Mamdani's $6 Billion Child Care Expansion Would Be a Handout to Wealthy New Yorkers |
Policy
Liz Wolfe | From the February/March 2026 issue
In the February/March 2026 issue of Reason, we explore Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani's policy goals and what they mean for New York City. Click here to read the other entries.
"While families with young children comprise about 14 percent of the city's population, they comprise about 30 percent of the set of New Yorkers who are leaving the city," said Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani at a visit to a day care center in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, where he hyped his plans for those families.
Mamdani ran on the most ambitious universal child care proposal in the country: free day care for all kids ages 6 weeks and above. Apparently, this pitch was compelling to the city's beleaguered parents: The self-styled socialist won by a hefty margin.
New York City already has universal child care guaranteed to 3- and 4-year-olds. When Bill de Blasio ran for mayor in 2013, he aimed to distinguish himself from then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who had created 4,000 new free pre-K seats but allocated them only to poor kids. De Blasio universalized the system in 2014.
Mamdani wants to expand to an even younger age group, which would cost an extra $6 billion a year. Those funds aren't available in city coffers, so Mamdani would need cooperation from the state government to raise the money, likely by taking another leaf from the de Blasio playbook and trying to hike taxes on the very rich.
Mamdani's political intuition is sound: The affordability issue is salient. The number of New York City families with three kids or more has dropped by nearly 17 percent over the last decade. Families with young children have been self-exiling in droves since the pandemic. The under-20 population has dropped by almost 200,000 over the last few years. The city's public school system has 915,000 students enrolled, down from 1.1 million a decade ago. New York's comptroller reports that the average cost of private child care for babies and toddlers now sits at $18,200 annually for family-based care and $26,000 annually for center-based care, shooting up in recent years. It's no wonder so many parents are clamoring to turn over their kids to the warm embrace of the state. They feel left out in the cold.
But universal 3-K (for 3-year-olds) hasn't served families as well as its supporters promised it would. It distorted the private market, driving day cares out of business. Rich families have used nifty hacks to get their kids into the best centers, while the poor are left with the rest. The universal nature of it might be politically valuable when you're currying favor with the tony Park Slope crowd, but it means that child care for rich people is subsidized by the slightly richer, and that day cares serving the poorest neighborhoods don't get what they need. Parents who choose to stay home with their kids or employ nannies get shafted, and costs for all forms of child care are driven up the more the government intervenes in the market. More government involvement won't make that better.
How did we get here? Mostly by de Blasio's political aspirations colliding with cold, hard reality.
When he ran for mayor in 2013, de Blasio needed a big idea to sell. He bemoaned "the tale of two cities," the idea that New York is a place where extraordinary wealth is amassed and enjoyed but also a place where many hundreds of thousands barely scrape by. He sold himself as the messiah who could fix it all, and he proposed a way to level the playing field earlier in life: universal pre-K for the city's young, to help both the struggling and the........