By the time Rebecca Bailin reached her mid-30s, she had grown tired of watching friend after friend get priced out of New York City once they started having children.
Ms. Bailin, a community organizer, feared a fresh wave of departures to Maplewood, N.J., or the Midwest after Mayor Eric Adams started cutting funding for prekindergarten. She began organizing parents in her Brooklyn neighborhood to help fight the cuts.
In the three years since, her group, New Yorkers United for Childcare, has organized more than 6,000 people to push for universal child care programs. They are part of a coalition of parent advocates, think tanks and philanthropies aiming to put the high cost of child care at the forefront of the local political agenda.
In so doing, they are fueling the creation of a new species in New York City politics: the child care voter.
“This is when we are all considering where we are going to live for decades to come,” she said of herself and her friends. And child care, she said, “is an investment to help us stay.”
Ms. Bailin now has an even better reason to focus on the issue. Her first child is due this summer.
The politicians vying to be the city’s next mayor appear to be paying attention to New York’s fed-up parents.
All the Democratic candidates have built their campaigns on a promise to make New York affordable again, with child care as a centerpiece, ahead of the June primary.
They have their work cut out for them. Over half of New York City families with children age 4 and under cannot afford child care, according to research by the Robin Hood Foundation, an influential philanthropy focused on poverty.
A New York Times analysis found that a city family would need a household income of at least $300,000 to meet a federal standard that recommends families spend no more than 7 percent of their total income on child care. Many city families spend about a quarter of their income on child care.
Former Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, the current Democratic front-runner, has pledged to restore funding for the city’s universal prekindergarten program for 3-year-olds.
That promise is particularly notable because, as governor, Mr. Cuomo rejected former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s attempt to raise taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers to pay for universal pre-K. (Mr. Cuomo eventually helped the city secure funding for pre-K in the state budget.)
Many of Mr. Cuomo’s campaign rivals go further, by promoting different versions of universal, free child care or after-school programs.
Brad Lander, the city comptroller, has promised to create a “2-K” program to offer free care for 2-year-olds, for whom the city currently has limited free and subsidized options, and to fund after-school programs for all city students. Jessica Ramos, a Queens state senator who worked on universal pre-K, wants universal child care for infants and toddlers until they start kindergarten, as does Zohran Mamdani, a Queens state assemblyman.
Scott Stringer, the former city comptroller, wants to extend the school day to 4:30 p.m., and Zellnor Myrie, a Brooklyn state senator, has said he would spend $400 million to create a universal after-school program.
Even Mr. Adams, whose cuts helped inspire the wave of enthusiasm for universal child care programs, has chimed in. The mayor, who is now running as an independent, announced this week that his administration would reverse some of the cuts it had made to programs for 3-year-olds and to preschool seats for children with special needs.
The fact that most of the city’s politicians have arrived at similar solutions for the child care crisis at around the same time is not a coincidence.
Over the past few years, groups like Robin Hood, the favorite charity of Wall Street, and the 5Boro Institute, a think tank with ties to the real estate industry, have succeeded in convincing some of New York’s most powerful people that the child care crisis threatens the city’s economy and their own bottom lines.
That push has now been compounded by parental rage, harnessed by New Yorkers United for Childcare and other advocacy groups, into an issue that has become difficult for politicians to ignore.
That’s especially true because of which New Yorkers are most vocal about their anger: middle- and upper-middle-class parents who tend to be highly motivated voters and expect a return on investment, in the form of new entitlements like universal pre-K, for the high taxes they pay in the city.
Many parents who assumed they would be able to save $10,000 or more by sending their 3-year-olds to free preschool — a promise made by Mr. de Blasio — were outraged that Mr. Adams halted the program’s expansion. The result has been a dearth of seats in middle-class neighborhoods.
In interviews, many parents said they would assess the mayoral candidates largely based on their child care plans and level of focus on the issue.
Ms. Bailin and her husband, Nathaniel Marro, took a careful look at their finances when she got pregnant. They quickly realized they would not be able to stay in their beloved railroad apartment in Windsor Terrace, which used to be an affordable neighborhood to raise a child.
They earn $225,000 before taxes, an income level that used to be considered affluent for a family. But in today’s New York, it meant they couldn’t find a two-bedroom apartment they could afford to rent, or one with a reasonable down payment, anywhere near the apartment they had lived in for seven years, with the landlady who had already promised to help them with babysitting.
They moved further into Brooklyn, to Ditmas Park, with its promise of cheaper rents and more child care options. But the couple will still spend more than $70,000 a year on rent and day care alone. After taxes, they don’t expect to be able to save and will most likely dip into their current savings to cover expenses during their parental leaves.
They understand viscerally why so many young parents in their old neighborhood have left and why they stopped seeing so many familiar faces at their local bar, Freddy’s, where they held their wedding reception.
Mr. Marro, who works in the music industry, said he fears that without major changes to the child care system, New York will become a city “of the super-rich, the super-destitute and 20-year-olds. And who wants to live in a city full of 20-year-olds?”
Other parents said the cost of care played a role in deciding when to have children.
Roona Ray waited to start having children until her early 40s, when she believed she had finally found some financial stability. Then the pandemic hit, inflation rose, Mr. Adams cut pre-K funding and Ms. Ray lost her job working for the city hospital system.
Her oldest child is in a free pre-K program, and she recently secured a city-funded child care voucher to help pay for day care for her two younger children, but it took her months and several rounds of rejections from the city to eventually secure those vouchers.
Ms. Ray, who lives in Jackson Heights, Queens, with her partner and children, will cast her vote in the mayor’s race based largely on a candidate’s child care plan, she said.
“That’s not only because hopefully it will bring some financial relief to my family,” she said. “But also because I think a candidate who cares about child care cares about people.”
Tracy McNeil, a public defender who lives with her son and husband in Washington Heights, said she is looking for a candidate who has “the vision to recognize that child care isn’t a family issue, it’s an economic issue.”
Ms. McNeil says she spends about $15,000 a year on child care, just to cover care for her first grader after he gets out of school at 3 p.m., until she and her husband can get home from work.
“We can’t rely on elected officials to actually recognize what New Yorkers need,” she said. “We have to demand what we need.”
Eliza Shapiro reports on New York City for The Times.
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