In expanding child care, Mamdani will have to wrestle with some serious tradeoffs.
Just days into his term, Mayor Zohran Mamdani scored a significant win when he and Gov. Kathy Hochul announced a pathway to universal, free child care in New York. For New York City, the pathway begins with major investments in “2-Care,” free child care aimed at 2-year-olds.
By all appearances, Mamdani and his team are adopting a reasonable and responsible strategy: communicating an ambitious end goal while designing a step-by-step process to get there. This increases the likelihood that Mamdani will be able to avoid stumbling blocks around promising too much too quickly; in New Mexico, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham is already running into a major challenge as the state legislature threatens to meet less than 10% of the budget request needed to fully fund that state’s universal free child care initiative.
That said, Mamdani still has difficult choices ahead, as any new policy inevitably brings tradeoffs. Here, I highlight five areas that are likely to prove thorny.
Site prioritization
One challenge with a phased-in approach is that it may be a number of years — maybe even into Mamdani’s potential second term — before some families start seeing benefits from the new child care investments. The mayor has indicated the 2-Care plan will begin this fall with 2,000 slots in high-needs neighborhoods, rising to roughly 10,000 slots by the end of 2027. (It’s estimated that around 55,000 slots will be needed in total, given the percentage of families likely to take advantage of the offering) This is sensible, and reflects how the City rolled out 4K and 3K, although the scale-up for 4K was much faster due to the ability to lean heavily on public school infrastructure. There may be an obstacle ahead, however, as reporting suggests Hochul’s planned state investment will cap out somewhere north of 30,000 slots. Mamdani will need an answer to how he plans to close the gap in the later years of the rollout. While projections so far out — before the initiative has even gotten underway or there is a sense of economic conditions in, say, 2030 — cannot be ignored, it’s worth noting the details are less vital.
That said, even among and within high-need neighborhoods, there may be 2-Care winners and losers. Mamdani will therefore need to determine and communicate a fair system for determining where the free seats go — and to what type of child care sites — and also whether the benefits flow through individual families or through programs open to anyone in a given geographic area.
The downside risk is ending up in a situation where, as social policy analyst Leah Libresco Sargeant posted on X, there are “big disparities between the 2yo in Apt 5J who is getting $37,500/year to support care vs the 2yo in 11B who doesn’t.” The planned expansion of child care subsidy vouchers, which will occur alongside the 2-Care launch, should help mitigate this risk (and also offer benefits for parents with children below the age of two), but it is unlikely to eliminate it entirely.
Educator pay parity
New York City’s child care workforce is fragmented in a way few other places can comprehend. Some child care workers are employed by community-based nonprofits, some by the Department of Education, some by Head Start agencies, some by private providers — which range from large national for-profit chains to single-site mom-and-pop centers — and some, especially home-based providers, are self-employed. This patchwork is a legacy of the city’s size and particular child care history: New York was the only state in the nation to use substantial state and local funding to continue operations of World War II-era child care centers, and some city providers track their origins back even further to the days of settlement houses. There are also multiple unions involved. Sometimes several employers of record (and several unions) are present at the same program site.
In his campaign, Mamdani pledged to “bring up wages for childcare workers — a quarter of whom currently live in poverty — to be at parity with public school teachers.” That’s easier said than done, and not only because at least one-fifth of child care educators in community-based settings make less than the DOE minimum for those with equivalent credentials, and equalization will cost millions. Figuring out how to equitably compensate all of these educators is going to be a headache, because there is no single answer that will satisfy everyone. Focus on bringing up pay among educators in private settings may lead to complaints that they are getting paid more despite often lacking many of the credentials as DOE-employed educators. Focus on recruiting new educators into the field with generous starting pay may lead to complaints that veteran educators are being ignored. Focus on improving the pay of educators in two-year-old classrooms may lead to complaints among educators in infant classrooms down the hall.
Many of these complaints are entirely valid. The best path likely leads through a classic compromise that leaves everyone a little unhappy but serves the larger goals of the project. Washington, D.C. has been largely successful in balancing competing demands within their Pay Equity Fund, which has contributed to raises of $10,000 or more for some child care educators and substantial growth and stability within their child care workforce.
Inclusion of home-based child care providers
Speaking of displeased groups, the question of home-based (also known as family child care) providers looms large. Many of these providers, who operate licensed programs out of their homes and apartments, felt excluded from or disadvantaged by the 4K and 3K expansions; for instance, small home-based providers were ineligible for 4K contracts as the City prioritized center- and school-based settings. These providers — of which there are approximately 6,500 spread throughout the city — are particularly important for younger children whose parents may be less comfortable with center-based settings, and home-based providers frequently offer more flexibility in terms of hours and languages spoken. Yet as a 2025 report from researchers at the New School suggests, pay rates for home-based providers can be as low as half that of center-based providers, and the City has struggled to pay many home-based providers in a timely and effective manner.
To his credit, Mamdani seems to recognize this, stating during his press conference with Hochul that, “we will deliver care by working in partnership with child care providers, especially home-based providers who have been doing this work without thanks or recognition for far too long.”
There are, of course, meaningful differences between home-based providers and center-based providers in terms of cost structures and operations; supporting both simultaneously is feasible but tricky. Importantly, doing so will require some flexibility, as a one-size-fits-all regulatory system will not work. The 4K and 3K expansions clearly missed the mark when it came to this part of the sector. Ensuring that home-based providers are fully included in the policy design process, and navigating the tension between home-based and center-based providers, will be paramount to the success of 2-Care and further efforts.
Whither “family, friend and neighbor” care?
Along the same lines, the plans announced to date are light on details regarding how ‘family, friend, and neighbor’ (FFN) caregivers — people like grandparents or close friends who provide regular child care to one or two children, but who are not licensed home-based providers — may or may not be included in the 2-Care system. The group was not mentioned at the recent press conference. This is an active conversation across the country; for instance, in New Mexico’s expanded child care system, these types of caregivers can register with the state and receive $750 a month per eligible child. There are again tradeoffs here: Including FFN caregivers expands the pool of providers and meets the preferences of substantial numbers of families that prefer to intimately know their child’s caregivers, but FFN providers can also be difficult to incorporate into a publicly funded system due to the inherent informality of the arrangements. Grandparents obviously aren’t unionizing, but there are open questions about what type of regulation and accountability is needed when public monies are involved.
Communicating costs
Finally, as Sargeant’s post illustrates, the cost figure being bandied around — approaching $40,000 a year per child, when you divide the $73 million initial investment by the 2,000 kids to be enrolled — may raise some eyebrows. In an objective analysis, the figure is perfectly defensible: It reflects the true cost of care in a high cost-of-living city where commercial rent is expensive and a competitive wage for child care educators is not $10 an hour. Getting the figure down significantly would require cutting back on plans to boost educator compensation, which works directly against the goals of scaling up the workforce to meet demand and of high-quality classrooms run by well-trained practitioners who don’t constantly turn over. Indeed, the figure is close to the New York average of over $36,000 per K-12 student, and public school classrooms can have many more children per educator.
There simply isn’t a long menu of options for reducing the costs of delivering child care because so many costs are fixed, most notably personnel and facilities. Important services sometimes require significant funding, and it makes no more sense to nickel-and-dime child care than it does to nickel-and-dime fire departments. That doesn’t change the fact that these are very large numbers. It will be important, then, that Mamdani continues explaining to a public not steeped in the economics of child care where the cost figures come from and why they are necessary and worthy investments.
In the end, none of the challenges facing Mamdani and his team are insurmountable. So far, the Mayor seems to be applying lessons from the 4K and 3K rollouts and setting his administration on a road to success. How the mayor’s office navigates the visible boulders and the not-yet-visible ones that will surely appear (such as the Trump administration’s recent attempt to freeze federal child care funding to New York and four other states) will help determine how far he’s able to take the city’s families over the coming years.