NYC mayoral candidates have to push on affordability

It’s official: the New York City mayoral race has become a referendum on the city’s affordability.

If the candidates want to win, they must tackle the No. 1 expense facing the city’s families and the linchpin of our city’s economy: child care.

Zohran Mamdani’s decisive win in the Democratic primary sent a clear message: voters are demanding bold solutions to the city’s cost-of-living crisis. His campaign slogans of rent freezes, free buses, and universal child care resonated with working families across the five boroughs and especially with historically elusive voters under 40.

Mayor Adams has taken notice. Within days of Mamdani’s win, Adams announced a new budget deal to pilot free child care for low-income families and urged the Rent Guidelines Board to approve the smallest possible rent increase.

It might be easy to miss just how significant it is that the mayoral frontrunners have acknowledged the child care crisis, especially when news headlines and political leaders have not. Media coverage since the primary has warned that billionaires will move out of New York City if the measures to address the affordability crisis involve tax hikes.

But the grim, underreported reality is that many working families have already left New York City, or are on the brink of leaving, because they’ve been priced out of raising their children here. We should all agree that New Yorkers should expect to be able to raise their children here.

Katelyn, a mother living in Jackson Heights, and her husband paid more than their mortgage last year for child care for her 2-year-old daughter. She admits they have put off having a second child, and they may have to leave the city due to the crushing costs of parenthood.

Kate, a communications executive at a Fortune 500 company, pays more than $3,000 a month for child care, more than their rent. Now expecting her third child, Sarah describes the emotional and financial toll as crushing. “I love my job. I want to work. I also want my children cared for. Why is that too much to ask?”

In New York City, the average cost of infant care is well more than $25,000 a year; that’s more than rent, more than in-state college tuition, and far out of reach for most families (the median household income exceeds $79,000 per year), even for high dual-income earners. At the same time, nearly every neighborhood is a child care desert, with too few providers, and waitlists that stretch for months.

This is the crisis that should dominate the headlines.

And that’s why if the New York City mayoral candidates want to lead on affordability, they must put child care first. Not third. Not as a rebuttal. The mayoral candidates must move beyond promises and pilots, and center their campaigns on bold, universal plans that meet the needs of all families.

We know this issue intimately. Reshma founded Girls Who Code and is the founder and CEO of Moms First, the largest national movement of moms and supporters fighting for affordable child care and paid leave. Reshma helped establish the Marshall Plan for Moms taskforce in NYC which created the blueprint for universal child care, and has built the only national business coalition advocating for investments in child care.

Justin, who founded Dads for All, is a Brooklyn-based education and policy leader who has worked across government, philanthropy, and advocacy to advance equity for working families. Together, we bring the experience and perspective needed to lead this conversation. We see the strain our broken care system places on American families every day. We also know what we all stand to gain if we fix it.

Let’s be clear: this isn’t just a parent issue. Child care is the public good that makes all other goods possible. Without it, families can’t work, women are sidelined, and businesses lose talent. And when care becomes unaffordable or inaccessible, the ripple effects hit everyone. Even billionaires.

When families leave, our city loses essential service workers like nurses, firefighters, and teachers. Those who stay cut work hours or tighten household budgets, spending less in their neighborhoods and contributing less to local businesses. Employers lose productivity. Transit systems lose riders. Schools lose students. And the city loses revenue.

In 2022, the city lost an estimated $23 billion due to parents cutting their work hours or moving out of NYC because of care costs. That’s more than the MTA spent running its entire system that year.

Turns out, it’s expensive to not look out for working families. And for the next mayor, it’s fiscal malfeasance.

Still, critics will ask where the money will come from. And they should. The good news for the candidates is this is an open-book test. We know that investing in child care pays off. A report from the city comptroller found that universal child care would boost labor force participation, increase tax revenues, reduce poverty, and grow the economy. Simply put: deprioritizing these investments is irresponsible. For everybody.

But, we don’t need a report to tell us that we can afford this investment. We can easily identify several lines in the budget that could be redirected to fund something we all want, including the business community: child care. Let’s ask taxpayers whether they’d rather pay for malpractice insurance for a special interest group, or an affordable child care seat in their neighborhood. The truth is we can find the money without raising taxes. And the next mayor should.

When it comes to affordability, why child care first? Housing and transportation matter. But, you can’t keep your apartment if your child care costs more than your rent, and you can’t take a free bus to work if you have nowhere safe to leave your baby. Child care is the single most powerful lever we can immediately pull to make this city livable for working families. We need to treat it as such.

The good news? This isn’t a moonshot. We’ve done it before. Mayor Bill de Blasio delivered his campaign promise to provide free, universal pre-K. The wildly popular program has since expanded to offer near-universal 3K, and has become powerful a lighting rod for electability as Adams will recall when he, momentarily, floated deep funding cuts.

Investments in early childhood have proven they work: they save families thousands of dollars a year, keep parents — especially mothers — in the workforce, provide food security, and offer our children a safe start to their education.

Now it’s time to build on that success to deliver child care that works for all New Yorkers. That means expanding care to children under age 3, increasing pay for the child care workforce, and building a universal system that reaches every family, not just the lowest earners, or those lucky enough to win a lottery.

Let’s stop pretending child care is a niche issue and finally recognize it for what it is: the No. 1 economic issue facing New Yorkers.

This crisis won’t be solved by catchy campaign slogans or well-timed announcements. We need a mayor with a bold, fully-funded plan, and the courage to make child care their top campaign issue and their top first-100-day priority.

We have seen before how an idea that starts in New York can take over the world. We know when New Yorkers build models of innovation that other cities, states, and nations can replicate. We can lead the way for families, again. We can build a city where every parent can work, care, and raise their children with dignity, and not by luck or privilege, but by design.

Voters have shown they are ready to elect a leader who will finally put child care first. The only question is: who’s going to answer the call?

Saujani is the founder of Girls Who Code and the founder and CEO of Moms First. Cohen is the founder of Dads for All.