Zohran Mamdani, 34, a New York State Assembly member and democratic socialist, won New York City’s mayoral race on November 4, 2025 after running on an affordability platform that included rent freezes, free public buses and a plan for city-owned grocery stores. One of his most ambitious commitments is universal, high-quality child care for every New Yorker from six weeks to five years old, coupled with raising child care workers’ pay to match public school teacher salaries. If enacted, that promise could reshape daily life for families and the city’s labor market.
Child care in New York is currently out of reach for many families. The typical annual cost for center-based care is roughly $26,000, and more than four in five households with young children cannot afford that level of expense. Research also links the high costs of housing and child care to out-migration: families with young children are about twice as likely to leave the city as those without, with both housing and child care frequently cited as main reasons.
These pressures reflect broader national trends. U.S. families commonly pay between about 9% and 16% of median household income for full-day care for a single child, and prices for day care and preschool have climbed far faster than general inflation—rising roughly 263% between 1990 and 2024. Meanwhile, the workforce delivering care is poorly compensated: in 2024 the median hourly wage for child care workers was about $15.41 (around $32,050 annually). Child care staff are disproportionately women, often women of color, and persistently low wages contribute to high turnover and recruitment challenges that can undercut program quality.
As a scholar of child care policy, I believe Mamdani’s proposal—universal access paired with living wages for staff—could have effects that extend well beyond New York, influencing policy debates and program design elsewhere.
New York’s municipal history offers precedents for large-scale child care initiatives. During the Great Depression the Works Progress Administration created emergency nursery schools that both employed educators and provided practical care for parents engaged in work-relief programs. During World War II, as more women joined the industrial workforce, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s administration stepped in to fund existing nursery schools after federal New Deal support wound down, making New York one of the few U.S. cities to provide city-funded child care services in that era.
The federal Lanham Act of 1941 temporarily financed wartime child care in hundreds of communities—the closest the country has come to a universal system—but most centers shuttered after the war. In New York, however, community organizing successfully pressured city leaders to retain programs, marking an early example of municipal tax dollars being used for peacetime child care.
The city continued to build public child care capacity in the 1960s under Mayor John Lindsay. In 1967 child care workers organized as AFSCME Local 205, and after a three-week strike in 1969 they won a contract that brought wages closer to those of elementary school teachers and established training pathways for professional advancement. When federal child care legislation stalled—most notably with President Nixon’s 1971 veto—New Yorkers staged demonstrations and persisted in pushing for universal access. During the fiscal crisis of 1975, community mobilization was instrumental in preserving child care services in working-class neighborhoods.
Although New York’s system today is not universal, it represents the largest network of publicly supported child care in the country and provides institutional building blocks—labor unions, training infrastructures and municipal administration—that a new universal program could scale up from.
Mamdani’s campaign estimated the annual price tag for universal child care in the city at about $6 billion. He has proposed funding mechanisms such as raising the state corporate tax rate and adding a 2 percentage-point city income tax surcharge on residents with incomes above $1 million. Those revenue measures would require state cooperation from Governor Kathy Hochul, who has expressed support for universal child care in principle even while differing on the best way to pay for it.
Evidence suggests that affordable, high-quality child care yields sizable economic benefits. It boosts labor force participation among women, raises household disposable income, and channels spending into local economies. Analysis from the Center for American Progress estimates that widely available affordable child care would prompt more than half of stay-at-home parents to seek employment and lead about one-third of currently employed parents to increase their work hours. For New York City specifically, eliminating out-of-pocket child care expenses could increase families’ disposable income by as much as $1.9 billion.
Public concern about the affordability of basic needs—including child care—cuts across partisan lines. Large shares of voters from both major parties identify child care costs as a major problem and support government action to help families.
If Mamdani can secure reliable funding and implement universal child care while raising compensation to attract and retain skilled staff, New York could once again serve as a laboratory for the nation—demonstrating how municipal policy can expand access, improve job quality in the care sector and support working families. The challenge will be translating campaign promises into durable budgets and operational programs that maintain quality, equity and sustainability over time.
Simon Black is an associate professor of labor studies at Brock University. This article was republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
