Zohran Mamdani, 34, a New York State Assembly member and democratic socialist, was elected New York City’s mayor on November 4, 2025, after campaigning on making the city more affordable with proposals such as freezing rents, free public buses and a network of city-owned grocery stores.
His pledge of free, high-quality child care for every New Yorker from 6 weeks to 5 years old — paired with raising child care workers’ pay to the level of city public school teachers — may be among the most consequential promises. Child care in New York City is prohibitively expensive: the average annual cost for center-based care is about $26,000, and more than 80% of families with young children cannot afford that. A recent study found families with young children are twice as likely to leave the city as those without, identifying housing and child care costs as key drivers of migration.
The city’s child care squeeze reflects national trends. U.S. families typically spend between roughly 9% and 16% of median income on full-day care for one child, and prices have risen far faster than general inflation — day care and preschool costs increased by roughly 263% from 1990 to 2024. Meanwhile, child care workers — mostly women and often women of color — are poorly paid. In 2024 the median hourly wage for child care workers was about $15.41 (roughly $32,050 a year), placing them near the bottom of occupational pay scales. High turnover and recruitment difficulties undermine program quality.
As a scholar who studies child care, I argue Mamdani’s plan — universal child care with decent wages for staff — could change both politics and practice in New York and beyond.
An example to the nation
New York has precedents for municipal-scale child care innovations. During the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration created emergency nursery schools that both employed teachers and offered de facto child care for parents on work-relief projects. With World War II and more women entering war industries, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s administration funded existing nursery schools when federal New Deal support ended, making New York the only U.S. city at the time to provide publicly subsidized child care services.
The federal Lanham Act of 1941 funded wartime child care centers in hundreds of cities — the closest the U.S. has come to a universal system. While most centers closed after the war, grassroots organizing in New York pressured the city to keep its programs, marking the first peacetime use of municipal tax dollars for child care.
Building blocks
Public child care expanded again in the 1960s under Mayor John Lindsay. In 1967 child care workers unionized as AFSCME Local 205 Day Care Employees. After a three-week 1969 strike over low wages and poor conditions, workers won a contract with a wage scale comparable to elementary school teachers and a training program enabling skill upgrades and credit.
When President Nixon vetoed federal child care legislation in 1971, New York activists staged demonstrations and public actions demanding universal child care despite the lack of federal funding. Community mobilization during the city’s 1975 fiscal crisis also helped preserve public child care in working-class neighborhoods.
Although New York’s system is not universal, it is the largest publicly supported child care network in the country and provides institutional building blocks for Mamdani’s plan.
Transformative beyond New York
Mamdani’s campaign estimated universal child care in the city would cost about $6 billion a year. He proposes funding measures such as raising the state corporate tax rate and imposing a 2 percentage-point city income tax increase on residents earning more than $1 million. Implementing those measures will require cooperation from Governor Kathy Hochul; she has expressed support for universal child care even if she disagrees on the revenue approach.
Research shows affordable, high-quality child care has positive economic effects: it tends to increase female labor force participation and puts more money in parents’ pockets to spend locally. Analysis from the Center for American Progress estimated that available affordable child care would lead over half of stay-at-home parents to seek work and prompt about a third of employed parents to increase their hours. For New York City, avoiding child care costs could raise families’ disposable income by up to $1.9 billion.
Public concern about the cost of basic needs, including child care, remains high across party lines. Large shares of both Democratic and Republican voters view child care costs as a major problem and want government to prioritize help for families.
If Mamdani can secure sustainable funding and implement universal child care with strong wages for staff, New York could again set an example other cities and states might follow.
Simon Black is an associate professor of labor studies at Brock University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
