New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani discussed his plans for universal child care with Gov. Kathy Hochul, going against the current administration's efforts.
When Mamdami stopped by a child care center in Brooklyn on Thursday, he outlined one of his biggest campaign promises. He also repeatedly said that campaign promises are not merely slogans, emphasizing that they are promises he intends to keep.
Zohran Mamdani's Promise of Universal Child Care
The NYC mayor-elect said that while families with young children comprise roughly 14 percent of the city's population, they comprise about 30 percent of the set of New Yorkers who are leaving the city.
Mamdami added that this was because, after housing, child care is the number one cost that many New York families spend on in their lives. He noted that the average estimate is $22,500 annually, which New Yorkers need to set aside for child care for a single child across five boroughs, according to ABC7NY.
Universal child care is one of the New York City mayor-elect's signature issues and is one of the most ambitious, as it would give free child care for every family in the city. His plan would cost roughly $6 billion per year and would cover infants as young as six weeks up to kids who are in pre-kindergarten.
Read more: Childcare Funding Cuts Result in Protests by Education Advocates in Front of Arkansas State Capitol
But Mamdani's plan would depend on tax increases on corporations and millionaire New Yorkers. Gov. Hochul supports the mayor-elect's concept but discourages talk of raising taxes. The plan would also require a massive infrastructure of personnel and sites that have not yet been identified.
The meeting between Hochul and Mamdani underscores their efforts to show that they would be prepared if President Donald Trump sent a surge of immigration agents or National Guard into the city, similar to what his government has done in other parts of the country recently, the New York Times reported.
What New Yorkers Spend Their Money On
Hochul's office said that the two lawmakers agreed that New York is safe and that "a federal surge would not improve public safety." This is particularly true as crime rates are dropping across the city.
The child care issues in New York City mirror a nationwide system that many experts see as broken. Data showed that American families spend anywhere between 8.9 percent and 16 percent of their median income on full-day care for one child.
What makes things worse is that the prices of these services have been on the rise. Between 1990 and 2024, the cost of day care and preschool has increased by 263 percent, which is much faster than overall inflation, as per The Conversation.
