Mamdani’s Voters Want Free Child Care. Here’s How He Could Do It.

Jessica Mendoza and her husband always knew they wanted to start a family in Brooklyn, where they were each born and raised.

But once they started researching what it would cost to have a young child in New York City, they began to worry.

Even with her salary as a city employee and her husband’s as an accountant, “we realized we might not be able to afford that baby. But we really wanted a baby,” said Ms. Mendoza, 37.

After their daughter was born, the couple concluded that the only way they could afford to stay in New York was to move in with Ms. Mendoza’s parents in Bushwick — and pay her mother to watch the baby while they worked.

Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor, has aimed his campaign squarely at voters like Ms. Mendoza, pledging to enact a system of free child care for all New York families, regardless of income. Doing so would involve navigating a logistical and financial maze to harness an unwieldy system of public and private providers, create new day care space, hire scores of new teachers and retool the city’s roughly $116 billion budget. If he is elected in November, Mr. Mamdani will face enormous pressure to deliver.

Mr. Mamdani won the nomination in June by upending conventional wisdom about which New Yorkers make up the base of the local Democratic Party and can sway elections.

Some of the most enthusiastic members of his coalition are young, upwardly mobile New Yorkers. They might once have been able to observe the city’s cost-of-living crisis at a remove, perhaps paying too much in rent for a mediocre apartment but not questioning whether they could afford to build a life here.

But once they started having children, they joined a growing group of voters across racial and class lines struggling to afford life in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

“There has been this focus that if Mamdani is elected, the billionaires will leave. But how many working families have already left?” said Reshma Saujani, the founder of Moms First, a child care advocacy group.

Frustration over the cost of child care has transformed what had long been a private family concern into one of the most pressing issues shaping local politics.

For Mr. Mamdani, a state assemblyman from Queens, the issue has been inescapable in his own life and on the campaign trail.

“I would hear this again and again and again, both in my own personal life, as friends would tell me the plans they had to settle down and start a family, and how in their eyes that meant it was necessary to leave New York City, with child care being a big part of it,” he said in an interview, adding that he and his team of canvassers heard similar concerns frequently when they knocked on doors.

And despite the significant cost to taxpayers it would require, Mr. Mamdani argued that free child care should be available to all New York City residents, not just low-income families. “It comes back to a belief that city government’s job is to make sure each New Yorker has a dignified life, not determine which New Yorkers are worthy of that dignity,” he said, noting that a recent report had found the lack of affordable child care costs the city roughly $23 billion a year in lost productivity.

How might Mr. Mamdani pursue his ambitious promise?

Interviews with a dozen parents, policy and budget experts, elected officials and former city employees who helped create the city’s existing child care system revealed a bundle of policy ideas that Mr. Mamdani could choose from, each with its own complications.

He could, for instance, start by expanding child care options for 2-year-olds, who are typically enrolled in private programs. Or he could create new birth-to-kindergarten care in specific neighborhoods, a first step toward a citywide system, which would most likely take years to build out.

He will almost certainly encounter concern from child care workers who want the next mayor to increase their pay before expanding free programs. Many employees make barely over minimum wage, and as they have fled the industry for better-paying jobs, there is a dearth of care options in some neighborhoods.

At the same time, some budget watchdogs are concerned that a rapid child care expansion could compromise the city’s already precarious financial footing as New York braces for federal budget cuts.

“The city actually doesn’t have money in its budget to do everything for everyone,” Andrew Rein, president of the Citizens Budget Commission, said. “There isn’t enough money to do free child care for everyone.”

The city currently offers free prekindergarten seats for all 4-year-olds and many 3-year-olds, though it is still difficult for parents in some neighborhoods to get a 3-K seat. Mayor Eric Adams cut funding for 3-K and then partially restored it after an outcry from parents.

New York also has some free or subsidized options for younger children, offered almost exclusively to low-income families.

For all the potential pitfalls, child care also presents a clear political opportunity for Mr. Mamdani.

The issue is an avenue for him to find common cause with Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat who has staked her upcoming re-election campaign on making the state more affordable, and with the city’s business leaders, many of whom are skeptical of Mr. Mamdani’s leftist politics but worried that the cost of care is harming the local economy.

Mr. Mamdani has so far offered few specifics, besides proposing raising taxes on the city’s wealthiest residents to help generate some of the roughly $6 billion his campaign believes a universal child care program would cost.

Any such tax increase would have to be approved by state lawmakers, and Ms. Hochul has already poured cold water on the idea. Aides to Mr. Mamdani said they planned to fight for the increase but that they would be pragmatic about finding other funding sources.

Political momentum around child care has seemingly motivated two of Mr. Mamdani’s rivals in the general election, Mayor Eric Adams and former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who are both running as independents, to focus on the issue, too.

Mr. Adams announced $80 million in new funding for early childhood education a few weeks after Mr. Mamdani’s resounding win in the primary. And Mr. Cuomo has said he would expand the 3-K program created by former Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Experts sketched out some blueprints that the next mayor could follow.

Because Mr. Mamdani wants a universal plan, rather than one aimed only at low-income children, he could build on a new City Council program that tests free offerings for children in a few neighborhoods, and then expand what worked to all parts of the city.

That could help ensure both some racial and economic diversity and improve the chances that the program would become popular among a wide group of parents, including those with the political power to ensure that it would become permanent.

The mark of success in government programs, Mr. Mamdani said, “is that all those who call the city their home use those same services — not just those who cannot afford to use others.”

Ms. Saujani, of Moms First, and other advocates have floated a plan to offer free day care to about 20 percent of the city’s 2-year-olds, which they estimate would cost about $300 million a year and could be funded by the city and state, before expanding to all 2-year-olds.

To help prevent day care centers from closing and employees from leaving for better-paying jobs, the city could also compensate the day care centers it contracts with in advance, rather than reimbursing them. Some centers have closed after waiting years for reimbursements under the Adams administration.

And while Mr. Adams and Ms. Hochul have temporarily expanded a pot of money that low-income parents can use to help pay for child care, many families are confused about how to apply or have incomes barely above the cutoff for eligibility, which is roughly $100,000 for a family of four.

Some advocates suggested that, while the city works toward a universal system, the government could cap child care costs at about $150 per week for families who do not fall into the eligible income bracket but are still struggling to afford care.

That would be much less expensive for families than many market-rate offerings, which can range from around $2,000 a month to $4,000 a month or more, and the city would make up the rest of the cost.

Mr. Mamdani was critical of government programs that have income cutoffs or other requirements. “It’s a question of whether or not you create an entirely additional bureaucracy that New Yorkers have to navigate in order to receive services from that program,” he said.

As Mr. Mamdani weighs how his administration would fulfill his promise on child care, he will have to reassure parents like Ms. Mendoza that help is on the way.

The prospect of universal child care “gave us hope that we might be able to stay in New York,” Ms. Mendoza said, “and that we might be able to raise our daughter in the place that made us.”