Who Cares about Childcare?

How Land Use Policies Make Urban Childcare Expensive & Rare

At its height, the preschool I ran in San Francisco had a waitlist of hundreds for a few dozen spots in our toddler classrooms. Was this a testament to our high-quality Montessori program, our wonderful teachers, and our excellent admissions team? 

Obviously. On the other hand, hundreds??? 

While it would be immensely gratifying to believe that our long waitlist was the result of our amazing efforts, it wouldn’t be 100% accurate. It’s true that many San Franciscan parents were willing to wait months and months for a spot in a high quality preschool—but that they had to wait so long reflected the fact that they had so few options available. In any other market, the obvious response to such scarcity would be to open up another preschool. 

Instead, cities have burdened childcare operators with such restrictive and cumbersome land use policies that solving the scarcity problem is far from child’s play.

In “Cities Aren’t for Families,” I wrote about how bad land use rules have made it virtually impossible to build middle-class, family-friendly housing in most cities, which helped accelerate the trend of families moving to the suburbs during the pandemic. But a lack of available housing isn’t the only factor that influences families’ decisions to stay in or leave cities: schools and childcare also matter quite a lot, too. In addition to teaching academics, schools also provide a place for parents to put their kids during the workday, so the pandemic underscored just how vital the role of childcare was to family life. Yet long before the pandemic, expensive tuition and long waitlists were the norm at urban childcare centers. 

The experience of my preschool in San Francisco was typical. Prior to relocating to the West Coast, I helped open a school in Brooklyn. Families were plunking down hefty tuition deposits two years in advance of our scheduled opening to secure spots in an as-yet-unbuilt school because of the city’s acute preschool shortage. One family even sent us a music video of their infant’s playful antics, in an amusing if futile attempt to boost his place on the waitlist. Supply constraints, driven in part by onerous land use rules and restrictions, contributed to making New York’s preschool market hyper-competitive, super-expensive, and a source of tremendous stress for families. 

The fact that this was the status quo before the pandemic is one reason why so many families were already leaving cities like New York and San Francisco before Covid upended all our lives. This may be commonplace in cities—but it shouldn’t be considered normal.

Urban land use policies contribute directly to abnormal preschool shortages through zoning and parking mandates. In many cities, childcare is considered a “conditional use” in most zoning districts, which means a potential childcare operator must go through a lengthy approval process to open. Conditional use permitting (CUP) processes add tremendous time, complexity, and uncertainty, driving up childcare opening costs that require operators to have deep pockets and good lawyers to navigate successfully. 

A simple fix—and one that Austin has helpfully undertaken—is to make childcare a “by right” use in as many zoning districts as possible, a move that now allows potential childcares to avoid a costly CUP process in nearly every part of the city. On the map below, which shows Austin before (left) and after (right) the reform, green is great—CUPs are only required in the yellow areas.

Green means more childcares! (Source: Community Impact)

Most land development codes also require a certain minimum amount of on-site parking. These laws force developers and businesses to build more parking than they need while also driving up construction costs, since each parking spot can cost up to tens of thousands of dollars to build—and those higher costs are eventually passed down to renters, buyers, and customers. Parking spaces compete for all other space, often shrinking building square footage and limiting outdoor space that could be put to better uses. These mandates also create some absurd situations, like requiring bars to have parking lots, essentially condoning if not encouraging drunk driving. 

In the case of childcare, parking mandates reduce the amount of space available for classrooms and playgrounds—which means fewer spaces for kids. In Austin, childcares were until recently required to provide one parking spot per employee, regardless of whether employees carpooled, bicycled, walked, or rode transit to work. Fortunately, Austin has now abolished parking mandates, giving developers the freedom to determine how much parking they need, which also makes many potential sites more viable for childcares (or other businesses). 

There are a lot of other rules that combine to make childcare as costly as college—including a host of state regulations that I’ll write more about in the future—but arbitrary, restrictive land use rules conspire to keep childcare rare and unaffordable in many cities. The availability of childcare (and good schools!) may be the most important amenity for urban parents, so such policies only serve to make urban life less desirable for young families. 

One more thing: “Cities Aren’t for Families” focused on land use policies that make housing family-unfriendly, but those same policies make housing more expensive for everybody. If the folks who pay childcare tuition can’t afford to live in cities, it’s not any easier for the people who work at childcares. At my school in San Francisco, many of our teachers commuted in from the more affordable East Bay, some with commutes topping 90 minutes each way. Similarly in New York, almost all of our teachers commuted to our chic Brownstone Brooklyn location from more affordable neighborhoods farther away.

Nobody wants to spend that much time sitting in traffic or on transit each day—and at some point, many of the teachers I worked with decided that they’d rather work closer to home. If schools and childcares cannot hire and retain staff due to the high cost of housing in cities, they will struggle or close, and families will leave. It all comes back to housing.

By abolishing parking mandates and allowing childcares by right in most zoning districts, Austin has taken important steps to reducing the barriers that make it extremely difficult and expensive to open new childcare centers. If it also eases the restrictions that make it illegal to build family-friendly housing, it will have gone a long way toward making the city more livable for those families who would prefer to stay here.

Family-friendly land use reforms make for more vibrant, joyous, and welcoming cities—they’re good for the entire city. Other cities hoping to stem the tide of families flowing to the suburbs should follow Austin’s lead. 

At the very least, they should do it for the kids.