Child Care Is Infrastructure,
and It’s Time We Treat It That Way

Child care has become one of the most destabilizing costs facing working families. For many households, annual child care expenses now exceed $20,000 per child—consuming an unsustainable share of take-home pay before housing, transportation, or groceries are even considered. These are middle-class families who want to work, contribute, and stay in New York, but are being priced out by a system that has not kept pace with reality.

As an infrastructure builder, I’ve learned that when a foundational system fails, everything built on top of it becomes unstable. Child care is no different. When child care breaks down, workforce participation suffers, productivity declines, and families are forced into impossible trade-offs.