The contours of child care in the District will teach us about its future

Finding quality, affordable, and convenient child care is a notorious challenge for new parents. They’re an often overlooked demographic group that tends to be at stages in their lives and careers when they have the least economic security and flexibility, despite the highest caregiving costs they will ever face as parents.

In 2023, the average annual cost of one year of child care for a toddler in a center in the District of Columbia was more than $24,000. Coupled with increasingly unattainable housing costs, the prospect of having children and making ends meet in DC has become a challenging, if not impossible, task for anyone other than the highest earners. The financial impacts of this uncertain, unstable, and insecure period of parenthood also come during the most critical developmental stage in a child’s life.

In a new research series developed with funding support from the District’s Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE), we, a research team from the Low Income Investment Fund (LIIF) and Openfields, take a deep dive into the District’s child care market. Our research reviews broad trends in the supply of and need for child care and assesses the physical spaces and built environment that define daily life for DC’s youngest residents. Our results help explain some of the fundamental challenges facing parents and child care programs today, and offer a mix of warning signs and reasons for optimism.

Some things are moving in the right direction. The District’s shortfall in child care supply for babies and toddlers is still substantial, but shrinking. That’s in large part due to big investments the government has made over the last five years in operating subsidies for the child care sector, pay stabilization for our chronically underfunded early childhood workforce, and the construction of quality facilities in which child care programs operate.

But many of the programs key to enhancing child care supply are often the first to see cuts in bad budget years. The DC Council preserved the Pay Equity Fund for another year after proposed cuts in Mayor Muriel Bowser’s FY25 budget, but other critical supply-building mechanisms like the Access to Quality Child Care program were cut altogether. Unstable funding and recurring fights over cornerstone early childhood programs represent a big risk to the efficacy of line items that did see increases in the mayor’s FY25 budget, given that overwhelming evidence suggests early childhood investments and adequate provision of child care are essential to reducing crime, driving economic growth and equity, and preparing children for long-term academic success.

This piece outlines key takeaways of our reports on the District’s child care sector, especially for those who care about or work in planning, housing, transportation, and other fields essential to the livability and connectedness of our built environment and our communities. If we want to understand what the District will look like two or three decades from now, we need to know more about the experiences and wellbeing of those growing up here today.

Supply, demand, and child care in the District

Child care supply in the District of Columbia, like that in almost every other market nationally, is exceedingly complex. Despite high tuition costs for parents, many child care programs are plagued with financial challenges and thin margins. The most recent study commissioned by OSSE on child care operating costs in the District found that it costs a typical center more than $25,000 annually to serve just one infant or young toddler, largely driven by important but financially significant adult-to-child supervision ratios that effectively fix personnel and staffing costs for child care programs. Many parents are already paying as much as they can in tuition, but it isn’t enough to cover the cost of care.

The fundamental economic challenges of the child care sector leave many District providers in a constant state of concern over day-to-day operations and staffing. A survey of programs we conducted for our study suggests that few have the time, resources, or capacity to consider expanding their services or facilities, an obvious way to create new licensed child care slots. The vast majority of programs that have either recently expanded or are considering expansion have needed public support from OSSE and philanthropic funders to take on expensive construction and renovation projects, with the most identifying a need for public support in parts of the District with the largest concentrations of low-income families and children of color.

Those recent investments in child care infrastructure by the District government are working. Paired with survey data from directors of child care programs, we find that aggregate licensed child care supply in the District increased by about 8%, or 2,500 slots, between 2017 and 2023. This increased supply has been driven by growth in capacity for child care for infants and toddlers, which expansion programs like OSSE’s Access to Quality Child Care grant directly incentivized before expiring in 2024.

This growth in supply occurred from 2017 to 2023, when the assessed demand for child care in the District slightly decreased, as a result of a declining population of young children and fewer non-resident commuters who work in the District and seek child care nearby. Despite the growth in overall supply and, to a lesser extent, spots for infants and toddlers, we find evidence of market misalignment by age. Specifically, there is a current oversupply of child care for preschoolers and a significant shortage of slots for infants and toddlers. Looking only at child care demand from District residents, there were about 5,700 more licensed preschool slots than needed and a shortage of almost 5,900 licensed infant and toddler slots. That latter figure translates to only two licensed slots for every three infants and toddlers that need child care.

These numbers escalate when considering demand from commuters who, while not residents, still use child care in the District and therefore affect the market. When we take account of in- and out-commuters, we see less oversupply of preschool spots but even larger shortfalls for infants and toddlers. The largest exception to this pattern is downtown, where demand from in-commuters creates shortfalls even among preschool-aged children.

This trend is largely driven by the increasing provision of child care for 3- and 4-year-olds in free school-based programs. Community-based providers are left responsible for piecing together resources to serve the youngest children. Survey and interview data from our study point toward an underlying challenge: Infants and toddlers are much more costly to serve than preschoolers, and restrictive building, fire, and development codes related to caring for children who cannot walk on their own make retrofitting rooms that were built in private child care facilities to accommodate preschoolers difficult. It doesn’t make financial sense for most child care programs to serve more babies and toddlers without big incentives and public investments to subsidize development costs, like those provided through Mayor Muriel Bowser’s Access to Quality Child Care program expansion.

Young children, caregivers, and the built environment

Of course, the raw difference in supply and demand is only part of the story of child care in the District. The physical conditions and qualities of the places where we live, learn, and regularly spend time as young children have outsized, long-lasting influences on basic biological and cognitive development.

Despite obvious need for coordination, the many different policy and regulatory functions of local government that influence the environments young children grow up in are rarely aligned. Decisions about physical space—homes, child care facilities, parks, streets, and so on—often occur independently from those related to social and educational services. The agencies created to explicitly focus on children and families often do not think enough about, or have meaningful influence over, the built environment, and those that govern the built environment fail to focus enough on children and families.

Child development does not stop and start when children walk through the doors of a child care facility, but our systems for reviewing health, safety, and quality of environments often do. Our study took a broader approach, seeking to evaluate and assess the conditions of traditional child care infrastructure, like classrooms and playgrounds, as well as the quality and child-friendliness of the public realm that surrounds formally licensed child care, like sidewalks, ramps, bus stops, benches, and street plants.

The structure of our analysis reveals an important theme for those working in child development and the built environment alike: Child care programs rely on a variety of public and private spaces to serve children effectively, but the programs and those who manage them have almost no authority to improve the public realm. With sufficient resources and support from agencies like OSSE, they can create high-quality environments for young children inside the walls of the building in which they operate. But those improvements are too often separate from what is happening immediately outside. As one director of a child care program told us during an interview, “We’re like an island for children in a place that’s not at all meant for them.”

That said, some of the most apparent inequalities in our review of facility conditions were in spaces over which individual programs had real authority. The programs we reviewed that serve wealthier families have a little more room to stretch tuition rates, and building a high-quality facility boils mostly down to charging parents more. Comparatively, in facilities that mostly cater to low- and moderate-income families, deferred maintenance and structural issues were more commonplace.

Trends were harder to discern when we extended our review to public spaces, primarily parks and streets surrounding child care facilities. Our survey revealed that more than 40% of licensed programs in the District rely on a shared park to comply with outdoor play requirements. The vast majority of these require a walk between the child care facility and the park. Road safety and walkway amenities like benches and public bathrooms don’t just affect parents and children during pick-up and drop-off from child care or school. The daily operations of a large swath of the District’s child care supply relies on public parks for programs to maintain their licenses. Even more programs, when taking walks or field trips with children to the District’s world-class museums and civic infrastructure, are at the mercy of the built environment.

Geographic inequities, unsurprisingly, arose while we reviewed the outdoor spaces and streetscape surrounding facilities. Transit diary entries from two parents we engaged who walked from their homes to child care for drop-off on the same Tuesday in October 2023 reveal how the quality of such a trip can vary by ward:

• Ward 2 parent: “She was very happy. Dad came with us too. We stopped at the park on the way. She was disappointed that it was not raining. We talked about going to ballet class and weekend plans.”
• Ward 8 parent: “After I dropped them off I went home. Usually I would go to work. I didn’t stop nowhere along the road. Both of my children was tired. We seen cars, we seen trees, and people in alleys smoking, drinking.”

Still, child care programs in all wards share built environment challenges, the most universal of which come from traffic and car-dominated planning and infrastructure. One of the most troubling points in our survey of program directors appeared in a question gauging perceptions on driver speeds. More than 70% of respondents conveyed that drivers near their program regularly exceed the speed limit. Even further, this was the only point in survey data where those responding from the highest- and lowest-income geographies were in alignment, with similar proportions of child care leaders in Ward 3 and Ward 8 relaying challenges related to traffic volume and speed.

A statement from one center director made direct links between the work of child care programs and the challenges of parenting and caregiving in places that are not intentionally planned or designed with the needs and abilities of children in mind: “I like the neighborhood we are located in, but drivers are very dangerous, and they seem more annoyed by a large group of children than cautious or considerate. One of the children in my program (and her caregiver) has been hit by a car while crossing a street to get to school.”

A child-friendly agenda

Using long-range population and job forecast data from the DC Office of Planning and Metro Washington Council of Governments, our study also finds that the District must add at least 500 new (mostly infant and toddler) licensed child care slots per year through 2035 just to cut existing supply shortfalls for residents in half over the next decade. This number grows to more than 1,300 slots per year when considering child care demand from non-resident commuters.

Given findings of our review of the physical conditions of child care facilities, these estimates represent an opportunity to improve the livability of DC for all of us, regardless of age. Cities with a robust supply of housing available to all income levels that also meets the needs of new parents often have stronger levels of civic engagement and democratic participation, in addition to more sustainable and predictable tax revenues. Economies tend to be more resilient in places that invest heavily in the provision of child care and early education, and parents of young children have more autonomy and choice about labor force participation. Employers and businesses benefit from more reliable human capital and the extra spending power families have when smaller portions of their paychecks are tied up in costly child care tuition bills.

Additionally, when neighborhoods are physically designed for babies and toddlers they are often safer, greener, and happier. When infrastructure—sidewalk networks and bicycle lanes, parks, or street networks and transit systems—is usable for a person just learning to walk or a caregiver pushing a heavy stroller, it tends to also be usable and pleasant for any other person navigating a city. Bringing important services, amenities, and jobs closer to where children and families live through regulatory reforms or development incentives can reduce overall carbon footprints and the collective stress of long daily commutes. Local agendas for addressing climate change that prioritize young children and the spaces they spend time are the most aligned with both the immediate and long-term public health challenges created by extreme heat or heightened risk of natural disaster.

Instituting the above in the District’s public policy will require all hands on deck, and doing so should begin with a structure many cities across the world have deployed to establish a central coordinating office focused on the holistic nature of childhood. Such an agency, perhaps a Deputy Mayor for Children or Chief Children’s Officer, could both monitor diverse decisions and initiatives for child-friendliness and act as a go-to for information and dedicated technical assistance on the ways specialized issues like building codes, transit planning, or housing finance policy affect children, families, and caregivers.

The agency could start its work with commitments to building sufficient child care supply, and in the process, it could drive broader enhancements to the District’s built environment and policy systems. For example, expansion grants provided to help open new child care centers downtown might be coordinated with DMPED’s priorities for the Housing in Downtown initiative, facilitating the co-location of child care facilities with any new housing downtown. Affordable housing developers exploring new Low Income Housing Tax Credit or Housing Production Trust Fund awards for the construction of new units around places where significant redevelopment is expected, like Poplar Point in Ward 8, could receive design and regulatory review consultation well before breaking ground to ensure they can recruit and accommodate some home-based child care providers in new ground-floor units. A new coordinating agency could engage the District Department of Transportation, the Department of Parks and Recreation, and the Office of Planning to assess walksheds surrounding child care facilities and respond with targeted traffic calming and right-of-way improvements that make children safer and allow them to “play along the way” in their trips between home, child care, and parks.

Such initiatives will be most successful if we begin with small, site-specific interventions in places where children live and spend most of their time. Child care programs are an ideal place to start. We badly need more of them. They are, too, the locations of some of the first socializing many District children will do outside of their own homes—the institutions where children first learn about what it means to be a friend, a neighbor, and a member of a community.

Note: This article was developed as an independent perspective based on the authors’ research and other professional experiences. It does not reflect the positions or viewpoints of District government or the Office of the State Superintendent of Education.