We accidentally made it really hard to open a daycare

One city inadvertently allowed daycares on just 4 percent of its land. Until we fix rules like these, subsidies will mostly benefit the better-off families who can grab scarce slots.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Until recently, Lakewood, Washington allowed daycares on 4 percent of its land. After the city adjusted its zoning, 52 percent became eligible.

Daycares face NIMBY dynamics just like housing does. Neighbors can even claim a daycare will bring traffic and block it through environmental review.

Plus, rules sometimes contradict each other.

One California daycare planned an expansion around eight toddlers and two teachers per classroom, exactly what the state's child-to-staff ratio rules allow. But the fire code changed to a maximum of five children per room for new facilities. The rules didn’t match, nor was it clear whether this applied to a pre-existing facility changing its purpose.

Lack of agency coordination also means long wait times.

My friend Allister Chang tried to open a daycare in DC. The city required him to have a fully leased, furnished, and staffed center for the entire six-month inspection wait. He couldn’t take in children during that time, so he had no revenue.

Most daycare owners are young women operating on 1% profit margins. Most provide care in their own home. Consultants, legal teams, or leasing an empty space are out of reach for many.

This is why subsidies alone can’t fix childcare. New Mexico offers free childcare to every parent. It still has just 32 slots per 100 children under age 2.

When slots are scarce, better-off families get them. Keeping a slot often requires a predictable schedule, which retail and service workers often don’t get. Getting a child to a center outside your neighborhood requires a reliable car. Enrolling requires paperwork, sometimes in a language the parent doesn’t read.

About 74 percent of lower-income families use informal care instead: often unregistered home daycares, relatives, neighbors. Thus, they’re less likely to use subsidies at all.

This is how countries with universal childcare sometimes end up with two tiers: subsidized centers for families with resources. Waitlists and out of pocket expenses for many others.

We can make daycares more abundant. Here’s how.

Let daycares open in more places

• Let care open by right almost everywhere. Seattle allows childcare in nearly every zone and dropped a rule forcing centers to sit a set distance apart.

• Treat in-home daycare as a normal use of a home. California is making in-home daycares immune to neighbors attempts to ban them.

• Waive parking minimums, like Austin.

• Let nearby parks count as the required outdoor space, like San Francisco.

• Waive impact fees. Cities charge these fees to offset a new building’s burden on roads, schools, and parks. But fees sometimes exceed the actual burden. A daycare adding ten children might get billed for a whole new crosswalk because those ten kids pushed the neighborhood over a threshold. Some cities use them to block building they don’t want.

Write fire codes that count all the risks

When California’s fire code started requiring fire walls and sprinklers, one Sacramento daycare cancelled an expansion. Sprinklers and the water pressure to run them would cost $1 million. Another owner with a 1,000-child waitlist faced a $150,000 sprinkler installation that would have closed her center for months. Around 2,250 infants and toddlers may lose center slots from the change. (California is now working on new building codes and retrofit support.)

Strict fire codes for daycare centers have a perverse effect. When a center doesn't get built, the children often end up in in-home daycares, many unregistered since the registration threshold is often 3+ children. That often moves kids into the least fire-safe buildings in America. Single family homes face the fewest fire protection requirements of any building type, one reason the US fire death rate is among the highest in the rich world.

• Use tailored risk assessments instead of blanket building codes. The UK, which has a lower fire death rate than the US, has inspectors review risk assessments and evacuation plans. Sprinklers are one mitigation strategy among several.

• Consider grants, tax incentives, or support for infrastructure improvements that bottleneck new facilities or expansions. California helps adult care homes pay for physical upgrades or critical repairs.

• Don’t ban in-home daycare in multiunit homes. Modern multiunit homes are six times safer than single family homes. Older multiunit homes are about as safe as single family homes. DC bans in-home daycare in multiunit homes, where most DC residents live.

Don’t require a college degree to care for children

DC and New York City require daycare staff to have degrees. Advocates cite systems like France where school starts at age 3. But even France doesn’t outlaw care providers without an early education degree.

A degree requirement shrinks the labor pool and outlaws traditional caregiving. Many daycare workers are women of color who, like my mom, might not speak English as a first language. Earning a degree on their own time is a hardship.

The rule also makes it illegal to run a daycare serving, say, Nepali families in Nepali, unless the provider first learns English and then earns a degree.

Low income people already rely on informal networks. Degree rules push more children into underground arrangements where the caregiver may not have even basic safety training like CPR.

Don’t shut down daycares over paperwork

New York City shut down a daycare because the director’s college degree wasn’t “related enough” to early education. Four months later, the city decided it counted after all. By then, the daycare had closed for good and the families had scattered.

A lot can go wrong on paper. You can be cited because the daily schedule is taped to the outside of the classroom door instead of the inside, because a parent filled out a form the state has since updated, or because the playground mulch settled below the required depth.

Often, one technical violation triggers an audit checking for full compliance of rules that change. Unreliable childcare correlates with missed work, financial strain, and worse maternal mental health.

Right-size staffing ratios in states with the lowest caps

Every state now caps how many children one adult can watch, and the caps vary a lot. The lowest caps don’t track with safety (though large group sizes lead to more illnesses). Low caps also correlate with lower worker pay and fewer slots, which pushes parents, especially lower-income parents, toward informal care.

Strict caps also make daycares fragile. When the cap is low and stringent, most daycares staff right at it. If a teacher hurts her wrist and needs an hour at a clinic, the owner has three options: close for the day, call every parent to come get their kid, or run one adult short for an hour and break the rule.

Fix agency culture, not just the rulebook

How rules are enforced matters as much as how they’re written. The same rule can work fine under one agency and go badly under another. What matters is whether the agency sees its job as helping providers meet safety standards or as catching violations.

To see why, consider the two ways a rule can be written:

A rule can be open-ended. Maryland requires “safe passage” to a playground. This lets each daycare meet the standard in its own way. But it also means one licensor’s opinion can stop a daycare. A finished 170-child center in Maryland sat empty for six months because one licensor decided a 150-foot path to its playground wasn’t safe. The center’s consultant emailed every week with examples of other daycares using playgrounds the same way.

An exact rule would have opened that center on time. But exact rules can get outdated or restrictive. Some states require an “approved crib,” which bans the floor beds some Montessori programs use. Floor beds sit on the ground, so a child can’t get hurt falling out of one.

Either kind of rule works under a supportive agency. California’s licensing agency has said the health and safety code doesn’t give it power over how a provider teaches. It stays out of lesson plans and sticks to buildings, training, and records. The official who built that culture had run a home daycare herself. (This is a big deal. States are more likely to require that their licensing staff have a degree related to early childhood education than to have worked in a daycare setting.)

New York shows the other path. Operators say it issues orders without weighing compliance costs. It ordered all classroom locks removed for fire safety, then ordered them reinstalled after a school shooting. It shut a daycare while it decided on a director’s degree. Its degree rules even created a small black market: people with the right credential get paid to sit in an office so a center can list a qualified name.

Make the process navigable without a legal team

A would-be owner has to satisfy a stack of separate agencies, licensing, fire, buildings, occupancy, lead, etc.

• Coordinate the inspections. Chicago runs its fifteen required childcare inspections as a single task force, everyone on the same two weekdays (Tuesday and Thursdays), instead of across months.

• Ensure requirements are compatible with each other. At one point, California fire inspectors required playground exit doors to stay unlocked and have easy-open “panic bars” while California Social Services required the removal of panic bars to prevent children escaping.

• Establish one stop shops for licensing and inspections

• Designate a specialized coordinator within the relevant agencies, such as regional planning, fire, building, and public works.

• Publish all rules, fees, and steps in plain language. Los Angeles’s guide even spells out that a landlord can’t charge a home daycare extra fees.

Borrow the foster care playbook

Foster care used to have a similar problem. States asked kin caregivers for things like a working car, big bedrooms, and good English, even when the child spoke another language. Kids often couldn’t be placed with their own relatives. Over 50 organizations, agencies, experts, and families built one safety-focused national standard for states to adopt.

• A single NGO-led standard could help states overhaul rules so outdated that, in some places, serving kids fruit requires a commercial-grade sink. Linking federal childcare subsidies to a review of existing rules would give states a reason to adopt it.

• Or at least let agencies fix their own rules. Illinois puts its childcare requirements in statute. Agencies can waive regulations, but not laws, so an Illinois caregiver who wants to use floor beds instead of cribs can’t even ask for a waiver.

Subsidies are important too

Cutting rules alone doesn’t work. Idaho ranks as having the loosest rules in the country, and care there is still scarce and expensive. Supply fell after the COVID relief grants ran out.

But subsidies work best when there are slots. If we want childcare money to reach the families who need it most, make daycares easier to open.

I’ll be adding these to my running list of how to make childcare, healthcare, and housing more affordable.

Thanks to Allister Chang and Aaron Bailey who generously shared their expertise and pointed me toward many of the examples here. Thanks to everyone I interviewed for this piece. Any errors and all opinions are mine.

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