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Naomi Veerasammy and her 2-year-old daughter leave their Jamaica, Queens, apartment weekday mornings by 6:30 a.m. and head to the home of whichever friend or relative has agreed to watch the toddler that day.
Veersammy, a paraprofessional at a public elementary school, relies on a rotating cast of relatives and friends to watch her daughter for little to no pay, so she can still make it to work by 8 a.m. on the city bus.
The single mom nets under $2,000 a month in income and can’t afford full-time day care, which costs between $1,500 to $2,000 a month for the average city toddler.
“It’s very, very hard on me financially, mentally, physically to find a sitter for my daughter every day,” Veersammy said, adding that her daughter needs stability.
Hoping for more stable child care, Veerasammy applied for child care vouchers worth an average of $300 a week for kids up to age 13 from low-income families across the state.
Veerasammy met the income criteria, but the city stopped enrolling new families in May. She’s now on a waitlist that has mushroomed to 10,000 city children. It’s a glaring indication of both the exploding child care affordability crisis for the city’s middle- and low-income families and the insufficiency of the current publicly funded options to help defray those costs, experts said.
The massive waitlist is also an acute crisis in and of itself — one that threatens to push more families with young children out of the city and shutter small child care providers who rely on vouchers for income.
Andrea Davilar, a family child care provider in St. Albans, Queens, currently has only four of her 12 full-day seats filled. She suspects there are families on the waitlist who are interested in enrolling their kids, but can’t until they receive vouchers.
“Are they trying to force us out of business?” she said of the city’s waitlist. “They have to remember we are the backbone behind the workforce.”
Losing family child care providers is something the city can ill afford at a time when incoming Mayor Zohran Mamdani is hoping to provide universal child care — an expansion that would likely lean heavily on home-based programs.
That’s part of why some observers are encouraging Mamdani to make clearing the voucher waitlist his first step on what could be a long road to building free child care.
Issuing vouchers to those 10,000 kids would bring “virtually free child care immediately” to a wide swath of city families, said Lauren Melodia, an economist at the New School’s Center for New York City Affairs who studies child care.
“It’s not the big vision … but you want to be able to deliver services to people while you’re building the big vision,” she added.
Mamdani’s transition team didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Vouchers are a key tool for infant, toddler, after-school care
The vouchers can be redeemed at a wide range of child care providers or even used to pay approved relatives or friends. They’re an especially critical resource for families with kids 2 and under who don’t qualify for the city’s free 3-K and prekindergarten programs as well as those who need care outside of school hours.
Separate from the vouchers, the city funds a limited number of free seats for kids 2 and under from low-income families. But families often don’t know about the seats or how to apply, experts have said. Roughly 40% of those seats were unfilled last year.
Officials in Mayor Eric Adams’ administration said the voucher program’s costs are soaring because of the program’s popularity, an increase in the voucher’s value, and a growing number of families who are supposed to receive subsidized child care as a condition of their federal welfare benefits.
Officials predict the city will need a total of $2.9 billion from the state in the upcoming budget — $1.8 billion more than the city typically receives — just to maintain the program.
Melodia, the economist, said the cost of providing vouchers to all the families on the waitlist for a year would be more modest: around $155 million.
Gordon Tepper, a spokesperson for Gov. Kathy Hochul, said “no one has done more to support and expand child care statewide” than the governor, noting that she has doubled funding for the voucher program and wants to reach universal child care.
Demand for vouchers boomed as eligibility widened
The voucher program’s current budget crunch traces back to a series of pandemic-era changes.
Prior to the pandemic, the city issued the majority of vouchers to families receiving federal cash assistance, whose child care the city is required to subsidize because their benefits come with work requirements.
Those work requirements relaxed during the pandemic, keeping more families at home with less need for child care. The number of vouchers going to those families fell from over 55,000 in 2017 to under 19,000 in 2022.
That drop, combined with a one-time infusion of federal relief funds, allowed Hochul to significantly expand the eligibility criteria for the vouchers, opening them to families who make under 85% of the state median income, or roughly $114,000 a year for a family of four.
At the same time, Hochul nearly doubled the value of the vouchers, from an average of $154 a week in 2019 to $301 a week last year. The change made the vouchers more attractive to families and providers — and expensive for the state.
City families flocked to the vouchers. Enrollment in the low-income voucher program skyrocketed from under 9,000 2022 to nearly 70,000 this year.
The changes created a major budget cliff.
After federal pandemic aid dried up, city officials resumed enforcing work requirements, bringing an expected surge of families who receive federal assistance to request vouchers.
To avoid kicking thousands of families out of the program each month, city officials asked the state, which has historically funded most of the voucher system, to commit an additional $900 million to the $1 billion city program.
Hochul eventually agreed to free up an additional $350 million for the program, contingent on the city chipping in the same amount.
That infusion allowed the city to continue offering vouchers to the majority of families who were already enrolled, city officials said. But it wasn’t enough to enroll new families.
Starting last May, the city began placing eligible new applicants for low-income vouchers on a waitlist, which has grown from 1,500 in August to its current 10,000.
Parents on voucher waitlist are desperate for relief
For families stuck on the waitlist, shouldering the costs of child care on their own often comes at the expense of other basic needs.
Milana Kochishvili, a mother of two elementary school children in southern Brooklyn, applied for vouchers after her husband was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, leaving the family to rely on her $72,000 annual income as a payroll specialist at a plumbing company. But she has been on the waitlist for months.
The only after-school option that works with her schedule costs about $800 a month. With $4,500 a month in take-home pay — nearly half of which goes to pay rent — it’s an expense she can’t afford.
“I’m in a position now where I can only afford basics,” she said. “God forbid the car breaks or something like that, that’s it.”
Adams recently launched an expansion of free, city-funded after-school programs, with a pledge to add 20,000 seats by 2027. But for some parents who work longer hours, the schedule of the city’s free programs don’t fit their needs.
Kimberly Watson, a single mom of an elementary student in Brooklyn, works as a caseworker in a hospital and needed an after-school program with longer hours. The private program she found costs $450 a month — an untenable expense for Watson, who takes home roughly $2,700 a month in income and spends $1,200 on rent.
She applied for a child care voucher and cleared the eligibility threshold, but was placed on the waitlist. Paying for child care has left her behind on some utility bills — and even on her rent, she said.
Getting a voucher would mean she can “just cut back on one thing that I have to worry about so I can catch up on other things.”
For Veerasammy, the paraprofessional with a 2-year-old, there could be some economic relief on the horizon: a bill supported by both Mamdani and a supermajority on City Council that would give paraprofessionals a $10,000 recurring annual bonus.
But she said that money would go toward paying off credit card debt, leaving her still in need of a voucher.
Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org
