Excerpts
East 65th Street, in one of New York City’s wealthiest ZIP codes, offers a bounty of goods for its residents to enjoy.
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And, this fall, a new child care center for 3- and 4-year-olds will open down the street with space for about 130 local children, a development recently announced with much fanfare by Mayor Zohran Mamdani. The charge: free for all.
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The mayor’s allies argue that child care should be a collective good, akin to Social Security or public education, and that making it available to all New Yorkers will create the kind of buy-in that will help the system flourish.
They also say that wealthy New Yorkers, who pay some of the highest taxes in the nation, should be able to see a return in the form of more free services. That, in turn, could persuade them to stay in the city and continue to contribute to its financial health.
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But the neighborhood is also more socioeconomically diverse than its stereotype. It is home to many renters and city workers, and it contains the gradations of wealth that make the city’s current affordability crisis so complex.
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But she said that Mr. Mamdani’s commitment to free services for all New Yorkers, including more affluent ones, reflected his belief that “city government’s job isn’t to decide who deserves dignity — it’s to guarantee it for everyone.”
“We already treat essential services as public goods: The F.D.N.Y. answers emergencies, the city collects trash and every child has access to a safe, rigorous education. Child care should be no different,” she said in a statement.
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Those skeptical about universal child care are concerned not only about the cost but also about whether offering free seats to all families could end up sidelining the most vulnerable ones.
Bruce Fuller, a retired professor of education at the University of California, Berkeley, has been a critic of universal pre-K in New York City since it was created in 2014. He has argued that free child care is most effective when reserved first for low-income children, then perhaps eventually offered to middle-class families on a sliding scale, as California has done.
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