Comptroller: 'Child care deserts' a family strain on Long Island and state

Chronically high child care costs and scant availability continue to put "a financial strain" on families across Long Island and statewide, according to a state comptroller’s office report.

The report, released Thursday, found that though New York's child care costs are among the highest in the United States, 60% of census tracts were "child care deserts" in 2023, with at least three children younger than 5 for every available slot in a day care or registered home-based provider.

On Long Island, 23 tracts had no child care at all, 14 had a ratio of 10 or more children to a slot, and 24 had 3 to 9.99 children per slot. The report did not identify those tracts, but previously published maps from the state’s Office of Children and Family Services show they are mostly on the East End. 

Cutting into wages

There are 3.7 children under 6 years old for every slot in Nassau and 4.2 in Suffolk according to the state Department of Labor, which based its calculations on 2022 census data.

In 2023, according to the latest published Labor data, infant care — the most labor-intensive and expensive type of child care — cost families in Nassau $21,914 and those in Suffolk $21,599. The average annual wage at roughly 1,000 child care establishments on Long Island was $31,875, less than half the average annual wage for Long Islanders overall.

"Even with high prices, many providers operate on thin margins, with financial and regulatory pressures that make expansion or even operating at capacity challenging," Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli's report noted. "Staffing remains a perennial challenge, as workers receive wages and benefits lower than those offered by firms for positions that require less skill and attention."

A weakened economy

Those challenges, DiNapoli wrote in a forward, sap the state’s overall economic strength, driving down employment as parents — especially mothers — limit their work or quit jobs to provide child care.

His report hailed a universal child care initiative announced in January by Gov. Kathy Hochul, who said the state would work to provide child care to all families who need it but can't afford it. In the interim, she proposed spending more than $100 million to build more child care centers and to bolster the ranks of teachers to staff them. She also proposed creating a pool of child care teachers and substitute teachers through the state Department of Labor to provide staff to keep child care centers open and to work in new centers that will be built.

The comptroller's report said state government would need to ensure those resources were used effectively. That will include collecting better information about child care availability, making it easier for families to find care and monitoring the outcomes of spending and tax credits intended to increase the number of child care slots, according to the report.

Experts said problems with the American child care system have been apparent for years, even if the precise solutions have not. 

"There’s a broken economic model of how we ... have treated child care as a private arrangement between a family and a provider, which mathematically doesn’t work for a lot of families," said Pete Nabozny, policy director of Rochester-based The Children's Agenda advocacy group.

In New York, "care is simultaneously too expensive for families, the industry is too low-paying to attract the workforce that is needed and, because of that, they don’t have the physical infrastructure," Nabozny said.

Challenges on Long Island

While some of the biggest challenges exist in sparsely populated, less affluent upstate areas, Long Island is not immune. The state’s Child Care Assistance Program caps its income limit for family assistance at 85% of the state’s median income, ruling out many Long Islanders, Nabozny said. The program's income limits vary by family size. For a family of five, the limit is $126,012.77. Median household income for Suffolk in 2023, the last year for which census data was published, was $128,329, and in Nassau $143,408.

Shoshana Hershkowitz, of the Empire State Campaign for Child Care, a coalition of parents and educators, said the availability of affordable child care varied considerably in a region as large as Long Island. Hershkowitz cited a child care facility in Montauk that was threatened with closure last year because of financial losses.

"Thirty families would have been without a child care option anywhere near them," she said.

Her organization supports universal child care but says it can only be done with permanent taxpayer funding to boost  child care worker wages. The Campaign for Child Care's 2025 legislative priorities include ongoing $12,500 "workforce supplements." 

Nabozny favors an expanded public assistance program but said the state could start making it easier for families to apply, starting with fixing an application process that can be onerous.

"We know there are many more families that could benefit than currently are," he said.

But Ken Girardin, research director for the Albany-based fiscally conservative Empire Center for Public Policy, said while some of the state’s problems stemmed from external factors like the COVID-19 pandemic and a falloff in immigration in the 2010s that cut the child care labor pool, many state interventions had "made things exponentially worse."

'No amount of money'

The state’s minimum wage increases caused some of the industry’s workforce problems, Girardin said, and popular initiatives like universal pre-K undercut the industry by diverting some 4-year-olds from private to public programs. Those older children had made some care facilities financially viable because they required less hands-on supervision than toddlers and infants, he said. Also, while state subsidies had made child care more affordable for some families, according to Girardin, they also increased demand overall.

"There is no amount of money that the state can throw at this and be completely satisfied," he said.

Assemb. Michaelle Solages (D-Elmont), the deputy majority leader, said universal child care — whether free, integrated into the public school system or fee-based on a sliding scale — would need federal funding.

"There is no way the state can comprehensively fund this," she said. "This shouldn’t be a partisan issue ... We all want to see a sustainable child care system that parents can use."

Assemb. Ed Ra (R-Garden City South) said he, like the comptroller, saw child care as an economic development issue that should be prioritized. Federal aid might be needed, but the state could free up resources of its own by rigorously evaluating its tax credit programs, he said. “Pull away from things that don’t work and try utilizing those funds in other places.”