Mayor Daniel Lurie just put $36,000 into the pockets of thousands of San Francisco families — including mine.
Lurie’s expansion of child-care subsidies, announced last week, will ease the crushing expense of raising children in the city. As my wife and I provide for our 6-month-old daughter, Xiomara, we’re going to need every penny we can get, and the $3,027 per month child care (opens in new tab) that will be granted to families of four making less than $230,000 a year is a blessing.
As a parent, I’m grateful. But as a journalist covering City Hall, I’m wary: I can easily see the influx of hundreds of families overburdening the child-care network. And I can also see the expiration date for the program, which is being paid for through a one-time surplus of funds found in the couch cushions of 2018’s Proposition C. Its time will run out in 2032.
Luckily for us, that’s ample time for my daughter to benefit. And while childcare providers say they’re ready for a surge of babies and toddlers to waddle into their arms, the city’s certified daycares and preschools may soon feel the strain.
When my wife, Anna, and I began planning for Xiomara’s care after parental leave, we pored over daycare and nanny-share options, searching for something affordable, safe, and enriching — we’d already seen how time with other kids encouraged our daughter to sit and crawl for the first time. Most providers for infants charge more than $2,000 a month. For child-care providers in the city’s Early Learning for All network (opens in new tab) — which uses city-provided curricula to prepare toddlers for school — the cost is even higher: a jaw-dropping $3,027 monthly.
For years, the city has provided child-care subsidies for low-income families. Those families eagerly snapped up available Early Learning for All seats, and waiting lists swelled.
Former supervisors Norman Yee and Jane Kim authored the 2018 ballot measure, Prop. C, which single-handedly mopped up the wait and boosted the pay of child-care staff. Now, San Francisco’s annual staff turnover rate for child-care providers is 17%, better than the state average of 22% to 26%, according to the Department of Early Childhood.
“When you talk to any parent of young children, they want quality early-education programs, people who know what they’re doing. Yet no one wants to pay for it,” Yee said.
City progressives, including Supervisor Jane Kim, championed Proposition C, which is funding the child-care initiative. | Source: Jeff Chiu/AP Photo
Prop. C fixed that problem. And while there has been a 50% subsidy for families in San Francisco’s lower-middle income range, as measured by the area median income, Anna and I didn’t qualify, by just a hair.
That’s a common story, according to Yensing Sihapanya, executive director of Family Connections Centers (opens in new tab), one of the city’s large child-care providers, with centers near every neighborhood. “If you make 20 dollars over that limit, then you get nothing,” Sihapanya said. She sees families like mine every month.
Before Lurie’s announcement Thursday, middle-income earners like my family — often dubbed the “missing middle (opens in new tab)” by lawmakers due to their flight from the city — had yet to benefit from Prop. C’s taxation of commercial real estate for the benefit of children. Those folks are sandwiched in a tough spot — not low-income enough to qualify for subsidies, but not wealthy enough to hang onto the fleeting hope of raising a San Francisco kid.
Anna and I are hanging onto that dream. Our rent is affordable enough that a steep child-care bill, while forcing some tradeoffs, would not make us flee the city. But anyone living in San Francisco long enough has seen friends and loved ones move away as their families grow.
Take my cousin Jake Rodriguez and his wife, Alivia, who are raising a 10-year-old son, Mortimer. Jake is a theater sound designer, working off and on for the American Conservatory Theater and Berkeley Repertory Theater, and Alivia is a dietician-turned-nurse in SoMa. Even with a rent-controlled apartment on Shotwell Street, with rent frozen during the first dot-com bust of the 1990s, they spent roughly one-third of their combined incomes on a Montessori daycare in South of Market when Mortimer was born.
“We ate it,” Jake said.
Jake told me it would’ve been a “game changer” if Lurie’s middle-income child-care subsidy existed when Mortimer was a tot. When they looked for a larger apartment in San Francisco so their son could have his own room, the extra money spent on child care put the rent out of reach.
Instead, Jake’s family moved to Richmond in the East Bay when Mortimer was 4. My family lost easy proximity to loved ones; the city lost two dedicated workers, a family of Giants fans with creative hearts.
The city knows this problem well. Prop. C was caught up in a legal limbo until 2021 (opens in new tab), which allowed the city to collect the taxes but not spend them. Jenny Lam, a spokesperson for the Department of Early Childhood, told me the agency needed several years to ramp up child-care staffing citywide, which currently serves 9,100 children. The number of families enrolled in city-subsidized child care is expected to grow by 500 annually as the program expands.
“This is what we’ve been building toward for years now, and we’re ready,” Lam said.
Six-month-old Xiomara will soon partake in city-subsidized daycare. | Source: Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/The Standard
In anticipation of growing demand, the Department of Early Childhood (opens in new tab) used Prop. C funds to help child care providers hire more staff. They are also training daycare centers to join the Early Learning for All network, helping them develop school-ready programming so they qualify. These are often the little mom-and-pop daycare centers with homespun banners you might spot in your neighborhood.
Major providers were beefed up too. Mark Ryle is CEO of Wu Yee Children’s Services, which counts a dozen daycare centers in its network. They’re hoping to leverage Prop. C funds to build a location at the edge of the Tenderloin, at 1101 Sutter St., he said.
While the Department of Early Childhood says it’s poised for the surge of families, Ryle said it was a herculean effort to bring smaller daycares up to speed with the city’s requirements so they can join the Early Learning for All program.
“I think it would be inauthentic to say we know exactly how we’re going to support every child that’s going to come through in expanded capacity,” he said. But his staff is determined, because “we can’t afford to lose a single minute of a child’s life in that regard.”
There are 700 families on the city’s waitlist for child-care providers, though there are roughly 1,000 slots available. The discrepancy is partially due to there being a higher demand for infant-age day care yet more open slots for toddlers. But the disconnect also comes from another problem my wife and I encountered: Parents don’t always like the location or the vibe of the daycares with open slots.
Mayor Daniel Lurie’s State of the City speech last week touted child-care subsidies as part of his affordability agenda. | Source: Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/The Standard
We want Xio close to home, and so we gravitated toward a daycare just around the corner, in Cayuga Terrace, that offers Spanish-language immersion. But there’s a catch: It won’t be available until at least June. She may attend another daycare farther away while we wait. Now imagine this same scenario scaling to the expected 1,000-plus families that will qualify for the new subsidies in the coming years. The competition for slots could make SFUSD’s school-lottery scramble look calm and orderly.
Lurie’s subsidy will last Xio until she hits pre-K. Then, in 2032, it will dry up. Prop. C wasn’t disbursing funds while it was mired in a legal challenge, one that was ultimately (opens in new tab)rejected. That allowed the city to save up a pot of $500 million, a one-time windfall that bolstered the proposition’s annual tax take-in. But the city has no plan for what comes after that pot is empty.
After his State of the City speech Wednesday, Lurie was vague when answering a reporter’s question about where the next funding stream will come from, raising the possibility of a state subsidy. Similarly, the Department of Early Childhood didn’t have an answer.
The speech leaned heavily on the child-care expansion as a central plank of the mayor’s new affordability agenda. As he spoke, I listened among the crowd at Rossi Park and thought of all the advantages I could now afford for Xio — more college savings, help with school if she lagged behind, and even a palpable release of stress over affording the basics.
“This is going to remove a huge burden for working parents,” Lurie told the crowd. “And we’re not going to take four years to roll this out — we’re going to be the first major city in the nation to actually get it done.”
Ryle hopes private donors like the Haas Foundation, Tipping Point, or Crankstart will chip in by the time the funding expires in six years. Maybe the Board of Supervisors or Lurie will propose a new tax. Or maybe, this dream of universal child care will vanish as quickly as it appeared.
Here’s hoping our little Xiomara won’t be among the last San Franciscans to enjoy the benefit.
This story has been updated with the correct number of daycare centers operated by Wu Yee Children’s Services.
