One of the campaign promises that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has made the most progress in realizing is universal child care. While Gov. Kathy Hochul has been reluctant to allow Mamdani to increase taxes to shrink a budget hole left by Eric Adams or pursue his other affordability plans, she did agree to significant investments that build on the city’s universal pre-kindergarten program by expanding child care for younger children starting this fall, including a first-ever 2-K program. The plan is to make 2-K and 3-K universal and free by the end of Mamdani’s first term, with a down payment of 1,000 3-K and 2,000 2-K slots coming online immediately.

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The free programs would relieve what has become an arduous burden for families in New York and across the country. The average cost of child care in the U.S. is about $14,760 annually, and in New York City that number can be as much as double. This second mortgage of sorts can force families out of the workforce and out of their preferred places to live. In New York, it adds to a rootlessness in a city that has priced out too many families.

While striving to ramp up his universal child care concept quickly, Mamdani is modeling his vision inside city government—literally. In a pilot program being announced today, city workers with children under three at the David N. Dinkins Municipal Building will have the opportunity to enroll their kids in a free, year-round child care program on-site in their place of work. It’s the first free child care program for municipal workers in the city’s history.

The facility is being built on the ground floor of the Municipal Building as part of a $10 million renovation and should be completed by the fall. Starting then, 40 workers with children as young as six weeks can get slots. All employees in the Municipal Building will be eligible for the program, along with anyone from the Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS), many of whom are among the 2,000 municipal employees who work at the building.

“Change begins at home. As we deliver universal child care to New Yorkers, that work must include the public servants who keep this city running,” Mayor Mamdani said in a statement. He stressed that workers would not just benefit from the city picking up the exorbitant cost of child care, but by placing the facility right where they worked, the city would be “giving them back hours of their time. No parent should have to spend hours commuting just to ensure their child is safe and cared for.”  

While dozens of employers offer on-site child care, it has fallen far short of a norm in the country, and most of those programs are discounted and not free. But on-site day care facilities do offer many of the practical benefits that New York City hopes will be realized in the pilot: reducing turnover and the costly training that comes with it, improving productivity, and keeping job satisfaction high.

The Dinkins Municipal Building program expands on an affordable child care pilot initiated during Adams’s last year in office; Mamdani has removed all fees for the program, and allowed any DCAS member to participate. The facility is being built in-house, and operations will be contracted out to a provider to be named later. An age-appropriate early learning curriculum will be established.

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Already, New York City was a national leader in early childhood services through former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s successful pre-K and 3-K programs. Mamdani has buy-in from the state to expand that further and deliver a tangible example of his more affordable city, particularly for families. Emily Liss, who was an architect of the de Blasio rollout, now runs Mamdani’s Office of Child Care and Early Education.

Child care has become a top-tier political issue, with a $50 million independent expenditure campaign being readied for the midterms. Last November, New Mexico became the first state in the nation with a no-cost, universal child care program. New York City’s effort would be significantly larger in scale, as the city has four times as many residents as New Mexico.

The last time Congress tried to tackle child care, a coalition of progressive and frontline Democrats demanded that the system be open to anyone who needed it; while the legislation ultimately failed to pass, the concept of a truly universal system was maintained for future fights. Having a universal and free child care program in place in the nation’s largest city is likely to influence that debate. And today’s free on-site program for some city workers takes it a step further.

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David Dayen is the executive editor of The American Prospect. He is the author of Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power and Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud. He co-hosts the podcast Organized Money with Matt Stoller. He can be reached on Signal at ddayen.90.