“The next mayor’s top two priorities should be implementing free, universal preschool for all 3- and 4-year-olds and expanding access to affordable childcare to substantially lower costs.”

Families across New York City are struggling to keep up with skyrocketing costs of living. Even before the 2024 election, hundreds of thousands of families have voted with their feet, leading to the largest decline in the city’s under-20 population in a decade.

This exodus is a damning indictment of the failed economic record of the Adams administration. With Donald Trump in the White House for the next four years, there will be no federal relief, and it will be up to the city of New York to deliver the lower costs that working families deserve.

Child care costs are out of control. Parents are spending up to an estimated $28,000 annually per child on child care—and that’s assuming they can even find a child care spot. Put differently, a family earning the median for households with children will have to fork over as much as 43 percent of their income on childcare for an infant and a toddler. Thousands of kids are being denied the opportunity to attend prekindergarten, jeopardizing their educational and economic futures and forcing parents out of the workforce. 

As Democrats in Congress have fought to make preschool free for 3- and 4-year-olds and reduce the cost of childcare to less than 7 percent of family income, the city of New York gutted hundreds of millions of dollars of education funding and reneged on the mission of universal early childhood education. Only when educators, students, and parents rallied to oppose the cuts did Adams restore some funding. But the damage has already been done. New York is becoming a place hostile to children. 

We need a mayor ready to do everything in their power to make New York City the best place in the world to raise a family. The greatness of New York lies in our people and public goods: schools, libraries, parks, parks,  and museums. Instead of imposing ruthless cuts, we need to invest in the programs and infrastructure that makes our city livable, joyful, and safer. That starts with our youngest residents. 

Early childhood education yields lifetime dividends, providing a foundation for social, emotional, physical, and cognitive development, educational achievement, and well-being. The next mayor’s top two priorities should be implementing free, universal preschool for all 3- and 4-year-olds and expanding access to affordable childcare to substantially lower costs. 

By bringing together parents, educators, community organizations, businesses, and relevant stakeholders, we can efficiently ramp up child care supply, raise wages and benefits to recruit and retain staff, and integrate early childhood education with the K-12 school system. We can also tap into the knowledge and capacity of our city’s seniors by co-locating child care and centers for older New Yorkers. 

We know that schools are the anchor of our communities and serve as a communal space to address the diverse needs of children and families. Congress, with the support of the Biden administration, has made historic investments in community schools. We should build on that progress by implementing health and social supports in schools, putting a washer and dryer in every school, and making after-school and summer programs free and universal. Every child should have a safe, nurturing place to be during non-school hours. That includes keeping schools, recreation centers, libraries, and other facilities open for extended-day programming.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Mayor Fiorello La Guardia delivered enormously for New York, from the New Deal’s school infrastructure projects to public housing to community health clinics to theater, music, and arts projects. Today, we need a mayor who will deliver an agenda that will make life more affordable—not pick fights with allies and deliver incendiary soundbites that play into Republicans’ hands. 

As a former Senate staffer who worked on the Build Back Better legislation and the former New York City Comptroller, we are both committed to economic justice. Child poverty, which climbed nationally to 13.7 percent in 2023, costs up to $1.1 trillion each year. That is money taken from our pockets, regardless of income. In next year’s tax negotiations, Democrats should fight to restore the expanded Child Tax Credit and enact a new $6,000 credit for parents of newborns to help defray expenses. These measures would reduce economic insecurity and lift millions of children—many of them in New York City—out of poverty. 

Over the past three years, we have witnessed City Hall become a carnival of corruption, and our children are suffering the most from the current administration’s scandals, incompetence, and cruelty. It is time to imagine a new social compact for New York. A compact that lifts up workers and organized labor, puts our people to work, houses the middle class, educates our children, puts the public good at the heart of government, and rebuilds a city where no family is priced out.

Scott Stringer is a former New York City comptroller and expected mayoral candidate in 2025. Nikhil Goyal is a sociologist and author of the book, “Live to See the Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty,” who holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge.