The Space You Can’t See: Why NYC Child Care Is So Expensive—and How to Fix It

North Brooklyn has no shortage of toddlers or empty ground-floor bays. What we lack is a way to tell which storefronts can actually become child care. When operators can’t find compliant community facility space, they either pay retail rents — or they stay out. That’s how tuition climbs and waitlists stretch from months to years. This is the quiet engine behind nyc childcare costs and the Brooklyn daycare waitlist problem: community facility space may technically be allowed by zoning, but without a way to see it, operators get pushed into retail pricing or shut out entirely.

This piece explains why so much “child-care-eligible” space in New York City is effectively invisible, how rezonings unlock (but don’t require) community-serving square footage, and the simple near-term fix: force the system to show us what’s actually being built.

Today, DOB will tell you how tall a new building will be, how many apartments it will include, and how much residential square footage is coming. What it will not show you is the non-residential side of that same mixed-use project — how much subgrade, ground-floor, or second-floor commercial / community-serving space is being delivered, what use group that space is intended for, and which floors it actually occupies.

We’re asking the City to make the non-residential space visible the same way it already makes the residential space visible, and to pilot that change first along Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn — a corridor that was just rezoned for thousands of new apartments and hundreds of thousands of square feet of new non-residential space. We call that pilot the Atlantic Avenue Child Care Space Pilot.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: A City of Waitlists and Empty Spaces
2. The Story: One Operator’s Search
3. Primer: What “Community Facility” Actually Is (and Where Daycare Fits)
4. Rezonings Don’t Create Quotas—They Create Possibilities
5. Atlantic Avenue: The Corridor We Can Prove This In
6. The Money Question: Why Tuition = Wages + Space
7. Data Snapshots: North Brooklyn, On the Ground
8. A No-Budget Fix: Make CF & Retail Space Searchable in DOB NOW
9. Conclusion: Seats, Sooner—And Cheaper
10. FAQ
    

Introduction: A City of Waitlists and Empty Spaces

Walk a few blocks in Williamsburg, Fort Greene, or Park Slope on a weekday morning and you’ll see the paradox in plain view. Parents are juggling drop-offs, nannies are hustling strollers across avenues — and a handful of ground-floor commercial bays sit empty, papered over, waiting for the right tenant. On the family side of the ledger, child-care costs have surged, infant rooms book out early, and waitlists routinely stretch across school years. On the provider side, operators are wrestling a quieter monster: space.

Space is the substrate under every tuition number. It shapes where centers can open, how quickly they open, how much they spend on build-outs, and — ultimately — how much families pay. In theory, New York City’s zoning code allows “community facility” uses (including child care) across much of the city, sometimes with bulk/FAR advantages that should make community facility space relatively feasible. In practice, those opportunities are often invisible at street level. The data that could tell an operator, “this bay is CF-eligible, ground floor, with the right square footage for classrooms” simply isn’t exposed in a way people can search.

When operators can’t find compliant community facility space, two things happen. They either pay competitive retail rents (and pass the cost into tuition) or they avoid the submarket altogether (and waitlists keep growing). Rezonings like the Atlantic Avenue Mixed-Use Plan expanded what’s possible on paper: thousands of new apartments, hundreds of thousands of square feet of commercial and community-facing space, and major public investment in the corridor. The plan projects up to 4,600 new apartments, including roughly 1,900 permanently income-restricted affordable units — about 40% of the total — across a 21-block stretch in Central Brooklyn. It also anticipates 2,800 permanent jobs tied to new commercial and light industrial activity, and on the order of 800,000+ square feet of new commercial, light industrial, and community facility space along Atlantic Avenue and neighboring streets.

New York City Council Approves the “Atlantic Avenue Mixed-Use Plan”

Whether any of that actually becomes infant and toddler classrooms, though, depends on something the City doesn’t currently provide: visibility. Who has what square footage? On which floor? Is it community-facility eligible (Use Group 3)? Could it realistically support early childhood care? Nobody — not even providers — can query that.

This article walks through why that data gap is the real bottleneck, and how a targeted administrative change to DOB NOW can fix it without a single dollar of subsidy.

The Story: One Operator’s Search

Picture a seasoned operator trying to open in Carroll Gardens. The model is tight but proven: 4–6 classrooms, infant through pre-K, 3,500–6,000 square feet on the ground floor, compliant egress, mechanicals that can handle infant rooms, and a street presence that reassures parents. The staffing plan is drafted. The curricular materials are ready. Family demand is not the issue.

The search starts with the usual mix: broker calls, neighborhood canvassing, public portals, and a thicket of PDFs. Zoning is checked in ZoLa; yes, community facility use is permitted here. But the minute we shift from “what’s theoretically allowed” to “what specific bays are actually viable,” the trail goes cold. DOB NOW is powerful if you already know an address; it’s not built to surface community-facility candidates across an area. There’s no public, searchable “Community Facility” filter that returns a map of prospects; no way to filter for ground-floor; no field that says “this is Use Group 3–friendly and realistically convertible for licensed child care.”

Weeks turn to months. A few addresses look promising, but each one requires bespoke sleuthing: old plan sets from a broker’s Dropbox, partial filings, a landlord who “thinks it could work,” and an architect’s quick take that reveals a fatal constraint (no second means of egress, a structural wall where a classroom needs to go, or a mechanical path that makes infant rooms impractical). Meanwhile, a glossy “retail” space a few avenues over is available — at a rent that only makes sense for a fashion brand. The operator does the math: take the retail at a premium (and push tuition higher) or walk away and watch neighborhood waitlists get longer.

Multiply this story across North Brooklyn. It’s not that child-care-eligible space doesn’t exist — it’s that we lack a standard, public way to find it. Without early, accurate matches, operators sign too late (or not at all), landlords don’t de-risk their financing with early educational tenants, build-outs start behind schedule, and change orders snowball. Families feel all of it — in price, and in time.

Primer: What “Community Facility” Actually Is (and Where Daycare Fits)

New York City’s Zoning Resolution groups land uses into “Use Groups.” Community Facility uses live primarily in Use Groups 3 and 4. Think schools and child-care centers, libraries and museums, houses of worship, ambulatory health care — institutions that serve the public.

The zoning tables then specify where these uses are allowed (Residence, Commercial, and in limited form some Manufacturing districts) and how they can be built (bulk rules for lot coverage, setbacks, height, floor-area ratio, parking where applicable).

Where does day care fit? For zoning purposes, day-care and early-childhood services are treated within Use Group 3 — the same umbrella as “schools.” That classification matters because it dictates:

• which districts you can occupy as-of-right,
  
• how much floor area (FAR) you can build,
  
• and which bulk/parking/yard rules apply.
  

In Residence (R) districts, community facility bulk is governed under a different chapter than housing. In Commercial (C) districts, community facility bulk is governed under commercial bulk rules. Some mapped overlays add extra conditions like minimum lot width or off-street parking ratios in specific geographies. Separate from zoning, operators must also satisfy Building Code, Health, and FDNY requirements, especially around infant rooms, egress, ventilation, and fire safety. Zoning tells you where you can be and roughly how big; DOB/DOHMH/FDNY tell you how it must be built and operated.

Here’s the important part: the City does not set a fixed, neighborhood-level quota of community facility space for child care. Zoning enables it — sometimes even with FAR that’s more favorable than straight residential — but does not require it to be delivered. That’s why we can have a corridor like Atlantic Avenue suddenly opening up hundreds of thousands of square feet of new commercial, light industrial, and community facility space, and still have basically no infant/toddler capacity on that same corridor today.Mayor Adams Celebrates City Planning Commission’s Approval of Atlantic Avenue Mixed Use-Plan to Create 4,600 New Homes, 2,800 Permanent Jobs

(This last point — extremely limited licensed early childhood capacity on Atlantic Avenue today — is an inference from the plan’s description of current conditions as primarily industrial, storage, and underutilized one- to two-story buildings rather than active community-serving child care uses.Mayor Adams Celebrates City Planning Commission’s Approval of Atlantic Avenue Mixed Use-Plan to Create 4,600 New Homes, 2,800 Permanent Jobs)

Rezonings Don’t Create Quotas—They Create Possibilities

Zoning is a permission slip, not a purchase order. When the City rezones a neighborhood, it changes what’s allowed — the mix of uses, the amount of floor area (FAR), the height and envelope. What a rezoning does not do is dictate a fixed quantity of “community facility” space that must be built in each micro-area. There is no community facility quota that flips on when the City Council votes yes.

Instead, planners run an environmental review (CEQR) using a “reasonable worst-case development scenario,” or RWCDS. Think of it as a forecast: given the new permissions, how much of each use is likely to show up — housing, retail, office, and yes, community facility — and what does that mean for impacts like school seats, traffic, shadows, open space? That forecast is not a mandate. Developers still decide what to build based on site geometry, loan terms, anchor tenants, ground-floor rent expectations, and what pencils.

That’s exactly where child care falls through the cracks. The plan can “enable” space. City Planning can “project” community-serving square footage. The Council can approve the rezoning. But unless operators and landlords can actually see which addresses have ground-floor community-facility-suitable square footage in real time, infant and toddler classrooms still don’t open — and parents still sit on waitlists.

Atlantic Avenue: The Corridor We Can Prove This In

The Atlantic Avenue Mixed-Use Plan covers roughly a 21-block stretch from Vanderbilt Avenue to Nostrand Avenue across Prospect Heights, Crown Heights, and Bedford-Stuyvesant. The City projects thousands of new apartments — including roughly 1,900 permanently income-restricted affordable homes, about 40% of the total — and more than 800,000 square feet of new non-residential space at the base of these buildings, plus an estimated 2,800 permanent jobs tied to commercial, light industrial, and production activity on the corridor. The plan also comes with hundreds of millions of dollars in promised safety and infrastructure upgrades along Atlantic Avenue.

Here’s the core problem: there is no clean public way to see what that new non-residential space actually is.

DOB can already tell you how tall a building will be, how many apartments are proposed, and how much residential square footage is in the stack. What you cannot easily see is the other half of that mixed-use building — the part that’s supposed to serve the street:

• How much subgrade / ground-floor / second-floor non-residential square footage is being delivered?

• Is that space planned as retail, community facility, light industrial / maker, or fresh-food/grocer-type use?

• Which floors does it actually occupy, and when is it expected to deliver?

Without that visibility, everybody flies blind. Owners market space like generic boutique retail by default. Community-serving tenants (including early childhood care) show up late, after rent expectations have already been set at “highest possible retail.” And the City is left saying “the rezoning enables services” without being able to point at actual, leased, program space on the corridor.

This is not a subsidy ask. We’re not asking the City to fund build-outs. We’re asking the City to make that lower-floor, non-residential space visible the same way it already makes the residential piece visible — and to do it first on Atlantic Avenue.

We’re calling that first deployment the Atlantic Avenue Child Care Space Pilot.

Why frame it this way:

• Atlantic Avenue is newly rezoned and politically important. The City wants a success story it can point to immediately.

• Families are going to live here. Thousands of new units are coming, including permanently affordable units.

• Hundreds of thousands of square feet of new non-residential space is already projected on paper.

• But without transparency into what that space is, where it sits in the building, how big it really is, and when it delivers, child care providers (and other community-serving tenants) can’t get in early enough to sign during planning.

That last part — signing during planning, not after C of O — is what lowers risk for the owner, lowers rent for tenants, lowers build-out cost for both the operator and developer, and keeps tuition from exploding on day one.

The Money Question: Why Tuition = Wages + Space

Child care is labor, first and foremost. Ratios drive staffing, staffing drives payroll, and payroll is the largest line item in any center’s budget. But in Brooklyn — especially Central and North Brooklyn — the other immovable object is space.

Space shows up in three ways:

1. Rent / carrying cost: Ground-floor bays with proper egress, loading, and mechanical potential get priced like high-value retail unless a landlord understands (early) that a community facility tenant is viable and stabilizing.
   
2. Timeline cost: If you don’t identify space until late, you’re signing under pressure. That compresses architectural/engineering, DOB/DOHMH review, and contractor bidding into crisis mode. Crisis mode = change orders and premium pricing.
   
3. Fit-out cost: Infant and toddler rooms are mechanically intense. Venting, air changes, hot water, fire-rated corridors, stroller storage — none of that is cheap to retrofit under deadline.
   

Here’s the part that connects directly to parent wallets:

The single fastest way to tame the “space” side of tuition is to give operators visibility into how much ground-floor commercial / community facility square footage (totalCommercialSquareFeet) actually exists in a corridor before it leases at full retail rates. If a provider can identify a viable 4,000–6,000 SF community-facility-eligible space early — and sign it before it’s bid up as boutique retail — rent pressure drops, the financing picture stabilizes, and build-out can be sequenced instead of rushed. That keeps opening-month tuition from starting at $3,200+ just to survive.

Data Snapshots: North Brooklyn, On the Ground

Look at the neighborhoods where families most want to stay put — Williamsburg, Fort Greene, Bed-Stuy, Carroll Gardens, Park Slope — and a pattern emerges. Posted full-day infant/toddler rates regularly land in the $2,500–$4,300+/month range, and that’s if you can even get a spot. Many programs signal “apply 12–18 months in advance,” especially for infants. That’s the Brooklyn daycare waitlist story parents are living every day.

What you do not see in high-demand areas is a steady stream of new early childhood centers opening on predictable timelines. Instead, you see one-off wins after long, expensive searches. That volatility shows up directly in tuition.

A No-Budget Fix: Make CF & Retail Space Searchable in DOB NOW

Give operators a CF filter and an API, and they sign earlier. Earlier signatures stabilize the landlord’s pro forma, improve loan terms, and let build-outs compete on price — not panic.

Early is everything. If providers can identify viable non-residential space during planning they can sign earlier. Earlier signing stabilizes the landlord’s underwriting, lets base building get designed around that use (egress, risers, venting, power) instead of hacked in later, and prevents “panic build-outs” that drive costs up and force tuition higher on Day 1. Everyone wins when the lease is signed in design phase, not after the building is already done.

Right now, DOB NOW doesn’t let you run the query we actually need:

• Show me the subgrade / ground-floor / second-floor non-residential space in this geography.

• Tell me what that space is intended for (community facility, retail, light industrial / maker, "fresh program"- food grocer).

• Tell me if it’s tagged as Use Group 3 (child care / school).

• Tell me which floor it actually sits on.

• Tell me how big it is in totalCommercialSquareFeet so I know whether I can run four classrooms and circulation without slicing the program into useless slivers.

That’s the gap.

Here’s what we’re asking the City to implement (administrative, not fiscal):

1. UI filters in DOB NOW

   • Community Facility (toggle)

   • Retail (toggle)

   • Ground Floor (toggle)

   • Optional “Use Group” dropdown (UG3 for child care/school, UG4 for other community facility)

2. API fields in the public DOB NOW feed

   • isCommunityFacility (boolean)

   • useGroup (enumeration, including UG3)

   • floorLevel (so we know if it’s actually first/second floor or buried somewhere unusable)

   • totalCommercialSquareFeet (how much contiguous non-residential space is actually available for lease/build-out — whether it’s community facility, retail, light industrial / maker, FRESH-type grocer, etc.)

   We don’t just need to know “does it touch the street.” We need to know “is there actually enough square footage to run classrooms, circulation, staff space, and stroller storage without slicing the use across three micro-bays.”

3. Backfill + pilot

   • Start with the Atlantic Avenue Mixed-Use corridor.

   • Tag active/new projects so results appear quickly, then phase in backfill.

   • Call it the Atlantic Avenue Child Care Space Pilot.

4. One-page data note

   • DOB / DCP publishes a short data note so coalitions, landlords, and platforms can immediately map which buildings along Atlantic still have subgrade / ground-floor / second-floor community facility or commercial square footage available.

Why this reduces costs and waitlists:

• Earlier deal timing: Visibility lets child care operators sign during early planning (even pre-TCO), instead of trying to grab leftover retail at the end.

• Cheaper finance stack: A signed early childhood tenant de-risks the landlord’s rent roll, which improves loan terms. Better loan terms mean the landlord can often deliver core base-building work (power, risers, venting) as part of the shell rather than forcing the operator to pay emergency TI pricing.

• Lower build-out costs: If you sign early, you design early. That means proper mechanical planning, competitive contractor bids, and far fewer “rip it out and redo it” late-stage fixes.

• Right tenant, right square footage: Many landlords along Atlantic will be delivering subgrade / ground-floor / second-floor non-residential space because the rezoning now lets them. When both sides can see “there’s ~4,000+ SF here that can legally be child care,” they can match up before anyone defaults to boutique retail. This is very similar in spirit to how the City’s FRESH program matches grocers to eligible space in underserved food areas — except here the use is early childhood, not produce.

• Economies of scale: Multi-site operators can batch fixtures, finishes, mechanical units, and compliance work across multiple Atlantic Avenue addresses. When you can plan three sites at once instead of scavenging one at a time, your per-site cost drops.

• Neighborhood wins: Seats open closer to where families actually live. That stabilizes tuition and shortens waitlists without relying solely on subsidy.

And this part matters politically: This is a no-budget, administrative change. We are not asking for new subsidy dollars. We’re asking the City to turn on visibility so private operators and private landlords can close the gap themselves — fast.

Conclusion: Seats, Sooner—And Cheaper

Rezonings enable community facility space; they don’t require a certain amount of child care to actually show up. Whether infant and toddler classrooms open on a given block depends on discoverability and timing.

When child-care operators can see which addresses have ground-floor community facility–eligible square footage, and how big those spaces are, they can sign earlier. Earlier signatures de-risk the landlord’s financing and let the landlord treat that child care tenant like an anchor, not an afterthought. More time means cleaner drawings, smarter mechanical work, and fewer emergency change orders. All of that flows directly into one thing parents feel: tuition.

We’re preparing the Atlantic Avenue Child Care Space Pilot for that reason. If you’re a child-care provider, please add your name to the petition so we can show the City that this visibility is urgently needed in the Atlantic Avenue Mixed-Use corridor. If you’re a landlord delivering ground-floor commercial or community facility space along Atlantic, we want to hear from you — your square footage could be one of the first classrooms that opens. And if you’re at City Hall or DOB: flip the filter, and we’ll bring the seats.

→ Sign the Petition

→ I’m a Landlord (CF capacity)

→ I’m a Provider (pilot interest)

FAQ

What does “community facility” mean in NYC zoning?
“Community Facility” uses are mainly Use Groups 3 and 4 in the NYC Zoning Resolution. That includes schools, child care, libraries, medical, houses of worship, and similar public-serving institutions. These uses are often allowed in Residence and Commercial districts with their own bulk rules.

Where do daycares fit in the zoning code?
Day care / early childhood care is handled under Use Group 3 (school/child-care services) for zoning purposes. That’s what determines where you’re allowed to be and what physical standards apply. That’s why “Use Group UG3” should be a searchable field.

Does a rezoning require child-care space to be built?
No. A rezoning changes what’s allowed and how big it can be. City Planning then “projects” what might get built to study impacts (through CEQR/RWCDS), but that’s not a binding requirement. New York City Government+1

What is the Atlantic Avenue Mixed-Use Plan doing?
It rezoned about 21 blocks from Vanderbilt to Nostrand to allow mixed-use buildings with housing, commercial, and community facility space instead of the old low-rise industrial-only zoning. It’s projected to create ~4,600 homes (about 1,900 permanently affordable), 2,800 jobs, and more than 800,000 square feet of new commercial/light industrial/community facility space, plus major safety and infrastructure upgrades.New York City Council Approves the “Atlantic Avenue Mixed-Use Plan”

Why would a DOB NOW filter actually reduce tuition?
Because it lets operators (1) identify viable space before it’s bid up as high-rent retail, (2) sign earlier so the landlord can underwrite them, (3) line up financing and build-out in sequence instead of panic mode, and (4) actually open sooner. All of that cuts the “space” cost baked into tuition.

Isn’t this just a tech request?
It’s more than that. We’re asking DOB to expose four basic data points — Community Facility / Retail / Ground-Floor / totalCommercialSquareFeet — in the UI and the public API, and then pilot it along Atlantic Avenue. If it works, the City gets to say: “We unlocked child-care seats, lowered pressure on nyc childcare costs, and we did it without new subsidy.”