How I Became A Radical DIMBY (Daycares In My BackYard)

NIMBYs treat children like pollution. Solutions championed by the housing movement could help young kids access the care they deserve.

I never thought I’d hear people complain about “the sound of children playing,” but there I was, listening to a city council meeting where person after person ranted about the ways youthful glee would disrupt their lives.

For work and for fun, I listen to a lot of public hearings at which people complain new housing development near them will cause noise, traffic, lower property values, crime, and all sorts of other nuisances. Many people express the same concerns about daycares.

Much like housing, America faces a vast child care shortage. Like housing, the shortage of child care options stems in large part from artificial barriers created by local NIMBYism, “not in my backyard” attitudes opposed to new development.

And lastly, like housing, solutions to the daycare shortage cut across party lines and ideologies, creating new opportunities for movement building.

The Daycare Shortage

After housing, child care is the biggest item in many parent’s budgets. The median cost of child care in the U.S. ranges from $5,357 to $17,171 per year, per kid. In the most expensive states, daycare can cost more than $20,000 annually.

The high cost of child care derives in large part from a shortage of options. Nationwide, there are approximately six young children for every one licensed daycare spot. Fewer than 20% enroll in a child care center, preschool, or a family day care provider.¹

Most Democrats and Republicans agree the child care shortage presents a problem. Leaders in both parties have supported efforts to invest money in child care subsidies, though to varying degrees. Yet neither party addresses the root causes.

Democrats have tried to subsidize their way out of the shortage. Republicans deregulate and hope for the best. Both parties miss a core component of the child care shortage: local zoning and permitting barriers that literally ban child care facilities in most parts of most communities.

The same zoning rules that ban multi-family housing in most neighborhoods also ban child care. Even in places where zoning allows child care, local governments often use discretionary approval processes that can last years, cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to navigate, and often result in rejection anyway. These barriers have helped to create a child care shortage in many ways just as glaring as the housing shortage.

Ultimately, both shortages arise from NIMBY attitudes. Except in the case of child care, neighbors are not upset about the shadows or the traffic or the construction noise created by taller buildings. They’re upset about the existence of children.

The beautiful product Gemini created in response to the prompt angry neighbors shouting at crying children in the front yard of a nice suburban single-family home. The neighbors should be brandishing lollipops in one hand and signs saying "no children playing" in the other. One neighbor in the background, wearing a red tie, should hold a sign saying "pronatal" in one hand and "no children playing" in the other. Another neighbor in another part of the background, wearing a blue tie, should be bending over to kindly hand one of the kids a $100 bill to wipe up their tears with. The lollipop placement at the front door isn’t quite where I requested but overall our AI overlords did me well.

Daycare NIMBYism

Within the San Francisco Bay Area, supposedly a progressive place that cares about families, neighbors and local governments regularly block daycares. Though the problem may be uniquely bad here, similar planning practices prevail in many other parts of the country.

Last year in Napa, where there are ten babies for every one daycare spot, neighbors sued under the California Environmental Quality Act to block a daycare from expanding into an existing church building. No new development would take place under the proposal, just the repurposing of an old unused structure. Yet the lawsuit claimed that kids’ pickup and drop off would create so much traffic as to irreparably harm the environment.

Under California’s wacky environmental laws, children can be considered pollution.

In my home county of Contra Costa, a child care center seeking to expand from 14 to 48 spots was delayed more than four years before the County Board of Supervisors imposed onerous conditions that killed the project.

First, the County’s zoning administrator, a staff member responsible for approving project proposals, denied the application for two years even though the county’s own long term plans promote child care in residential areas. Neighbors opposed to the project complained the expansion would cause noise, traffic jams, and reduce property values. Apparently the zoning administrator agreed.

After the zoning administrator finally approved the proposal because it did in fact comply with local zoning laws, neighbors appealed the decision to the County’s planning commission. The planning commission upheld the approval but capped the number of spots to 30 kids, robbing 18 potential kids of daycare to placate the angry neighbors.

The daycare owner then appealed that decision to the County Board of Supervisors, who upheld the cap on spots and added additional parking requirements. Under the weight of these restrictions and the years of process and fees they had racked up trying to provide care for more children, the daycare owners cancelled their planned expansion entirely.

The kicker? Two other child care centers already operate down the street from this project.

I recently spoke with a woman in San Mateo County, where I work, who described her struggle trying to start a new 20-spot daycare. She’d raised the money to build a new building and she had a compelling financial plan. She expected she’d be able to charge more than $25,000 for most spots to cover operating costs, with a few provided at more affordable costs for lower-income households, because that’s how bad the shortage is.

Despite having all the resources lined up, she could not find a site zoned for child care facilities that would allow the right size of structure she needed. She needed a lot that was big enough to have space for 20 kids, their caretakers, and the requisite parking but not so big that the land costs would be prohibitively expensive. All the modest single-family housing lots that met her size parameters banned child care centers—just as they ban multi-family housing.

I expect that many stories like these go unreported, that many daycares get stalled in the approval process or never get off the ground in the first place because of NIMBY zoning and permitting processes. And so the child care shortage persists.

DIMBY (Daycares In My BackYard)

Since child care faces many of the same problems as housing, many of the same solutions can help. Fundamentally, solving the child care shortage will require allowing more child care facilities.²

California has already taken action to promote what are known as “family child care homes,” child care operated out of a person’s primary place of residence. SB 234 (Skinner), a law that took effect in 2020, removed the vast majority of permitting requirements for family daycare homes operating in single-family neighborhoods.

However, “child care centers,” commercially operated daycares, don’t yet have access to the same protections. Family daycare homes provide a valuable source of child care, but they aren’t scalable enough to meet our vast child care needs. We need broader commercial solutions.

AB 752 (Ávila Farías), a law currently under consideration by the state legislature, takes an important first step. The bill would streamline permitting for child care centers co-located with multi-family housing. It would make building new child care centers as part of new apartments much easier by exempting them from most residential zoning laws and the California Environmental Quality Act.

The state can do even more, specifically by promoting standalone child care centers. In 2021, SB 9 (Wiener) attempted to allow duplexes in all single-family neighborhoods across California. Why not promote the same flexibility for child care centers up to three stories tall?

AB 609 (Wicks), a bill under consideration this year, would exempt most housing in existing cities near jobs and transit from the California Environmental Quality Act. Daycare centers deserve the same protections. California’s legislature should make clear that children are not pollution.

Two years ago, I lived in a duplex immediately next to a family daycare home. Most weekday afternoons, 10 little kids would come frolicking out into the backyard, where the home had a little play structure. Yes, they made some noise. Listening to that noise, tiny voices laughing and yelping, was always a welcome distraction from the tedium of public hearings and planning documents I typically find myself immersed in.

The noise of children playing is not a nuisance. It’s the sound of the future. To provide for our future, we must build for it. Daycares In My BackYard!

1. "Child care center" typically refers to commercially operated daycare, whereas "family daycare provider" typically refers to a smaller operation run out of a household's primary residence.

2. Changes to zoning and permitting processes alone cannot solve the shortage of daycare. Many low-income families may need financial support to afford childcare even if it were much cheaper. Low wages in the childcare industry penalize workers for providing an essential service. Republicans and Democrats alike have supported proposals to subsidize child care because it helps!

Fundamentally, though, all the money in the world will make limited difference until cities allow abundant child care. And creating abundant child care requires guaranteeing child care facilities can operate freely throughout our communities.