In his state of the city speech last month, Mayor Daniel Lurie made a big announcement for San Francisco’s millennials: He would expand access to free and subsidized childcare for the city’s 5-and-under residents.
“This is going to relieve a huge burden for working parents,” Lurie said at that Jan. 15 speech, tapping into a very popular “affordability” talking point in the national conversation.
New York’s Mayor, Zohran Mamdani, ran, in part, on free childcare, and the state of New Mexico began subsidizing childcare in November 2025.
Lurie even took pot shots at Mamdani’s promise: “We’re not going to take four years to roll this out,” he said, referencing the New York timeline. “We’re going to be the first major city in the nation to actually get this done.”
But San Francisco, the most childless city in the country, has been here before — and the middle-income families Lurie is targeting have made little use of its past offers.
For years, the city has provided subsidized preschool to thousands of children, mostly from low-income families. But in 2024, then-Mayor London Breed tackled childcare specifically, and for middle class families.
Breed subsidized up to half of childcare costs for families making less than 150 percent of the area median income at the time, about $225,000 for a family of four.
Over the next year, only a middling 145 children took advantage of that program, according to data provided by Wu Yee, the referral agency for the subsidy, to the Department of Early Childhood. (The department provided the data to Mission Local.)
Thousands of children were eligible at the time.
There are more than 7,000 children eligible at this income level today, and Lurie’s plan would make another 12,610 children eligible. If a similar proportion enroll as did in the year following Breed’s expansion, the expansion would affect just hundreds of children in a city of 830,000 residents.
Ingrid Mezquita, the Department of Early Childhood’s director, said she counts the 2024 expansion — and its 145 new participants — as a success, despite its being a “slow burn.”
“To be able to expand to that degree for babies and toddlers in less than a year is nothing short of a miracle,” Mezquita said.
District 2 Supervisor Stephen Sherrill isn’t so sure. It’s a low enough number, Sherrill said, that he’s concerned that people who are eligible for and want the subsidies aren’t opting in, and he’d like to know why.
Sherrill is holding a hearing at the Budget and Finance committee on Wednesday to discuss implementation of Lurie’s expansion. He wants the city to set a reasonable goal for infants and toddlers the city will enroll in the coming years.
“Year one is not the year we’re going to save the world,” Sherrill said, referencing the 145 newly enrolled children during the Breed era expansion.
Realistically, he said, the full impact of the subsidies won’t be seen for a few years. “But it’s better to set a target, set a road map of how we’re going to get there.”
It’s not clear why parents did not sign up in droves for the Breed-era expansion, nor what that means for Lurie’s. Breed’s expansion covered up to half of those children’s childcare costs.
Lurie will cover the full cost for those families, plus up to half of the care for families making more than 200 percent of the area median income — about $310,000 per year for a family of four.
In San Francisco, the sticker price for care for infants and toddlers regularly exceeds $20,000 a year, according to the Children’s Council of San Francisco, with costs going well past the $3,000-a-month mark at privately run childcare centers.
Numerous analyses have found that childcare is San Francisco families’ No. 2 expense after housing. That could be a big reason why San Francisco’s 5-and-under population is still only about three quarters of its pre-pandemic high of about 40,000, and why the overall number of children in the city has been low for decades.
Wednesday’s hearing could identify bottlenecks impeding uptake of the subsidies, Sherrill said. But advocates and providers have some theories.
Children who receive subsidized care have to enroll in one of the city’s 500-plus approved childcare sites, and there are about 1,000 slots open, according to the early childhood department.
But those spots may not be what families want. About 81 percent of the families on the department’s waiting list for childcare, which is 700 strong, are seeking care for kids 3 and under. There is a shortage of childcare slots for that demographic, according to the early childhood department.
Another potential problem? Publicity. At a meeting Wednesday with one of the department’s oversight groups, one member of the group asked how the department was telling parents about the subsidies.
Mezquita mentioned, without specifics, that two groups that work with the city to enroll children in childcare conduct parent outreach. And, she added, “part of it is also getting better connected with parents. And sometimes that takes a little bit of time.”
Funding for this expansion comes from 2018’s Proposition C, often nicknamed “Baby C,” a commercial rent tax to fund childcare in San Francisco (“Big C,” also passed in 2018, is a tax on high-revenue businesses to fund homeless and housing services).
The Office of Early Care and Education, a predecessor of today’s Department of Early Childhood, wrote up a plan for spending the proceeds in 2019. It called for, among other things, subsidizing childcare for families who earned up to 200 percent of the area median income.
Lurie’s expansion essentially completes the subsidy goal that was laid out six years ago. “Baby C” has enough cash in its coffers — thanks in large part to its yearslong delay in dispersing funding due to the lawsuit — that it can cover these expansions likely until 2032. After that, the city will need to scale back or find a new funding partner.
Future funding is a problem, Sherrill said. The 2019 plan floated the idea of partnering with the state, something that he and the mayor have also mentioned.
But with those worries very much in the future, Sherrill is focused on getting into the weeds of implementation to ensure that everyone who wants the care, gets it.
“We have the lowest number of children per capita in America,” Sherrill said. “We’re the fastest-aging population. Those are not recipes for long-term success and stability and strong communities.”
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