Karina Lopez rises with the sun every weekday and hauls her three-year-old to her day care provider in Oakland. By 7 a.m., the 24-year-old has started her workday, selling juicy slices of watermelon and other fresh fruits at outdoor stands throughout the Bay Area. Her shift wraps up at 5 p.m., when she heads back to Oakland to pick up her child.
The tenuous arrangement allows Lopez, a single mom from Guatemala, to leave her toddler with a caretaker five days a week while she tries to make ends meet. She earns roughly $300 per week through her fruit-selling gig. After paying $35 a day for child care, she’s left with only $125. The situation pushes Lopez to the brink of instability. It’s hardly enough to survive in one of the most expensive regions in the United States.
“It’s a stressful time,” she explains in Mam, through a translator. “I’m thinking about work, rent, and on top of that, I have to pay for child care.” The latter eats up more than half of her weekly income.
Lopez lives in East Oakland with her aunt, Audelina Perez, and Perez’s 16-year-old son. Besides sharing a home, Perez and Lopez share anxieties about navigating the rising costs of parenting in the Bay Area, which they discussed one May evening in their living room. The 33-year-old Perez, also a single mom, is three months pregnant and wonders how she will make it all work when the baby comes. “I feel emotional thinking about it,” Perez said in Mam. Spending a significant chunk of income on child care for the newborn “will be very difficult for me.”
The two moms’ predicament is familiar to scores of working parents across California. The economics of child care have placed an enormous strain on low-income families up and down the state, who struggle to keep up with runaway costs of child supervision while balancing rising food, rent and gas prices.
Since 2014, the cost of child care has surged 68% in Alameda County, according to the child care referral agency First 5 Alameda County. The organization calculated that single parents earning minimum wage in the county use more than half of their income to pay for full-time care for just one child. Moms like Lopez and Perez live just one major expense or unanticipated bill away from economic disaster.
In the coming years, changes to the economic landscape of child care in Alameda County could provide low-income families some much-needed relief. Last month, the California Supreme Court upheld Measure C, a 2020 Alameda County sales tax measure aimed at increasing access to social services for low-income families. The initiative, which has been tied up in the courts for the last four years, is expected to invest heavily into the county’s child care system by increasing access to subsidies for low-income families.
Measure C created an Alameda County sales tax, the funds of which would be used to expand access to affordable child care for low-income families and raise wages for child care providers, who are disproportionately low-income women of color. The fight to put the ballot measure before voters was driven by a broad coalition of parents, grassroots organizers and child care advocates throughout Alameda County. Voters approved Measure C in 2020, but the initiative’s rollout was stalled for years after a challenge from the Alameda County Taxpayers Association held the measure up in court.
The California Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Measure C will allow Alameda County to begin disbursing the hundreds of millions of dollars collected from the 0.5% sales tax since it went into effect in 2021.
This infusion of cash is designed to address what supporters say is a significant gap in California’s child care ecosystem: state-subsidized care only reaches a small percentage of the families who need it, while tens of thousands of children languish on lengthy waiting lists that can take months—or even years—to clear.
Parents call it the no-hope list, not a waiting list.
Mary Ignatius, executive director, Parent Voices
In 2011, the California Department of Education stopped collecting data on the number of children on the waiting list for subsidized child care after budget cuts eliminated funding to track those statistics. But Mary Ignatius, executive director of the statewide advocacy group Parent Voices, estimates that around 250,000 families in California are on waiting lists for subsidized day care spots. In Alameda County alone, 6,743 children were on the waiting list for subsidized child care in 2021 according to a report by the Alameda County Early Care and Education Planning Council.
Because so many families are waiting for an opening, securing a coveted slot has become time-consuming and rare, so much so that some families have come up with a bleak shorthand for the ledger of names. “Parents call it the no-hope list,” said Ignatius, “not a waiting list.”
The nickname resonates with Carmen, a Novato-based mother of three who spent more than a decade on the waiting list for a subsidy for her oldest child, who, now 12, has long aged out of the need for child care. During the years-long wait, Carmen, who asked to withhold her last name because of her immigration status, dropped out of school at the College of Marin, where she was taking English language classes, in order to watch her son.
“I had to make a lot of sacrifices,” the 38-year-old said in Spanish. “I could not move forward.” Carmen explained that a representative from the child care agency where she applied for a subsidy told her that securing a spot on the waiting list “was like winning the lottery. I thought: ‘maybe instead I should start buying lottery tickets,’” she joked.
The workarounds parents create can have ripple effects beyond the child or even the nuclear family. Before Lopez found someone to watch her child, she had to cut back her hours at the fruit stand and rely on family and friends to step in on the days she had to work. Among the babysitters was the 16-year-old son of Lopez’s aunt and housemate, Audelina Perez. He pitched in to watch her child when no one else was available, causing him to miss weeks of classes in the 2022-2023 school year. During that time, he fell behind in school and struggled to catch up with the mountain of homework awaiting him when he went back to class.
When and if financial resources could assist Perez and Lopez with child care, “it will help a lot, in so many ways,” said Perez.
Relief for families
In California and across the country, child care is the engine that keeps the economy humming. Parents can’t work without it, which is why families are willing to pay for a service that can consume such a significant chunk of their income. In Alameda County, the average cost of child care for a preschooler is $23,016 annually, a steep price tag for parents earning minimum wage.
In California, the support available for parents who need help paying for child care is few and far between. Low-income families who meet the state’s income limits for child care services are eligible for California’s subsidized child care programs, which provide families with vouchers to pay for care or directly enroll children in centers that offer subsidized spots.
But the demand for these services far exceeds the available supply. To qualify for a subsidy, a family of four must have an income below $8,025 per month, or $96,300 annually. That translates to roughly 2.2 million children throughout the state who are eligible for subsidized child care, according to the California Budget and Policy Center. But just 11% of those kids—231,400—are enrolled in a program.
This gulf is especially wide with Latino children, who, Ignatius estimates, make up the majority of kids statewide eligible for child care assistance. Though nearly half of all Latino children in California meet the criteria for subsidized child care, just 9% are currently enrolled in a program. The California Budget and Policy Center found that families of color, who have the greatest need for subsidized care, are disproportionately affected by its limited supply. “Therefore,” the organization concluded, “the lack of subsidized child care continues to exacerbate the historical and unjust inequities that impact Californians of color.”
Measure C is expected to invest approximately $150 million annually into the county’s child care, early education and pediatric health care system over 20 years. Among other things, these funds will be used to increase access to subsidized child care and raise the salary of child care providers to $15 per hour. According to First 5 Alameda County, which will serve as the administrator of the measure’s child care funds, more than half of child care workers in Alameda County are over the age of 50, 79% are women of color and 82% qualify as very low-income. Proponents say the funds will provide urgently needed resources to a child care ecosystem that was in crisis well before the coronavirus pandemic, which “ripped it all open, and exposed the fragility of the system,” Ignatius said.
“Currently, we are in a deeply inequitable system,” said Clarissa Doutherd, executive director of Parent Voices Oakland, which was a driving force behind putting Measure C on the ballot. “And that is what’s so important about this infusion of revenue. It’s not just the funding, but it’s the ability to have the resources and the infrastructure to tackle these harder questions of inequity, fractured systems, and really get us to a place where we can be visionary about systems change, and not just be in deficit and survival all the time.”
Notably, Alameda County’s child care assistance expansion comes as the subsidized child care safety net statewide faces headwinds. Governor Gavin Newsom’s proposed 2024-2025 budget would indefinitely delay a previously planned expansion of 200,000 subsidized child care slots statewide. With the expansion of subsidized slots on the potential chopping block, having local revenue sources to fill the gaps left by potential cuts to social safety net programs will be critical, explained Laura Pryor, research director at the California Budget and Policy Center. “The state budget is pretty bleak right now,” she said. “So Measure C is really coming at a good time, given that we are facing really harmful potential state cuts.”
Already, Doutherd said advocates with Parent Voices Oakland have heard from organizers and parents in other California counties interested in replicating the ballot initiative or creating a version of their own. “That was the vision for Measure C,” she said. “We want to be a model in terms of systems change.”
Amid all these changes, back in Oakland, Audelina Perez is readying herself for the arrival of her newborn this winter. She’s worried about how it will all come together, especially now that her schedule at the coffee shop where she works has been cut from 40 to 30 hours per week.
“I’m the only one who is here to take care of myself and my income and the future baby,” she said. “But something that does give me hope is that there are programs out there that can help. I’m happy that there is support—somehow, somewhere.”
