Governor Hochul Speaks at 5BORO NYC Childcare Summit

Earlier today, Governor Hochul spoke at The 5BORO NYC Childcare Summit in Brooklyn to discuss the importance of affordable and accessible child care. The Governor emphasized that a collective effort is needed between state, city, and leaders in the private sector to work toward achieving universal child care.

VIDEO: The event is available to stream on YouTube here and TV quality video is available here (h.264, mp4).

AUDIO: The Governor's remarks are available in audio form here.

PHOTOS: The Governor's Flickr page will post photos of the event here.

A rush transcript of the Governor's remarks is available below:

Good afternoon. First of all, who doesn't love Etsy? I'm sitting in the car and my staff says, “Oh, I'm waiting for something to be delivered.” I said, “Maybe they have it here.” That's not how it works. I actually know that. But I've toured this incredible place, and it's just a place where visionaries gather and led by an extraordinary leader. Josh, I love the fact that not only have you innovated a whole new way of creating products and giving people at home, many times, the ability to bring in more income from themselves — which I know is important to you — but also just to give people that sense of creative spirit out there and creating so many thousands of jobs. It's extraordinary.

But also to be so forward thinking that you're not just like, “Well, this is my workplace. I go home at the end of the day and I'm good.” You're also thinking about the larger picture and the larger challenges that society is meeting. So it is leaders like you and others in this room who I believe are the key to the solution to the childcare crisis. Something I know a little bit about.

Tom Allen, thank you for being the leader of 5Boro. I think it's an extraordinary organization that helps focus on policies that matter to the larger group, the entire ecosystem of New York City, which is wildly complicated, but I figured it out. I have finally figured it out. You just have to walk with a lot of swagger, right? Like you own the place. Yeah. Nobody messes with you when you do that. So, that's how I operate.

But I also think about the fact that I probably am a poster child for the childcare crisis. All I want to do when I was younger, probably about 13 or 14 years old, and they ask you what you want to be when you grow up. My parents used to live in a trailer park and we started, we had nothing growing up for a long time. But I had this vision. I love government studies in school, and I decided someday I'm going to work in Capitol Hill. I'm going to work in that white building and I'm going to be so good. I'm going to be a staffer to a senator someday. And that's as high as my ambition went. I've been making it up ever since then because I was able to achieve that at the age of 28. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan hired me as his counsel in Washington. I loved my job. I'd been waiting my whole life for this job, but I also was newly married. Little baby comes along and what does that do to my career aspirations? And I'm looking around Washington — this was quite a few years ago. Where's the help? I had no family in the area. There were very few childcare centers. The wait lists were phenomenally long and I just didn't have any options. And so I had to walk away from that job that I cherished and Senator Moynihan and said, “Come back someday. You come back any time.”

But I didn't. I wasn't able to. And of course what that does to your family when the mom has to stay home or the parent has to stay home. Like my husband was working for the government. I was working for the government, so we weren't exactly big time rollers in the money here, but we were both passionate about public service and then all of a sudden my income is gone.

So believe me, I knew all about having to go out to the big box stores and get lots of discount diapers and paper towels and formulas. So I lived that life. So when people are talking about the crisis today and my own kids now have kids, the ones who were born at that time. It's real — it's not something in a textbook you read about.

Almost every family is struggling with this and sometimes they to put their dreams on hold or maybe they can't even do that. They have to just figure it all out. And I've always thought that families shouldn't have to figure this out on their own. And I think when I was growing up it was like, “Well, you chose to have kids and it's your decision, so you figure it out.”

But I love the fact that we have employers who are finally enlightened to actually — not just the societal, but the economic benefits — of addressing families and their needs because we want people to be here. We love the fact that this is a magnet. The number one destination for college grads right now is not Silicon Valley. It is not out in Dallas, Texas, or out in Salt Lake City, or certainly not Florida — that's another topic. It's New York City. So they want to be here because this is a very cool, hot place to be. We know that — well, it's kind of cool and hot.

But listen, if we don't do certain things like provide housing — another topic Tom we’ll talk about my efforts on housing and the five boroughs — if we don't provide housing that's affordable and we don't give people safe streets and a good quality of life and we don't figure out a way that people can take care of childcare, then we will lose the younger generation. We'll get the really young ones. But when the ones who are having a family, we're losing them. We're going to lose them. And that's the talent that I do not want to see walk out the door because we didn't have the ambition or the ability to solve this problem.

So Josh, I'm looking forward to seeing the white paper. I don't care what paper it’s on, I need to see this. I need to see this and figure out — as you mentioned — the federal, state, local, and private sector solution to this. And that's what is required here. And so I realized when you're living in a city where the average cost of childcare ranges from $26,000 to about $41,000 a year, you live in a neighborhood and the childcare options are $41,000 a year, and you're making 45 yourself or 35 or so, it does not work out. It is just not going to work for you.

So I decided when I first became Governor four years ago, that I was going to invest heavily in childcare. No other governor before me had even talked about it. And we took $7 billion over four years. And what we had to do was to build up the entire childcare ecosystem because it was decimated during the pandemic, decimated. So many facilities were shut down. They didn't make it. They didn't even survive once the pandemic was over, they lost their childcare workers. People went into other professions. It was decimated and you know who was feeling that? Business leaders.

I had business roundtables and I'd have these chief executive officers, mostly male, saying, “We got a real problem.” What's the problem? “The women aren't coming back to work”. Well, why do you think that is? “Well, they're home with the kids.” And I say, what are you doing about that? What have you figured out here? Have you made any accommodations? Are you helping subsidize? Are you finding some extra space in your building, especially those in the suburbs? Are you finding space to put in a childcare center? Like what are you doing to help facilitate this? Because it is having an effect on your bottom line. You're losing your well-trained, dedicated workers.

So I saw this as a challenge, but I knew the first thing I had to do was start building more facilities. And so we've invested this past year, another $150 million to build more childcare centers, to help people renovate their homes if it's a home childcare center, if it's on a college campus — we had them on all the SUNY campuses trying to get them on all the CUNY campuses so students and professors and teachers can have access to this. But we had to build the ecosystem there.

Also workforce retention. We have to pay people better. I mean, these are some of the lowest paid jobs in society and the most important jobs we have in society. It doesn't work.

So, for us to attract people who could be making $20 an hour working at McDonald's to want to go take care of somebody's children, we have to make it worth their while. So, we put $500 million toward workforce retention and training and to up the game of being a childcare provider. So, we had to do that.

We also created a child sponsored childcare program. We split the cost with employers and a lot employers have not taken us up on this. I'm going to encourage you to take a look at this. Again, I was disappointed in how few employers were looking at this. But we can't go it alone. I mean, universal childcare is not something I thought of overnight. I actually, I had thought about it for years and announced in my State of the State address last year that we can get to this place.

But I'm also going to tell you this, it is about $15 billion a year to do statewide, universal, everybody covered statewide, It's about $15 billion. You know how much I have in my state reserves right now for a rainy day? $14 billion. I can't wipe that out.

And I'll also say we are facing the fact that as much as we want to be supportive of all programs, and we will be supportive of this, I also have to plug a lot of holes from Washington. I didn't expect this time last year, I'd have to find $3 billion to stop people from losing Medicaid. We're going to have to figure all this out.

There's so many financial challenges, all the money that Washington is holding back from us. And by the way, we have a President who just said, “If a certain individual gets elected mayor, I'm withholding everything.” It's like, believe me, I'll be taking that one — we'll be taking that fight on as well. So these are some of the headwinds. I'm just trying to give you a reality check here.

I can't just write a check and cover this cost, but I've talked to Zohran Mamdani and others who are thoughtful and want to see a path forward and we will get on a path forward. We absolutely will. We just have to do it over the right timeframe with the right amount of money. And I can know that we have the desire because I have the desire. We will get to that place.

But what does the business community do in the meantime? As I said, I have no trouble going anywhere shaming business leaders. I love business leaders, but I was up, I was asked to go speak, it's like Women's History Day, up at a very large facility in the North Country, about 3,000 employees in a technology space. And they said — I looked out in the room, I was like, I almost, there's always no women in this room. Like you have 3,000 workers and these are good paying jobs and I don't see any women I said. The CEO said, “Well, what do you think we should do?” I said, “Where's your childcare center?” He's like, “What do you mean childcare center?” I said, I guarantee you'll be the most desirable place to work in this entire region. People will be knocking down the doors, men and women, if you offer childcare on site. Think about it. And you know what?

We talked about it in that facility. And the next big one that came along, Micron. Have you heard of Micron coming to New York? Julie Samuels knows, she's here I think. Okay. My technology friends, Micron, is coming. We worked hard to land that. That's 50,000 jobs in Upstate New York that were going to Texas and we brought them back. A hundred billion dollar investment. But do you know what I said to them? We'll give you some help from the state, but you have to abide by the values we have in New York.

First of all, it's going to be all sustainable, clean energy. You're going to do workforce development programs in the city where the jobs are harder to find. You're going to recruit from that area and you're going to build a childcare facility on site. Guess what? They're building that childcare facility on site as we speak. I've toured it.

So, that's where I think the business community can step up as well. And I know the challenges we have, people talk about restrictive zoning. We have restrictive zoning that doesn't allow for beyond first floor childcare centers. Now I'm going to ask our City Council to take a look at that again because think about it, most of these kids they live in NYCHA buildings. They're living in high rise buildings, likely anyhow, a lot of them in the city. And is this really a barrier we need to keep in place? That is the one reason we're having a real problem here. It really is. I think we can break through that. I think we, because if I don't add more capacity, if we don't add more capacity, more spaces, you can say to everybody, “Universal childcare you're covered. Oh, I'm sorry. We don't have a space for the next seven years.” Then we're failing. Then we're failing at what we have to do.

This is where the vision has to be all encompassing just like I did with housing. I had too many vacant commercial office buildings. Guess what? We changed the law in the city that now allows them to convert to residential. What a crazy idea. Why didn't no one think of it before, but now we're having many conversions? Let's look at this the same way. Is this really a smart policy that needs to be in place right now? Because I view that as restricting. It's restricting our ability to build capacity for childcare facilities, which are going to stop our ability to provide real universal childcare.

So, that's the collective thinking I want to go on. And let's take on that challenge, and the business community will be a great partner for us because it is in the business community's interest to have a workforce that is dedicated to you because you're understanding that this brief moment in an employee's lifespan, just those years from birth til they hit school age or preschool age, that's the time that you invest in them. You take care of them. You let them know their value. They're not going to walk out the door. They're not going to walk out there, that's how you build lifers. That's how people want to stay with you and use their talents. And I know the cost of a continual recruitment of new employees to replace, otherwise. You can keep them with you if you understand this time in their lives where they just need a little extra help. We have the capacity to do that. I have the desire to do that, and I know the people in this room know how to make stuff happen. So, let's commit to that as you continue on your conversations and you know I'm there. I'm already having conversations with the likely next Mayor exactly about how to do that. And I think we'll be making some more announcements in January in our State of the State about how that, what that path looks like.

But I thank everyone for caring enough to be sitting in this room today. And again, thank you to Etsy for again, just being so forward thinking and progressive in your values and your thoughts, and those are the kind of thinkers that we need to help us solve this crisis at this time. We'll be a nation leading opportunity to show what business, the private sector, as well as academia, has a role, in my opinion, they should be training more childcare workers, professionalizing, and government — because I'm there.

Thank you very much everybody.