But cities can ditch these arbitrary rules and help families out of the daycare desert.
Children can't drive cars. Yet across Cascadia, onerous rules defining how much parking new daycares must provide on-site are blocking those wee non-drivers - and their families - from the care they need. Even as the majority of families live in childcare deserts, jurisdictions that enforce mandatory parking minimums make it difficult or impossible to permit new daycares if the sites are unable to meet that arbitrary asphalt standard, worsening the shortage.
Dana Christiansen has experienced this conflict firsthand. In 2023, she hoped to open a new daycare center for 100 children at a site she found in Clark County, Washington, near Ridgefield. After her offer for the property was accepted, she started working with an architect.
"We were having a hard time getting the building situated with the amount of playground that we require,"
Christiansen said.
"But parking is what killed it."
Christiansen is not a novice to the industry: she serves on the board of the Washington Childcare Center Association and has been a daycare owner for 24 years. But her expertise counted for nothing against the Clark County legal mandate of 2 parking spaces for every employee on the largest shift. For the 16 employees she estimated would be there at any given time, 32 parking spaces were required.
"Why do we need that many parking spaces?"
she lamented. Her center down the road in Vancouver runs fine with 8, she said.
But the law was the law, so Christiansen and her architect struggled to fit all the spaces in. They had found room for 29 spaces when the city reminded them of landscape islands, a design feature required for large parking lots to lessen their environmental impact. The additional space for those islands was the last straw that broke the project camel's back. Christiansen had to abandon her plans, and local families lost needed childcare as a result.
Death by a thousand regulations
This area of Clark County is considered a childcare desert, where there are at least three children under the age of five for each licensed childcare slot. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the shortage has deepened. At the end of 2023, the county still had 700 fewer daycare spots than were available in 2019.
Childcare scarcity is a common experience for parents in the Evergreen State. Sixty-three percent of Washington families live in a childcare desert, the sixth worst in the United States. The lack of access was estimated to cost $6.9 billion to Washington's economy in 2023.
There is no single explanation for how childcare got into such a crisis, and no single solution to fix it. Childcare is a notoriously tough business to balance economically, resulting in high costs for families and low wages for workers. State interventions to increase access to daycares typically involve subsidies, both to childcare centers and to families.
Additional funding isn't a cure-all, though.
"Our issues are a mile long,"
explained Christiansen. Back in the '90s, she recalled, the licensing requirements for childcare centers were 45 pages long. Now, it's 450 pages.
"The rules just keep coming,"
she said.
"We are one hundred precent over-regulated."
At the top of her list are new educational requirements for childcare providers. Even people currently operating and childcare programs must obtain new certifications by 2026 to retain their positions.
"We're not against higher education, but there's no vehicle to pay our teachers higher wages."
said Christiansen.
"It's a real crisis we have on our hands."
Trying to find an adequate site for a childcare facility is a whole other can of worms. Many cities restrict commercial daycares to small areas of town or force operators to obtain a conditional use permit - a time-consuming process ending in a committee vote. When Lakewood, Washington, updated its zoning code in 2023, daycare centers went from being allowed by right on just 4 percent of city l...
