Where are Brooklyn’s daycare deserts? A new map explores

Access is such a deeply complicated thing. A new map from Will Geary offers another data point in analyzing what’s up with our world and how we can improve it.
The map, called Lack of Daycare Capacity in NYC, shows the daycare deficit of each census tract in the city as measured by the capacity of each daycare center in the neighborhood minus the number of children under six years old in that neighborhood.
The map shows the biggest daycare deficits in South Brooklyn, specifically the neighborhoods of Borough Park, Bensonhurst and Bay Ridge. Neighborhoods with the smallest deficit (no Brooklyn neighborhoods have a surplus) were led by Flatbush and Greenpoint, both of which had deficits under 1,000.

Using @schmiani's day care dataset and @CARTO to map the deficit of day care center capacity by neighborhood in NYC https://t.co/qjMFWMDrJz pic.twitter.com/4U9L3jAjpf

— Will Geary (@wgeary) December 10, 2016

Geary is a graduate student at Columbia University working in data science with a focus on transportation. He built the map using Brooklyn-based mapping software platform CARTO.
It should be noted that there are a lot of variables that go into this map that aren’t accounted for. South Williamsburg has large daycare deficits, but it stands to reason that that’s due primarily not to some systemic lack of access to daycare but rather to the fact that the Hasidim have a lot of kids and for the most part their mothers stay home and take care of them. There is likely not an enormous market demand for daycare there.
But childcare is certainly an important and sometimes overlooked part of our economic culture. In places where the price of daycare is high (in part a function of supply and demand) it can present a serious impediment to people working. That this is a problem is evidenced by the fact that there have been attempts at a solution to it. Last year we covered a project by a pair of working moms for pop-up coworking at bars called Workaround. We would expect more like this in the future.