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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

There's hardly any place which is really "friendly" towards professional families with infants. For safety reasons, daycare centers have to maintain staffing ratios so it's always going to be extremely expensive (unless you're poor enough to qualify for subsidies).

As for safety, for some reason those big tech employees keep voting for progressive politicians whose failed policies have ruined their cities. I guess voters are getting what they want?

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1. Seattle is quite safe. Friendliness is different than safety

2. It all comes back to housing density/supply. As you say, daycare costs are dominated by staffing ratios/wages - which are a function of cost of living. The surge of high income earners + housing supply deficit = pricing out daycare workers (and daycares).

Seattle has a higher homicide rate than New York or LA and it is running well above its own historical rate; in 2014, the entirety of King County had fewer homicides than the city of Seattle did in 2024. It is safer than many other US cities, but US cities are quite dangerous by first world standards which is why many people opt to raise kids in suburbia.

The required staffing at daycare isn't driven by "crime safety" but an overprotective sense of protecting kids from themselves and each other. These are the required ratios. As low as 1:4 for < 1.

https://www.childcare.org/ckfinder/userfiles/files/Washingto...

A 4:1 ratio for infants seems quite reasonable and not overprotective. Children that age require a lot of attention. By the time you've fed and changed diapers for 4 babies it's about time to start the cycle again.

Having had kids and cared for them as infants myself, and previously worked in a (very much unlicensed) home-based daycare, the 1:4 ratio for childcare centers and 1:2-1:4 (depending on primary licensee's experience) ratio for home-based daycares for infants are not at all unreasonable.

Yes, most of time that's going to seem excessive -- but it is not a cloud system with on-demand autoscaling, you have to set your capacity by peak demand, not average demand.

I would define Seattle as much more friendly than it is safe — same of other similar cities like San Francisco and Portland.

Somehow most countries in the world can manage it to keep low cost or even free.

Really? Most countries? Do you have a list of those?

Some countries do manage to keep daycare somewhat affordable through huge subsidies (as well as lower wages for the daycare workers). I'm not opposed to increasing subsidies but that has to be balanced against other priorities. Elder care facilities face the same basic economic issue.

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