The argument that childcare is economic infrastructure — not a social cost — has been made by researchers and advocates for decades. The logic is simple: when childcare is unaffordable or unavailable, working-age adults, disproportionately women, cannot participate in the workforce. Their skills leave the local labour market. Employers cannot fill roles. Tax revenues fall. Public services thin out. The town or city becomes less functional and less attractive to the next wave of working-age adults. It is a self-reinforcing decline.
New Mexico has tested the inverse. By making childcare universally free — funded through the state's oil revenue and administered through a network of providers — it has created a condition that makes the state materially more attractive to families weighing relocation decisions and to employers weighing workforce availability. The policy has been described by state officials as putting families at the centre of economic policymaking. That framing, however obvious it sounds, represents a genuine shift from treating childcare as welfare to treating it as competitive infrastructure.
The replication wave
New York City is now rolling out a citywide universal childcare programme. Massachusetts is targeting its Gateway Cities — the same post-industrial towns referenced in the Fitchburg story — with specific childcare investment as part of workforce development packages. These are not coincidental. They reflect a growing consensus that childcare availability is a measurable variable in location decisions, both for families and for the businesses that employ them.
The evidence from New Mexico is still early-stage, but the directional signals are clear: workforce participation among parents of young children is up; inward migration of working-age families has increased; and employer surveys cite childcare availability as a factor in site selection. None of this is yet at the scale of a controlled experiment. But the pattern is consistent with the theory.
The Institute for Women's Policy Research publishes regular analysis of childcare as economic policy, including state-by-state modelling of the workforce participation effects of subsidised provision. Their work is the most rigorous available on the economic case for childcare investment.
IWPR research →What this means for UK place strategy
UK planning policy and economic development strategy do not currently treat childcare availability as a place competitiveness variable. It sits in children's services budgets, managed separately from economic development, inward investment and housing. That separation means the connection between childcare provision and economic outcomes is rarely made explicitly in investment cases or local economic strategies.
The New Mexico model suggests a different framing. If a town or city can demonstrate that childcare is affordable and available — whether through local authority provision, employer partnership, or developer contribution — that becomes a measurable competitive advantage in the competition for working-age talent. It is particularly relevant for secondary towns trying to attract families from larger cities: affordable housing is the pull, but childcare availability is often the deciding factor for families with young children.
This is territory that sits between the planning system, the education system and economic development policy. Which means it currently belongs to nobody. The places that will benefit most from the New Mexico lesson are the ones that decide it belongs to them.
Nick Bolton is Managing Director of Positive Places Ltd. Sticky Places is published fortnightly. Subscribe here.