Erin Moriarty-Siler and her husband, Sean, never planned on leaving Denver.
The couple, both 36, met as freshmen at the University of Colorado Boulder and later moved to the city, where they had their daughter, Mo. Three years and more than $100,000 in childcare costs later, the family feels it has no choice but to call it quits on the Mile High City.
The couple has put their Berkeley home on the market. Once it sells, they plan to move to Moriarty-Siler’s hometown of Kansas City, where the cost of living is lower.
“There was never a scenario in our head where we thought we wouldn’t be here, because we’ve lived here for so long and we love it,” Moriarty-Siler said. “But parenthood is really hard, and the financial aspect makes it even harder.”
Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, who just launched his reelection campaign, fears that without intervention, many more families will make this same choice. Eventually, the high costs of raising a child could put Denver in a class with cities that families have begun to abandon, like San Francisco.
His solution — if voters give him a second term — is to bring “childcare for all” to the city by 2031. Childcare experts say that while no other city in the country has achieved that ambitious goal, Denver — which has an abundance of early childhood education specialists and new political momentum — may be well positioned to become one of the first.
But it’s going to be an uphill battle.
The city’s ongoing budget constraints, the challenge of maintaining a stable caregiver workforce and a shifting political landscape will give Johnston and his team plenty of roadblocks to overcome.
“It’s not surprising to see the mayor take on something that might be a bigger-than-typical bite for a city. But it is going to be very difficult,” said Robin Kniech, who served as an at-large City Council member from 2011 to 2023. “There aren’t a lot of precedents for exactly the scale he’s proposing.”
Assuming that the mayor’s team secures the potentially massive new funding to make a childcare program possible, the difficulties won’t end there. Officials will then have to build an accessible, financially sustainable infrastructure, all while being flexible enough to respond to the realities and challenges that come with creating a never-before-seen system.
A potential starting point is the city’s preschool program for 4-year-olds and some 3-year-olds, which is now two decades old. But the city would still have to fill a massive gap in existing childcare for younger children.
Denver has nearly 31,000 children below the age of 4, which is the target group for the new policy, according to the state demographer’s office. Meanwhile, childcare centers have only about 5,000 spots and 986 caregivers for that age group, city and state data show.
And each year, more than 8,000 new Denverites are born.
The available childcare spots that do exist are quite expensive. The federal government defines childcare as being affordable if a family spends no more than 7% of its annual income on tuition. In Denver, where infant care in a center costs an average $25,000 per year, that means a family with one child would need to make more than $350,000 for such a cost to be affordable, according to data provided by the Denver Office of Children’s Affairs.
The Moriarty-Siler family, which doesn’t have any relatives nearby, wasn’t able to secure one of those childcare spots for Mo, now 3.
After nearly a dozen childcare facilities didn’t respond to the couple’s applications — which cost at least $100 each to submit — they resorted to using a nanny-share service. The cost to pay that nanny, including paid sick leave and vacation time, amounted to more than $36,000 per year for the past three years for the Moriarty-Silers. Even as Mo approaches preschool age, they worry other inflated child-raising costs in Denver will add up.
“We are incredibly privileged. We have great jobs. Our families have been able to (come) help us if we needed them,” Moriarty-Siler said. “Constantly, my husband and I talk to each other about if we’re struggling, I can’t even imagine what other people are going through.”
Local demographic data show that many families in Denver are facing that hardship, or choosing not to have children at all. Birth rates have steadily declined over the past decade, and the city’s overall population has begun to shrink. Several Denver parents told The Denver Post in interviews for this story that daycare costs are one of the top factors in determining whether they can afford to have more children, purchase a car, pay for groceries — and, ultimately, whether they can remain in the city at all.
How exactly the city would help keep them in Denver is still unclear. While a task force Johnston formed in recent months is still working on defining what childcare for all would mean in the city, the mayor told The Post that it wouldn’t necessarily mean free childcare.
“We think of it as childcare that everyone can afford, that’s accessible and high quality,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that everyone would pay $0, but it does mean that people would pay what they can afford to pay.”
Johnston points to the experiences of families like the Moriarty-Silers when he thinks about the importance of launching a program.
“We want Denver to be a dynamic, world-class city, but (also) a place where you can still afford to raise kids at any income level,” he said. “I think that’s what’s at risk if we don’t figure that out.”
How will Denver pay for the program?
The grand vision comes as Denver’s budget continues to wobble in the post-pandemic era. But even in its strongest years, the city would almost certainly need a new cash infusion to pay for a “childcare for all” structure.
“There’s no planet on which Denver could do this with existing resources,” said Olivia Allen, the co-founder of the Children’s Funding Project, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that helps government agencies develop financing plans to expand childcare. The organization recently gave a presentation to Johnston’s task force.
While it’s impossible to precisely estimate the cost of a system before officials decide its parameters, any version of universal childcare would cost somewhere in the hundreds of millions of dollars, Allen said.
That’s partly because the cost of childcare for the youngest children is also the most expensive.
The ratio of infants and younger toddlers to teachers and other caregivers has to be much lower than for older children, who can perform some tasks on their own. That high demand for caregivers quickly increases costs.
Providing care for more children also will likely mean a need for more physical spaces and a new administrative system to connect families to the care.
The program will be more or less expensive depending on how the city chooses to subsidize it. A theoretical program could give dollars to parents, to childcare providers, to the network of friends and family members who help provide childcare — or some combination of the three. The cost will also depend on which income levels qualify for aid.
The Denver Preschool Program, which is supported by a city sales tax, now provides support on top of what families receive from the state’s universal preschool program. It provides assistance to families at any income level, based on a sliding scale, with up to 100% of costs subsidized for some families. The organization pays tuition credits directly to the school a family chooses. The most common tuition credit given is $871 per month, according to the DPP’s 2025 impact report.
That overall design costs about $32 million per year, said Elsa Holguin, its president and CEO.
Launching a similar childcare system “is going to take substantial investment,” said Holguin, who is on the mayor’s task force. “I am not going to lie and say this is going to be a little bit of money.”
Building the new program will demand similar resources and time that it once took to create the K-12 public education system, “but it’s even more expensive,” Holguin said, pointing to the need for more teachers per child.
But the eye-popping price tag may become more digestible with help from the state or federal governments.
Two statewide measures on the November ballot, if passed by voters, would provide new dollars to support childcare. Amendment 87, which would change Colorado from a flat state income tax to a graduated tax structure, would raise taxes significantly on higher earners, with some of the money potentially going to support childcare. And an education funding proposal called Proposition NN would allow Colorado to keep money it otherwise would have to refund, with the state setting aside some of those dollars to support childcare.
Denver, which has an effective sales tax rate of 9.15%, also may need to ask voters to either create a new designated funding stream or swap out an existing one to support the initiative. Holguin said the goal would be for a question to appear on the 2028 ballot.
Kniech said that if a ballot question is the path the city takes, it would make sense for officials to wait until an even-numbered election year, when turnout typically is higher.
“Denver voters have been enormously generous, including stepping into areas that are not traditionally the city’s role. … But we’re in pretty unprecedented times in terms of cost of living,” Kniech said about the prospect.
Members of Johnston’s team have said they haven’t decided whether they will pursue a ballot initiative and that they will first explore all available funding sources. Johnston said he wanted to begin developing the funding plan in spring or summer of next year.
“We have to make sure that we’re asking all of the right questions, that we’re looking in all of the right places before we were to ever say that the only way to solve this problem is by going back to the voters,” said Jess Ridgway, the executive director of the Office of Children’s Affairs. “The goal is to ensure that there is no stone left unturned.”
Building political will
Denver’s goal of bringing universal childcare to the city comes amid a wave of interest in the policy nationally — including in Colorado’s backyard.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who appeared in a photo with Johnston in one of the Denver mayor’s recent fundraising emails, also campaigned on the idea in his 2025 election.
Johnston’s announcement that he would pursue the policy came just weeks after Denver made national news when voters chose Melat Kiros as the Democratic nominee to represent Colorado’s 1st Congressional District over longtime incumbent U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette. Kiros also focused on universal childcare in her pitch to voters.
And it comes as New Mexico in the past year became the first state to offer universal childcare by removing income caps on an existing assistance program for families. That program draws heavily on large state funds, including one that takes in oil and gas taxes and royalties, according to the Fiscal Policy Institute. But recent news reports say rising inflation could trigger the charging of co-payments to families under state law.
To continue pursuing the idea for Denver, Johnston will first have to win his own reelection next spring, when he’s likely to face several challengers. If he does clear that hurdle, he’s likely to need the support of the City Council to make the childcare policy a reality, Kniech said.
“We’ve seen in the past — the mayor (has) struggled to really form deep partnerships on initiatives that really require a lot of council support,” she said, pointing to Johnston’s failed affordable housing tax measure from 2024. “It’s a money challenge, but it’s more than that. It’s a political challenge.”
She added that it appeared to be a good sign and a “lesson learned” that the mayor started the process this time by assembling a task force of experts.
“I don’t think five years is an unrealistic timeline, but it assumes passage of the money that’s needed to pay for it,” she said.
In the pursuit of a possible ballot initiative, Holguin hopes the city will remember what it learned from creating the Denver Preschool Program.
The ballot initiative that added a new 0.15% sales tax for that program narrowly passed in 2006 after two similar measures had failed. Holguin said the biggest takeaway was that the community wanted more transparency for how the program would use the dollars.
“I think we need, from the very get-go, to say how we’re going to ensure that we’re accountable for every penny that comes into the system,” she said.
One thing the council, the mayor’s office and Denver voters may have to contend with is that it’s likely the city will have to break its childcare efforts into digestible chunks, rather than bringing the whole system together at once.
Allen, with the Children’s Funding Project, says her “worst nightmare” is that in striving for a perfect universal childcare system, some cities will lose sight of just making progress.
“There is no community in the country that has achieved childcare for all,” Allen said. “The communities in the country that have achieved significant childcare progress are communities that have taken (small) bites of the apple.”
Johnston agrees the goal is ambitious, but he stops short of calling it a moonshot.
“I think it is a very big swing,” Johnston said. “I don’t think it’s impossible. And we think if we don’t solve it in some way, it’s going to be very hard for families.”
A stable workforce
Policy experts and the mayor’s office agree on at least one thing: The city will need a stable childcare workforce to make the new policy possible.
Denver’s massive gap in the number of childcare providers available, compared to the number of children living in the city, means that attracting caregivers and paying them a living wage will be one of the program’s biggest challenges.
“If you do this and teachers are still making poverty wages, your system is eventually going to fall apart again,” said Sara Mickelson, an early childhood policy expert who helped stand up New Mexico’s universal childcare system.
One option that the task force is considering is expanding the Denver Preschool Program to include children from newborns to 4 years old. That would still be a costly and complicated endeavor, however, because of how few caregivers work in the city now and the lower child-teacher ratio for the care of young children. The Colorado Department of Early Childhood requires at least one caregiver for every five infants, and the ratio is relaxed only slightly as children age.
That tension is one of the main reasons childcare has become so expensive in many cities, including Denver, Johnston said.
“The root problem is the overlap of how much you can pay the childcare providers — who you want to pay a strong wage to attract good talent — (and) how many kids you have in the room, and then what it costs a parent,” Johnston said. “People try to cut corners to make the math work.”
To solve that equation, providers have historically offered lower pay, resulting in less-qualified employees and higher turnover among caregivers. The median pay for early childcare education workers in Colorado is $18.50 per hour, while the lowest living wage in the state is estimated to be $26 per hour, according to the Colorado Department of Early Childhood.
Nearly half of the state’s early childcare education workers receive some kind of public assistance, including food stamps or Medicaid, according to an essay published by two public health academics from CU’s Anschutz Medical Campus.
The task force is also considering ways to support other types of childcare, beyond facility-based options, including the caregiving that relatives and friends often do. That group, called the “friends and family network,” or FFN, makes up a significant portion of the caregiving in the city, Ridgway said.
“People don’t understand that there is more than one way to deliver high-quality services,” she said. “Families proactively choose that (help from friends and family) because of the type of culturally responsive, quality care their children receive.”
In the next few weeks, the task force Johnston assembled plans to release a summary of what its members learned during a two-month listening tour in the city. Then the group will begin meeting to decide on which policy proposals to recommend to the mayor by its April deadline.
By fall 2027, one or even multiple pilot programs are set to begin, if all goes according to plan.
Between now and then, Coloradans will elect a new governor and most members of the state legislature. Denver will decide whether to keep Johnston as mayor. Voters across the country will determine the makeup of Congress.
As Allen with the Children’s Fundraising Project sees it, Denver may then be in a position to forge into the new policy frontier.
“You have some of the country’s leading experts in early childhood policy living in Denver,” she said. “There’s a world in which the dominoes in the next 10 years fall in a way that makes this possible.”
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