Takeaways
- Families across Cascadia live in “childcare deserts,” defined as places where there are at least three children under the age of five per one licensed childcare slot.
- Unfortunately, parking mandates—the onerous, arbitrary rules defining how much parking a facility must provide on-site—make the childcare shortage worse. In cities and towns where land is scarce and expensive, people proposing new daycare centers must sacrifice play area and facility square footage for parking spots, reducing the number of children they can care for and families they can serve—or forcing them to cancel new daycare center plans altogether.
- Some towns and cities, like Sandy, Oregon, have taken note, and reduced or eliminated parking mandates, including for childcare centers. These places have seen a welcome influx of new daycare centers to serve local families and can serve as a model for other jurisdictions throughout the region.
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 land to 52 percent. A state bill that would have similarly legalized daycare in more zones failed in 2024.
“The average Washington jurisdiction requires more space dedicated to parking cars than to play areas.“
Washington state also requires childcare facilities to have outdoor play areas of at least 75 square feet per child. Local governments heap parking mandates on top of that, making it even harder to find a site that works. A Sightline analysis found that the average Washington jurisdiction required 87 square feet of parking per child. The two regulations combined mean that to provide care for 50 children, a childcare center would need 8,100 square feet of outdoor area, for play and parking, apart from the actual building. There simply aren’t many land parcels in Washington cities that have that surplus of space.
Parking mandates around Washington
How many parking spaces does a daycare need? It depends. Parking mandates vary from one city to the next. They are commonly based on the number of employees, the number of children, the area of the building, or some combination of all those factors. Land-intensive requirements for pavement can make sites infeasible to build on or restrict facilities’ capacity to the point where they are no longer financially viable.
Below is a sampling of parking mandates for daycares in Washington state:
| Parking Mandates for Commercial Daycares in Washington | |
| Jurisdiction | Parking Mandate |
| Edmonds | 1 space per 300 square feet of facility OR 1 per employee + 1 per 5 students, whichever is greater |
| Whatcom County | 2 per classroom; minimum of 6 |
| Wenatchee | 1 per employee + 3 drop-off spaces per 12 children |
| Issaquah | 2.45 spaces per 1,000 square feet of facility |
| Sea Tac | 2 per facility + 1 per employee + 1 load/unload space per 10 children |
Requirements based on staff levels pose an additional barrier to infant care. At a one-parking-space-per-employee ratio, babies require roughly four times as much pavement as school-age children.
After mandates end, a new daycare opens
Cities that have reformed their parking rules are already seeing success with new daycares opening. After being briefed with information about their own daycare shortage, the city of Sandy, Oregon, voted in 2020 to eliminate parking mandates downtown and reduce them everywhere for daycares. The situation was dire: for the 1,400 children under the age of five living in Sandy, the city only had 162 childcare spots for preschoolers and 6 spots for children in the infant to toddler range.
“High parking mandates block daycares from opening. Cities with fully flexible parking see an increase in daycares after reform.“
“City Council and staff are committed to removing municipal code barriers and creating financial incentive programs for childcare providers,” City Development Services Director Kelly O’Neill told the Sandy Post. “Modifying the city parking standards is the first step in the process of removing code barriers.”
At the same time code changes were being discussed at city hall, Sandy locals Julie Littlepage and her daughter Amie Versaw were struggling to find an adequate building for their growing childcare business. Between issues with landlords and simply outgrowing their space, Littlepage had changed locations twice in the last decade. After their new downtown location fell through due to water issues in the building, a local developer reached out and offered to build a location just for them.
The two-story building now home to Grandma’s House & Preschool would have been impossible to build before the code change. The small site has no off-street parking at all, with its entire backyard dedicated to outdoor play. But it now has capacity for 56 children, more than double the capacity of its last location. “I feel like we’re actually helping the city now,” said Versaw. At the time of our interview, the daycare had worked through its waitlist and even had a few openings left.
Grandma’s House isn’t the only new daycare to benefit from the parking reform in Sandy. Just last month, the city received another application for a daycare downtown. The building doesn’t have any off-street parking currently, and no spaces are planned for the remodel, saving the project from costly paving and stormwater expenses. Thanks in part to the zoning reform, the city will add another 63 childcare slots available for working families.
Staffers at Oregon’s Department of Land Conservation and Development had Sandy’s success in mind when they added childcare facilities to the list of equity uses exempt from local parking mandates. Those rules went into effect in 2023 and apply to the state’s eight metro areas, which roughly two of every three Oregonians call home. Other states looking to increase childcare options should consider doing the same. Removing parking mandates won’t remove every obstacle to new childcare services, but it’s a no-cost solution that can make an immediate difference for families across Cascadia.
