Daycare in NYC

According to OpenData’s daycare inspection dataset, there are 2,948 daycare providers in NYC. That includes infant daycares, school based programs, and camps. Brooklyn has the lionshare of daycare centers - 1,255, or roughly 43% of all the daycare centers, with Manhattan coming in second (732, or 24%), and The Bronx third (430, or 14%).

Here is how the daycare centers are distributed around the city:

What is the best neighborhood to have a new baby in?

If you are interested in daycare, then it looks like you should be headed to Dumbo. The top five neighborhoods for the availability of infant daycare, controlling for population, are:

Neighborhood People per Infant Daycare DUMBO-Vinegar Hill-Downtown Brooklyn-Boerum Hill 3450 Midtown-Midtown South 4090 Battery Park City-Lower Manhattan 4411 Prospect Heights 4962 Clinton Hill 4970

This mostly correlates with stroller sightings around those neighborhoods (though Midtown, really?).

Where to go to camp?

Not surprisingly, camps look to be clustered around parks. The top neighborhoods with camps are:

Neighborhood Number of Camps Park Slope-Gowanus 24 East New York 12 Upper East Side-Carnegie Hill 11 East Harlem South 11 Central Harlem North-Polo Grounds 11

Park Slope has double the next most, but if you have visited Prospect Park in the summer this will not surprise you.

Where should there by more daycare centers?

Here is the plot of daycare centers throughout the city, controlling for population:

Notice anything? Looks like Queens is the outlier. Either there is a massive shortage of daycare centers in Queens, or daycare centers there are systemically under reported.

If we remove Queens from the data, the distribution looks more like this:

Looks like the neighborhoods with the lowest concentration of daycare centers are mostly in the Bronx. Here are the top five:

Neighborhood Borough People per Daycare Arden Heights Staten Island 12619 West Farms-Bronx River The Bronx 11670 Stuyvesant Town-Cooper Village Manhattan 10525 Parkchester The Bronx 9940 Allerton-Pelham Gardens The Bronx 9634

Presumably StuyTown is because of the high concentration of residential within that neighborhood. Still, the surrounding areas do not make up for it - perhaps a good place to start a daycare center?