Estimating Changes in the Supply of and Demand for Child Care in Philadelphia (2020)

In 2014, with support from The William Penn Foundation, Reinvestment Fund conducted an initial analysis of the supply of and demand for child care in Philadelphia to identify areas of the city where targeted investments could help address shortages of high-quality child care. 

Now in its sixth update, Reinvestment Fund’s 2020 childcare analysis provides updated estimates to track the change over time in the supply of, demand for, and shortages in child care. Reinvestment Fund’s Childcare Map is an interactive online tool, www.childcaremap.org, that makes the results of this work accessible to the public at no cost. The tool identifies neighborhoods where high-quality child care is scarce in absolute and relative terms, while also providing actionable information for funders, practitioners, and childcare advocates. 

The 2020 report captures the conditions in the city’s childcare market at a critical time. The data presented in this report captures supply and demand for childcare between January and March of 2020, as the impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic were only just beginning to become apparent. To the best extent possible, the estimates presented in this report represent a snapshot of supply and demand for childcare in the first quarter of 2020, just prior to the onset of the pandemic. Supply estimates presented in this report do not account for mandatory reductions in program capacity or closures that were imposed in response to the pandemic. Similarly, demand estimates do not capture changes in parent preferences that may have occurred when large portions of the region’s workforce experienced employment disruptions or shifted to working from home.