FAMILY & CHILDCARE

Over the preceding few decades, it has become increasingly difficult to raise a family in Los Angeles. LAUSD's enrollment decline reflects the deeper affordability crisis across the city. Families are leaving in droves because rent is too high, childcare is prohibitively expensive, and the basic infrastructure and services they count on for their quality of life are treated as an afterthought. No one should be forced to choose between the city they love and the family they want to build.

A home you can afford

For most families in LA, rent is their single-largest expense, and owning a home feels not only out of reach, but like an outright impossibility. As mayor, Nithya will triple housing construction in Los Angeles, with a shot clock on permits approvals to minimize needless delays. We will allow duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes near transit to allow families to find the housing that best suits their needs and their budget. We will work with the state on the urgent reforms necessary to make it easier to build for-sale condos as well as ADUs as starter homes.

We will create an Office of Tenant Protections to enforce the Rent Stabilization Ordinance, the Just Cause for Eviction Ordinance, and the Tenant Anti-Harassment Ordinance, with case management support and legal representation for eligible renters. We will strengthen access to rental assistance for families with children

Read our full housing policy here.

Read our full protecting renters policy here.

Safety you can trust

Safety starts with the commute to school. We will expand Safe Routes to School to every neighborhood, require traffic calming around every elementary and middle school, install pedestrian warning lights at crosswalks near schools, and fund crossing guards at every high-traffic school intersection. We will recommit the City to Vision Zero—the global initiative to eliminate all traffic fatalities and severe injuries—by treating it as a citywide operating mandate and creating a dedicated Vision Zero Director in the Mayor's Office. Traffic crashes are a leading cause of death for children in Los Angeles, and we can never accept that as part of our city’s reality.

Families need to know that when they call 911, the right help will arrive quickly. Today LAPD response times vary from neighborhood to neighborhood, and people calling about a non-emergency can wait as long as an hour for someone to answer. We will work with LAPD on deployment and increase civilian staffing so more sworn officers are in the field and focused on serious and violent crime. We will also build unarmed crisis response into 911 dispatch citywide, so trained responders handle mental health and substance use calls. Every family should feel safe at home, walking in their neighborhood at night, and riding transit.

We have announced a plan to cut encampments in half by the 2028 Olympics by moving people into permanent housing with multi-year vouchers, rather than simply shuffling encampments from one neighborhood to the next. No child should have to walk past an encampment to get to school, and no one should be sleeping on the streets of Los Angeles at all. In Nithya's district, a dedicated homelessness team that tracks every encampment and matches people to beds cut street homelessness by 49% last year even as it rose nearly 8% citywide. Her plan takes that approach citywide and targets shelter resources at sensitive areas first: the blocks around schools, parks, and the places where families play and gather. By the end of her first term, Nithya has pledged to address every tent and encampment in the city.

To proactively address organized crime and neighborhood violence, Nithya will proactively fund community violence intervention at scale, with multi-year contracts in the neighborhoods that need it most. She will also make sure the City shows up with the basics that make a neighborhood feel safe, including working streetlights, clean sidewalks, and well-maintained parks.

Finally, since June of last year, ordinary people have been terrorized across the city by masked federal agents. No one in Los Angeles should be afraid to go to work or drop their kids off at school. We will audit LAPD's cooperation with ICE, direct LAPD to strictly enforce the City's sanctuary policy, and fund legal defense and rapid response for families facing deportation.

Read our full public safety policy here.

Read our full transportation and street safety policy here.

Read our full sanctuary policy here.

Parks and services you can count on

Los Angeles ranked 93rd out of 100 large cities in the Trust for Public Land's 2026 park rankings, its seventh straight year of decline. One million Angelenos do not have a park within a 10-minute walk of home. That’s completely unacceptable.

Every kid should have a safe, open place to play. The fastest way to add park space is to open the land we already own. LAUSD is the largest landowner in the County, and most of its playgrounds, fields, and courts sit locked behind fences when school isn’t in session. A Community School Park opens those spaces to the neighborhood during non-school hours, free of charge. The City ran four of them before COVID shut the program down. In 2023 Nithya wrote the motion to revive that program and direct Recreation and Parks to negotiate a new agreement with LAUSD. Ten Community School Parks opened the following year. But right now, these parks are open only on weekends from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and close over school breaks. We will open them after school, in the evenings, and all summer, when families can actually use them. Nithya will expand community school parks citywide, opening 100 school grounds to the neighborhood after hours, on weekends, and in the summer. This would increase the percentage of Angelenos living within a half-mile of a park from 62% to 80%. Nithya also supports the November ballot measure to double the charter minimum allocation for the parks budget over the next 10 years, but has committed to increasing the funding for parks with or without a charter mandate.

We will plant 100,000 street trees and build 600 bus shelters by the 2028 Games, so that a walk to school or a wait for the bus with a stroller is not only shaded, it provides more natural beauty and cleaner air. We will increase recreation center hours that were cut during COVID and never fully restored, while also expanding after-school and summer programming.

Read our full parks and climate policy here.

Childcare

The problem

Child care is essential infrastructure. Just like roads, bridges, and bus stops, parents need care for their children in order to get to work every day. But across LA County, only 7 percent of working parents with infants and toddlers have access to licensed care. That scarcity is inextricably linked to the affordability crisis: when there are not enough child care slots to begin with, finding an affordable option becomes nearly impossible. The median price of center care for one infant is about $19,000 a year, almost a quarter of the median Los Angeles household income.

Providers are struggling too. Infants and toddlers require more staff for fewer children, so programs have long relied on tuition from families of 4-year-olds to stay open. As free public transitional kindergarten (TK) expanded, those 4-year-olds left. Free public TK is a huge step forward; now we must find a funding solution to close the gap for providers of care for children under 4. A recent study found that 167 preschools in LA County closed between 2020 and 2024, a loss of 12,000 seats. We have built a child care system that is both too expensive for parents and unsustainable for providers.

Los Angeles Public Schools are not part of the Mayor’s jurisdiction , and universal child care is not something we can achieve in isolation at the city level. A feat of that magnitude will necessitate funding and policy changes at the state and federal level. Nonetheless, there is a lot we can do in LA. We will work with the County, which leads child care planning for the region, and with LAUSD. As mayor, Nithya will use the tools the City controls to make it easier for child care providers to open, reimagine City buildings and recreation centers to create more child care capacity, and help families find the care that they need and receive any subsidies for which they qualify.

Our plan

Make it easier to open and expand child care

Eliminate the zoning barriers that keep child care centers from opening. Child care providers still face discretionary zoning approvals simply to open a center, even in neighborhoods where more care centers are desperately needed. We will remove unnecessary conditional use permits for child care centers, establish clear by-right zoning wherever appropriate under state law, and publish a simple citywide guide showing providers exactly where and how they can open.
Fast-track permits for new child care facilities by requiring child care center applications to be reviewed concurrently by City Planning, LADBS, LAFD, and other relevant departments, rather than moving sequentially from one agency to the next, and ensure timelines for each step of the process.
Reduce or eliminate permitting costs for new and expanding child care centers by establishing a comprehensive fee waiver program that covers various application and clearance fees.

Reimagine city assets to create additional child-care capacity

Identify and offer low-cost or no-cost leases on City-owned and City-supported buildings that can host licensed child care providers for operators interested in renovating the property to accommodate child care, and partner with LAUSD to do the same in their properties.
Make it easier to put City property to productive public use. We will create a clear, expedited pathway for child-care and other community-serving operators to lease and renew leases on suitable City properties, with standardized agreements, coordinated legal and departmental review, and clear timelines. City assets should not sit underused because navigating City Hall is harder than delivering the public service itself.
Restore and expand the licensed child care network through the Department of Recreation and Parks. In 2021 the City used one-time federal relief funding to open ten child care centers at City recreation centers, but when that funding expired, most were transitioned to nonprofit operators. The City has over 100 recreation centers—we should be using that space to increase our childcare infrastructure. We will pursue innovative funding models and public-private partnerships to open more child care centers, starting in the neighborhoods with the fewest licensed slots.
Expand affordable summer, holiday, and school-break programming at Recreation and Parks facilities, prioritizing neighborhoods with the greatest child care shortages and unmet demand.
Incentivize employers to invest in neighborhood child care facilities by increasing awareness of the federal tax incentive, Section 45F, for qualifying expenditures such as contracting with a qualified child care facility to provide child care to the employer's employees.
Enhance workforce recruitment efforts by investing in apprenticeships, especially at City-operated and City-funded child care centers, and helping folks already providing informal care to get licensed so that lack of adequate staffing does not become the bottleneck to reopening or expanding centers.

Make child care easier to find and easier to afford.

Build a screening tool that tells families which state and federal child care programs they qualify for and guides them through enrollment. Programs like CalWORKs child care, the Alternative Payment Program, General Child Care and Development, and California State Preschool already exist — we will create a simple, multi-lingual tool for families to determine eligibility, find the best fit, and apply.
Strengthen and integrate existing child-care navigation infrastructure. Partner with LA County and Resource & Referral agencies to improve the digital experience for families seeking care. Child-care directories should be searchable by neighborhood, operating hours, age group, and language and should feature real-time availability so parents aren't piecing together information from outdated databases
Advocate for universal childcare at the state level. Work with labor partners, providers, and families towards a system where providers are fully funded for the cost of delivering care through public investments.
Create a seamless, no-wrong door experience for families. Convene LAUSD and LA County to build a coordinated early childhood strategy so families experience one connected network of support from infancy through school entry, regardless of which agency or program they encounter first.