COMING SOON
Childcare Desert Map
This map is the product of a two-year long effort to contact every state agency with childcare licensing data in the United States to collect a comprehensive list of every childcare provider and relevant business information including their address, sector (Head Start, Family Day Home, Childcare, Pre-K), capacity, ages of children served, and quality. This is an active collection, with 37 states currently reporting. As part of this project, I am also actively working on scraping state websites on a monthly basis. July 2024 marked 1 year of monthly data retrieval for a total of 37 states. I have converted both the historical and real-time childcare provider-level into panels and am currently working on harmonizing variables and geocoding. The product of this effort will be used to 1) check agreement with official the Census’ childcare industry establishment records, 2) provide insights into the changing dynamics of childcare firms over time, and 3) provide a real-time, publicly available resource for researchers and policymakers to examine a historically underreported on and fragmented industry.