America has a $172 billion child care problem. Investors are overlooking part of the solution

America’s child care crisis costs the economy an estimated $172 billion each year in lost earnings, productivity and tax revenue.

Nearly half of young children in the United States live in communities where licensed child care supply falls far short of demand.

Yet for all the attention paid to what families spend on child care, considerably less attention has been paid to a more basic constraint: In many communities, there simply are not enough classrooms.

The ramifications don’t just stop at the doors of a child care center.

They extend directly into the workforce.

In a national poll conducted for the First Five Years Fund, 59% of part-time or non-working parents said they would return to full-time work if they had access to quality child care at a reasonable cost.

Separate polling found that 52% of voters said they or someone they know had missed a shift or reduced their working hours because of a child care problem.

For employers, those individual decisions add up.

When parents cannot find reliable care, businesses lose available workers, employees miss shifts and experienced professionals scale back careers they might otherwise continue.

That makes America’s child care crisis more than an affordability problem.

It is also a supply problem.

After years spent helping early education operators find and build the facilities they need to grow, I have had a front-row seat to a strange contradiction: Operators can have families waiting for seats and still struggle to find the real estate and capital necessary to open another school.

I also have a financial interest in this issue.

Fortec develops and invests in early education real estate and manages a fund that invests in the sector.