Mayor Zohran Mamdani will add another 1,000 free preschool seats for New York City’s 3-year-olds this fall in an effort to alleviate seat shortages in some areas and ensure children aren’t assigned to locations far from their homes.

The Mamdani administration said the new seats for the city’s popular 3-K program will be spread across 56 ZIP codes that include a mix of socioeconomically diverse neighborhoods, such as Park Slope, Canarsie, East Elmhurst and Parkchester.

The expansion will also reach Staten Island, after the borough was excluded from the city’s initial list of neighborhoods that will launch free care for 2,000 2-year-olds this fall.

The cost of child care across the five boroughs averages about $20,000 a year and has been driving young families who can’t afford to pay out of the city. While the city offers free care for 3- and 4-year-olds through its 3-K and pre-K programs, parents are often waitlisted for care or assigned to child care locations miles away from their homes. Meanwhile, some neighborhoods are sitting with empty seats.

“A 3-year-old can’t take themselves to class 3 miles away and a working parent shouldn’t have to commute from Parkchester to Park Slope just to find child care,” Mamdani said in a social media post on Monday.

The New York Times first reported the addition of new seats.

Mamdani pledged to make child care free and universal during his mayoral campaign. Shortly after taking office, he announced a plan to expand the city’s free preschool program to 2-year-olds. Gov. Kathy Hochul has vowed to fund the first two years of the program and promised another $100 million toward 3-K after years of cuts under the Adams administration.

Mamdani in recent weeks has been pushing hard to encourage more families to enroll in the city’s 3-K and pre-K programs. He said getting names in the system will help his administration understand where the city needs to create more seats and to make sure all families know what resources are available to them. The city said enrollment numbers are still being crunched.

City officials said that as the new 3-K seats are confirmed, they will notify families in those neighborhoods. The city’s free 3-K program covers six hours of care throughout the school year from September to June. Families can pay out of pocket for additional extended hours if the program offers it.

The 3-K and pre-K programs are offered inside schools, centers and family child care providers who care for children in their home. But family providers, who are overwhelmingly women of color, were largely left out of 3-K and pre-K expansion efforts, which destabilized their businesses and plummeted enrollment.

It’s not clear whether the additional 3-K seats will include more family providers, who say they need to be part of the mayor’s universal child care plans or will be forced to close their doors.

City officials said potential provider capacity as well as previous enrollment data and early numbers of 3-K applications determined where the new seats will go. The additional seats will cover more than half of the city’s school districts and include the following ZIP codes and neighborhoods:

Bronx (Districts 8 and 11)Staten Island (District 31)Brooklyn (Districts 13, 14, 15, 20 and 21)Manhattan (Districts 2, 3 and 6)Queens (Districts 24, 25, 26, 27, 28 and 30)

Elizabeth Kim contributed to this report.