CARE House #3 (Anitra)

About the property

Care Access Real Estate’s (CARE) third property is located in a quiet neighborhood of the Winchester area in Las Vegas, Nevada, just down the street from our first CARE home—reflecting our conviction that this location is optimal for family child care operations.

This 2,260-square-foot home has an ideal child care configuration that offers ample natural light and separation from the provider’s family space. The large interior courtyard can serve as an outdoor classroom, visible from the main child care space through huge windows.

About the provider

Anitra hadn’t intended to become a child care provider. She was about to take her final exams for medical billing and coding in March 2020 when the state shut down many services.

“You can have all the plans you want,” said Anitra. “But if God’s got another plan—any plan you write out—it’s just not going to work.”

Anitra decided to “step in as grandma” and help her daughters with child care when they needed to get to work. Before long, their coworkers asked who was watching their kids.

“That’s when the emails started coming,” Anitra said. “I thought, this is weird. Then my neighbors started seeing kids coming to my home and were like, ‘You watch kids? Do you accept Urban League vouchers?’ I was learning there’s a big difference between being a babysitter and an educator.”

Meeting this need and starting as a family, friends, and neighbors (FFN) child care provider to fill a gap in the community, Anitra at one point was organizing child care providers and advocating for improved licensing practices in front of elected officials.“I was just a frustrated mom trying to help in my community,” said Anitra, who in 2022 was on hand—alongside some of those elected officials—to usher in a new resource hub for child care providers, parents, and guardians called the Nevada Strong Start Child Care Services Center.

Anitra got connected to CARE when she had trouble purchasing a home from which to run her child care business; a major national lender did not allow this type of business in homes purchased with their loans.

Anitra moved into the CARE home in the fall of 2023.

“The house has been working out perfectly,” said Anitra. “The kitchen is wonderful. I could actually put a table for the students inside the dining area. We’re not bumping into each other when we’re making meals. We have plenty of space for them to learn and play. There’s a science area and a drama area. We have a big enough yard now, very different from when I was in an apartment where there were syringes, poop, and beer cans and bottles out there. It wasn’t a promise every day that we could go outside and have fun.”

“Now, everything is just right.”

About Care Access Real Estate®

Working with local ecosystem partners, Care Access Real Estate® (CARE) purchases homes in areas identified as not having enough quality child care, renovates them into ideal child care spaces, and leases them to child care providers who have gone through a vetting process. CARE’s national portfolio of commercial and residential properties is specifically designed to expand quality child care and help unlock the full potential and aspirations of center- and home-based providers.

Disclosure: The experiences of Anitra, a current CARE provider tenant, are shared above. No compensation was provided in connection with the experiences shared.