News
They're Not “Poor,” but 31% of California Households Can't Afford Basic Needs
Around 15.9% of California households are below the official Federal Poverty Level (PVL), but a new report from United Way says that number vastly understates the struggle people undergo at the lower end of the economic scale.
Researchers for “Struggling to Get By: The Real Cost Measure in California 2015” calculate that 3.2 million California households (31%) lack sufficient income to cover the basic costs of living. That’s even higher than the 23.4% Supplemental Poverty Measure for California used by the U.S. Census Bureau to measure additional cost-of-living factors.
United Way uses something it calls “Real Cost Measure,” which adds housing costs, transportation, child care, taxes, health care and other family needs to the standard cost of food, which has tended to rise slower than the other factors. It also takes into account “race/ethnicity, gender, nativity, occupational type, marital status, educational attainment, employment status, housing type and more.”
The report uses 1,100 different household configurations, analyzes figures in the context of individual counties or similar locales and bores down into neighborhood census figures.
The report also applied the Elder Index as refined at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and the Insight Center for Community Economic Development, but in the end found that households of seniors struggled at the same 31% rate.
