United Way looks at real cost of family life in 2015

The United Way is sharing a new study on poverty in California, aiming at figuring out what it really costs to live in the Golden State.

“We have to acknowledge the poor don’t need this data to know this. It’s incredibly expensive to be poor,” study co-author Henry Gascon told more than 100 civic leaders gathered at the Memorial Medical Center conference center in Modesto.

About one in three households statewide, measurably more in the Central Valley, are not making enough to pay for housing, food, health care and child care, according to “Struggling to Get By: The Real Cost Measure in California 2015,” created by United Ways of California.

The full study and summary are available online at www.unitedwaysca.org/realcost, with a host of interactive tools and downloadable data.

The United Way calculations more than double the federal poverty figure of 16.6 percent for California, which is based on a nationwide average of prices selected in the 1960s. The index ignores the changes in family spending needs over time, including the need for childcare as the minimum wage failed to keep up with inflation, meaning households need multiple jobs to get by, and the numbers of single-parent households soared.

In addition, Gascon noted, “It treats California the same as Mississippi.”

For Stanislaus County, the real-cost study found 46,359 households living without enough to statistically get by, or 36 percent of the county’s families. This despite the fact that 83 percent of families living in poverty have at least one working adult.

Families with young children are particularly hard hit, with 58 percent earning less than what the study figures it costs: $47,444 for a two-parent family with one infant and one school-age child. It would take two full-time and one half-time, year-round jobs to support that family at California’s minimum wage of $9 an hour. The minimum will rise to $10 an hour Jan. 1.

Other Stanislaus statistics of note: Two-thirds of single mothers live on less than they need, 67 percent, versus 29 percent of married couples. About 31 percent of seniors are struggling financially across the county.

The study used 25 data sets to support its conclusions, Gascon said, leaning most heavily on the 2011-13 American Community Survey compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau.

This story was originally published November 17, 2015 at 5:08 PM with the headline "United Way looks at real cost of family life in 2015."