We produce the Struggling to Move Up: The Real Cost Measure in order to enable communities to set a universal goal^* for all families – to afford a decent standard of living, to live with dignity and agency – and to see which families struggle, in which communities, so that we, our partners and policymakers can develop strategies targeted to their specific circumstances.
 
Once we have a clearer picture of which families struggle, the next question is what we can do to help them. How can communities put insights from the Real Cost Measure into action?
 
Our new brief, Building Economic Inclusion: Putting the Real Cost Measure into Action builds upon the Real Cost Measure by offering suggestions of areas we could  address individually and together to help improve the well-being of families below the Real Cost Measure.

At United Way, we believe everyone deserves an opportunity to achieve the building blocks of a good life - a quality education, financial stability, and good health – and we believe that expanding this opportunity is both a core objective and a key strategy to fulfilling our mission.  
 
Unfortunately, for far too many California families – over one in three households in California, representing 3.5 million families – even a modest level of security remains elusive.  These struggling families reflect the diversity of California; they come from every household composition, represent every racial and ethnic group, and they overwhelmingly already are working. More information on this and other results from Struggling to Move Up, our Real Cost Measure study, including an executive summary, interactive maps, dashboards, regional profiles and more are available here.

We produce the Real Cost Measure in order enable communities to set a universal goal for all families – to afford a decent standard of living, to live with dignity and agency – and to see which families struggle, in which communities, so that we, our partners and policymakers can develop strategies targeted to their specific circumstances.

So what can communities do to help these families? Philanthropy is a very important way to help our neighbors and improve our communities - volunteering, funding and providing charitable services to struggling families is one obvious way communities can help - but the highest impact we can create is to change the environment for families to increase the odds they can succeed.

With every release of our Real Cost Measure, from 2015 to the present, we have provided examples of possible options to change the odds at large scale, and now we’ve added more detail and pulled those suggestions into a companion document, Building Economic Inclusion, available here. We hope this document will assist community groups in making strategic decisions about how to help families move up. Building Economic Inclusion discusses the following major categories:

• Preserve and expand subsidized health coverage
• Provide childcare and preschool for struggling families
• Maximize current income supports such as the earned income tax credit (EITC) and CalFresh
• Help adults level up their education
• Smooth the decline of income supports
• Help families build assets and protect them from payday loans and other predatory financial services
• Integrate and naturalize immigrants
• Increase housing stock and prioritize support for renters
• Make work pay
• Adapt to the changing nature of work

^*Setting a universal goal for families of all types, no matter their starting point, a "targeted universalism" approach, is essential to advancing equity and dismantling systemic racial injustice. For more on targeted universalism, an approach pioneered by jon a. powell, founder and director of the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley, see https://belonging.berkeley.edu/targeted-universalism.

As we prepare for a second Thanksgiving holiday during a global pandemic, many of us have so much to be thankful for including a safe place to live, a healthy family, a secure job and more. Still, approximately one-third of families throughout California continue to struggle financially every day — over 3.5 million — according to our latest Real Cost Measure study on what it takes to meet basic needs. 

Furthering that strain is the fact that many families are struggling to imagine what their Thanksgiving holiday will look like given increasing food costs throughout 2021, and the lack of healthy, nutritious food in their immediate neighborhood. In this blog post, we will explore what average food costs look like throughout the state, especially for families with young children, and visualize the dispersion of food deserts where access to healthy and affordable food is often difficult and limited. 

Through the lens of our Real Cost Measure household budgets, food is one of the basic needs that appears to illustrate the most consistent pricing throughout California, unlike the cost of housing and child care. As illustrated in the graphic below, most counties and county clusters show that working households with 2 adults, 1 pre-schooler, and 1 school-aged child spend anywhere between 12-16% of their income on food, approximately $11,810 a year. One of the few exceptions is Solano County where this same household type can spend up to $15,371 on annual food costs, about 19% of their income.

While our Real Cost Measure is calculated through 2019, the latest currently available upon publication, the U.S. has experienced a 5.3% increase in food costs over the past 12 months due to inflation. This makes it more challenging for some families to afford the types of food they normally purchase in an effort to cover other household expenses. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly changed how many of us access and consume food by limiting how many times we go to the grocery store and increasing “to-go” orders at restaurants to reduce exposure from the virus.

What the data above doesn’t show, however, are the ongoing hardships many families have in accessing nutritious and healthy food. Using data aggregated from the Food Access Research Atlas, a tool by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (U.S.D.A.) to map food deserts, approximately 5 million Californians live at least one mile away from a supermarket (about 13% of the state’s population), and approximately 1.2 million of those are considered to be both “low-access” and “low-income” by the U.S.D.A.¹  

A majority of those living in a food desert reside in Southern California, which highlights the prevalence of food deserts in urban areas. It is painfully ironic that approximately 1.2 million Californians in the Central Valley live in a food desert given the state’s high agricultural production. According to a recent study by the California Department of Food and Agriculture, California brought in over $50 billion in crop cash receipts in 2019, about 45% more than the nation’s second largest agricultural competitor, Iowa. This speaks to the tragedy that so many families often struggle to access healthy and nutritious food given the fact that California is often considered the “breadbasket” to the rest of the world. 

It is also imperative to emphasize how systemic racism has contributed to the creation of food deserts in many parts of our state and nowhere is that more clear than South Los Angeles where well over 60% of families fall below the Real Cost Measure. A recent spatial analysis found that there were only seven supermarkets in the entire South Los Angeles region compared to dozens of fast-food restaurants, liquor and convenience stores. Though a moratorium has been placed on the latter, people who rely heavily on fast food have “seven times the risk of having a stroke before age 45, double the risk of heart attack and type 2 diabetes, and four times the risk of kidney failure” significantly decreasing their expected life expectancy.^₂ In fact, Measure of America’s most recent human development study for California identified nine neighborhood clusters in South Los Angeles experience a life expectancy less than 81 years of age, the California average, and most of those residents are Black and Latino.

Hence, as we begin this Thanksgiving holiday, let us not only be thankful for what we have, but also recall the adversity many families have to endure to access and cover the cost of food. Many families throughout the state will have to work odd hours on Thanksgiving to ensure that their family’s basic needs will be met. If a working single mother arrives home at 9pm after working her third part-time job of the day, preparing a Thanksgiving meal for her family may feel nearly impossible. It would be much easier for her to pick up food from a local fast-food restaurant and get to sleep early for the next day with the hope of managing her family’s limited income. Many families may make heroic efforts to receive food from a local food bank, including waiting long hours with limited gas in their car, while others will find it difficult to celebrate as they recover from a loss of a loved one from the COVID-19 pandemic. 

All of this is an important reminder that Thanksgiving celebrations are not universal, and that many families will struggle to find where their next meal will be coming from. As we learn to navigate and embrace this “new normal,” we should continue to acknowledge the long-term systemic challenges that low-income Californians face, especially this holiday season.

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Footnotes

1. The U.S.D.A. defines “low-income” as those falling below the official poverty measure which is largely calculated by food, but it would be safe the assume that a majority of Californians living in a food desert fall below the Real Cost Measure which accounts for housing, food, child care, health care, and transportation and other basic needs.
2. Robbins, Ocean. From Food Deserts to Food Oases: Addressing Access to Healthy Food. Food Network Revolution. September 11, 2020. https://foodrevolution.org/blog/food-deserts-food-oasis-healthy-food-access/

This May Revision stands in stark contrast to the budget of one year ago when COVID-19 first threw the Governor's budget proposal into disarray. Compared to a projected budget deficit of $54 billion a year ago, the state now has a projected $75.7 billion surplus. Combined with over $25 billion in federal relief, this supports a $100 billion California Comeback Plan—a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to not only speed the state's recovery from the pandemic, but to address long-standing challenges and provide opportunity for every California family—regardless of their income, race, or ZIP code. 

In this blog post, we will go over key investments in:

• Education: including childcare, higher education and a new “14th” grade established by the creation of universal transitional kindergarten.  

• Housing & Homeless: A $9.3 billion package for housing and $6.8 billion for homelessness.

• Health & Human Services: including the brand new expansion of Medi-Cal to undocumented seniors aged 60 and over. 

• Golden State Stimulus & Rent Relief: $8 billion in Golden State Stimulus payments to Californians earning less than $75,000 annually, including to immigrants who are undocumented. $5.2 billion for emergency rental assistance and back rent owed by Californians with low incomes.

• Emergency Preparedness & Responses, Small Business Relief, and more!

On April 26, the U.S. Census Bureau released its first population estimates from the 2020 decennial census. This release, primarily consisting of national and statewide population results, found that that there are approximately 331 million residents in the U.S., an increase of nearly 7.5 percent from the 2010 census. 

This population increase, however, masks the fact that the U.S. has experienced its sharpest population decline since the 1930s. From 1950 to 2010, the U.S., on average, experienced a nearly 13% population increase after every decennial census. The only other comparable period from 2010 to 2020 is the 1940 census where the U.S. experienced a 7.3 percent population increase from 1930. These results are prompting demographers to take a closer look at emerging patterns such as lower birth rates and reduced immigration as key indicators for declines in population growth. (How the 2020-21 COVID-19 pandemic impacts future population growth is yet to be determined).

After two-months of deliberations, President Biden recently signed into law a $1.86 trillion COVID-19 relief package (HR 1319) that reflects key components of his American Rescue Plan. 

In a major victory for California’s counties, the final legislation includes robust, direct, and flexible federal COVID-19-related financial support to all counties. Pursuant to the bill, counties across America will receive a total of $65.1 billion, with funds allocated based on population. According to preliminary estimates, California counties are projected to receive at least $7.6 billion.