"Want to have enough money to meet your basic needs in California?
Then don't be a woman, don't be a parent, and don't be a person of color. All of these groups are disproportionately less likely to have enough income to meet their basic needs, according to a new report from the United Way of the Bay Area."
Some of these categories are not surprising: It's expensive to raise children, and gender and racial discrimination still lurk in our job markets. What is surprising about the United Way's findings is that having a job and even an education isn't a ticket to making ends meet in California. The poor, it turns out, are just like the rest of us. They just struggle more.
The analysis is based on the Self-Sufficiency Standard, a formula developed by social scientist Diana Pearce to reflect the actual cost of people's real needs in a given area. (The Federal Poverty Level doesn't accurately reflect the growing costs of health care, energy and housing, among other things.) According to the report, about 22 percent of Bay Area households were struggling even before the economic disaster began in 2008.
The Bay Area is doing better than the state overall, where nearly a third of households don't have enough income to meet their basic needs for food, housing, transportation, child care and health care. But as this season of sharing comes to a close, it's sobering to learn just how hard some of us are working to keep our households afloat.
It's also sobering to learn how many of the poor are working poor: 86.5 percent of all Bay Area households without enough income had at least one person earning a paycheck.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/01/09/EDMF1B5B04.DTL#ixzz0cDzAh5Sk
Then don't be a woman, don't be a parent, and don't be a person of color. All of these groups are disproportionately less likely to have enough income to meet their basic needs, according to a new report from the United Way of the Bay Area."
Some of these categories are not surprising: It's expensive to raise children, and gender and racial discrimination still lurk in our job markets. What is surprising about the United Way's findings is that having a job and even an education isn't a ticket to making ends meet in California. The poor, it turns out, are just like the rest of us. They just struggle more.
The analysis is based on the Self-Sufficiency Standard, a formula developed by social scientist Diana Pearce to reflect the actual cost of people's real needs in a given area. (The Federal Poverty Level doesn't accurately reflect the growing costs of health care, energy and housing, among other things.) According to the report, about 22 percent of Bay Area households were struggling even before the economic disaster began in 2008.
The Bay Area is doing better than the state overall, where nearly a third of households don't have enough income to meet their basic needs for food, housing, transportation, child care and health care. But as this season of sharing comes to a close, it's sobering to learn just how hard some of us are working to keep our households afloat.
It's also sobering to learn how many of the poor are working poor: 86.5 percent of all Bay Area households without enough income had at least one person earning a paycheck.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/01/09/EDMF1B5B04.DTL#ixzz0cDzAh5Sk