Californians no longer earn enough to cover their expenses

Rivas earns above the median household income in the United States. And you haven’t lost your job due to the closing of a pandemic; However, the complexity of surviving economically is the manifestation of a fundamental economic divide between the haves and the have-nots [money] in California. For many middle-income workers, the pandemic marked the end of “barely surviving”

Home to 166 billionaires who have made more than $ 235 billion since the start of the pandemic, the Dorado state also has the highest poverty rate – 17.2% when adjusted for cost of living, according to a recent Census Bureau analysis. .

Even with a salary of $ 66,129 a year, Rivas couldn’t afford her rent of more than $ 2,000 in the tech valley. According to data from 2017, the median household income in Sunnyvale is $ 134,234 and the median rent is $ 2,390.

“How can you be a normal one when that is what you need?” Said the teacher. If Summit Denali Charter School reopens this year, Rivas will have to face a tough decision: quit her job or find a new place to live in Silicon Valley.

“I will never be able to buy a house, I will never be able to comfortably raise a family in that area,” he said.

Experts worry that in addition to the growing distress of poor people, the state’s already shrinking middle class is also taking a hard hit.

“We already had a vacuum in the middle class, and this situation is not going to help,” said Dr. Sylvia Allegretto, a labor economist and co-chair of the Center for Wage and Employment Dynamics at the University of California, Berkeley. “This is going to be harmful for families, we will see more food insecurity and then evictions will come.”

In the Bay Area, what used to be the crowded parking lot of the San Francisco Giants is now a makeshift food pantry. Collective food coolers appeared in front of Oakland homes so that people who couldn’t afford food could eat.

One in four Californians has filed for unemployment since March, and the state’s unemployment rate in August was still three points higher than the rest of the country, at 11.4%, according to the state’s Employment Development Department. Read more via SomagNews