How difficult is it is to make ends meet in Los Angeles?
A single parent needs to earn $26 an hour, or $54,000 a year, just to pay for the basics of raising a family, according to a study being released Wednesday from the California Budget Project, a left-leaning Sacramento think tank.
That’s 70 percent more than the median income of $31,325 a year and nearly four times the $14,000 annual income of a minimum wage worker, the study said.
Making ends meet in L.A. is almost as difficult for two-parent families with only one parent working. That parent needs an hourly wage of $23.71 an hour, or an income of $49,322 a year to support the family, according to the CBP study. While a family with two working parents needs to pull in considerably more income ($69,670 per year) to pay for the cost of child care, each parent needs to pull in $16.75 an hour, just slightly above the median wage of $15.06 an hour.
“Over the past decade, welfare reform has focused attention on the challenges involved with moving families off welfare and into the workforce. Far less attention has focused on whether the jobs that are available provide sufficient income to support a family,” the study said.
The study concluded that the federal poverty thresholds for receiving welfare assistance are inadequate. For a family of three, the threshold is $15,219 in annual income; for a family of four, it’s $19,157.
The study assumed $1,060 in child-care expenses for families with a single parent or two working parents. In a single-parent household, just paying rent, utilities and childcare accounts for half the monthly living expenses, the study said.
