How much does it cost to raise a family in Santa Clara County?

The Insight Center just released the new Family Economic Self-Sufficiency Standard for 2008, which lays out how much it costs to maintain a basic standard of living for workers in every county in California.

Detailed tables with the cost of living in Santa Clara County can be found here (pdf). It's expensive -- okay, no surprise there -- but the Self-Sufficiency Standard shows us just how big that gap is between the cost of basic needs and what jobs actually pay.

A single parent with two kids could be working three full-time minimum-wage jobs and still not have enough to cover housing, food, health care, child care, transportation, and other necessities. No wonder our County's safety net services are strained beyond capacity: as taxpayers, we are subsidizing the social cost of low-wage work.

The list below shows the "self-sufficiency wage" for several different household types. This is the minimum wage needed to get by in Santa Clara County if you work full-time year-round, don't get any outside assistance, and have a minimally adequate standard of living (i.e., you live in an apartment with at least one bedroom for every two people, have enough to eat, and can get medical care when you need it):

• Single adult: $13.37/hr



• Single adult with one infant: $23.55/hr



• Two adults with one preschooler and one teenager (both parents working): $14.70/hr

And compare these to the median wages for some of the most common occupations in Silicon Valley:

• Retail salespersons (25,990 employees, largest single occupation in the region): $10.98/hr



• Office clerks (18.860 employees): $15.85/hr



• Cashiers (17,550 employees): $9.89/hr



• Janitors and cleaners (14,340 employees): $10.78/hr

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Keep in mind that self-sufficiency only measures whether a family can support themselves right now; it doesn't allow for costs of college education, retirement savings, unemployment, or other situations for which you might need to put some money aside. Also no meals out, entertainment, or vacations. But even at that minimum standard, too many jobs simply don't pay enough for a working family to make ends meet.

Here's a breakdown of the Self-Sufficiency Standard by budget item for a two-parent family with a preschooler and a teenager:

One more key point: the Self-Sufficiency Standard assumes that all working families are covered by job-based health insurance, which is increasingly not the case. Without access to job-based coverage, health care costs in the pie chart above shoot up from $348/month to an average $943/month, adding $7,140 to a family's annual expenses.

And of course this problem isn't confined to Silicon Valley. While the Valley does have some of the highest costs in the country, workers nationwide are feeling the sting of stagnant or declining real wages. We urgently need a new national direction towards economic policies that support families and make work pay. Check out EPI's Agenda for Shared Prosperity for some good ideas on how to make this happen.