COVID-19: Last straw for ‘barely making it’
Virus magnifies state’s fracture between its haves and have-nots
Sarah Rivas was barely making rent since she’d moved to Sunnyvale. So when, three months into the pandemic, she woke up to an email from her school announcing a nearly 7% cut in teachers’ pay, she gave up a three-year battle.
“I moved into my parent’s house,” said Rivas, who’s been teaching her class of 12th graders from Sacramento, three hours from their high school. “Not what every 26-year- old wants to do.”
Rivas makes just less than the median household income in the U.S. and hasn’t lost her job due to pandemic closures. Yet her inability to financially survive the pandemic is the manifestation of a foundational economic fracture between California’s haves and have-nots. And for many middle-income workers, the pandemic marked the end of “barely making it.”
Home to 166 billionaires who made more than $235 billion since the beginning of the pandemic, the Golden State also has the nation’s highest poverty rate: 17.2% when adjusted for the cost of living, ac
cording to a recent Census Bureau analysis.
Even with a $66,129 salary, Rivas couldn’t make her more-than $2,000 monthly rent payment in the Bay Area. According to 2017 data, the median household income in Sunnyvale is $134,234 and the median rent is $2,390.
“How can you be normal when that’s what it takes?” Rivas said.
If Summit Denali charter school resumes in-person classes this year, Rivas will have to face a difficult choice: Either quit her job or find a new place to live in Silicon Valley.
“I’ll never be able to buy a home,” she said. “I’m never going to be able to comfortably raise a family there.”
She isn’t the only one struggling. One Mill Valley high school teacher, who asked not to be identified, described contemplating sex work to fill the gaps left by her roughly $65,000 salary. Others who lost their jobs have switched to lowerwage or temporary work to avoid unemployment. Experts worry that, on top of increased distress for the poor, the state’s already-shrinking middle class is taking a hard hit in the pandemic too.
“We kind of already had a hollowing of the middle class — that’s not going to help,” said Dr. Sylvia Allegretto, a labor economist and co- chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at UC Berkeley. “This is going to be harmful for families, you’re going to see more food insecurity, then evictions play out.”
In the Bay Area, what used to be the packed parking lot at the Giants ballpark is now a makeshift drive-thru food pantry. Collective food fridges popped up in front of Oakland houses so the hungry could eat.
One in four Californians filed for unemployment since March and the state’s unemployment rate in August was still three percentage points higher than the rest of the country, at 11.4%, according to the state EDD.
Some found new work, but job growth has been slow and many have had to settle for the lower-paying jobs available on the market, often without career prospects.
Rivas, who learned in September — months after she’d moved back to her parents — that the school would reinstate teachers’ full pay, isn’t sure whether she’ll be able to find new housing. Rents haven’t gone down much and she might become another Californian unable to afford to live where they work, no matter how good she is at her job or how much she loves it.
“I think one of the key things to recognize is that economic value is increasingly based on information and knowledge — not labor,” said Chris Benner, a professor of sociology at UC Santa Cruz. So, hard work and long hours are not rewarded as generously as ideas and information, and in the Bay Area, people’s ideas are often worth a lot in the form of investments, wealth and net worth. But Benner points out our system taxes income, not net worth, leading to increased wealth disparity.
“It doesn’t serve to redistribute wealth, it serves to raise government revenue,” Santa Clara University professor of tax law Patricia Cain said.
As a result, economic growth doesn’t translate into social inclusion.
In the Bay Area, the onetime federal stimulus check of $1,200 plus an additional $500 per child barely made up one month’s rent for many. Thanks to the latest federal Lost Wages Assistance Program, workers who lost work due to the pandemic can now apply to receive an extra $300 (the previous program provided $600), although applicants must already be receiving $100 or more from regular unemployment.
Other emergency programs like the Pandemic Electronics Benefit Transfer, which provided eligible families with up to $365 in grocery money, have expired or are about to. So are many local eviction bans still protecting renters from having to pay a quarter of their rent starting in September, a requirement under Gov. Newsom’s new regulation. Between March and July, the median amount Californians received in unemployment was $339 a week — the equivalent of less than $20,000 a year. For many, that might not be enough to stay housed.
“It’s a lot of suffering and not a lot of coverage,” said Michael Katz, a regional coordinator for East Bay Works, a state-funded provider of workforce programs.
“I love my job, I love these kids, but this is stressful. This is hurtful,” Rivas said.