Almost half of households in the Lehigh Valley exited the pandemic without making enough to be financially secure, according to new report from the United Way of Pennsylvania.
The updated report on the state’s families and where they stand looks at data from 2022, so it reflects hardships and opportunities families faced two years ago. The data in the report is aggregated from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community and Household Pulse surveys, as well as inflation reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking.
While many reports concentrate on families and individuals at or under the poverty line, the United Way report focuses on households that are above the poverty limit, but are not well-off enough to be comfortable, even though they largely don’t qualify for public assistance. United Way refers to these households by the acronym ALICE : Asset-Limited, Income Constrained, Employed.
The charity organization looks at households of various configurations, from single adults living alone to families with one or more children of various ages in need of child care, and tries to calculate monthly survival budgets in each of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties.
The Morning Call looked at the most recent ALICE data and compared it with the report from 2019 (with data from 2017) to get a look at how the outlook for families in area counties has changed over five years.
The report emphasizes that the 2022 data reflects the whiplash impacts of pandemic-era support programs, including expanded child tax credits and various public assistance programs that were instituted and retired within those years, as well as inflation and wage growth.
The three tables below break out a typical household budget needed by a single adult and a family with two young children to stay above the ALICE survival threshold. Combined, almost half of the Lehigh Valley’s 264,641 households don’t earn enough to be financially secure.
The eye-popping annual income needed to be above the ALICE threshold in Northampton County now tops $100,000, while Lehigh is not far behind at $98,664.
The single largest monthly expense for a family with an infant and a preschooler is child care, ranging from $1,500 to more than $1,800 per month in Lehigh, Northampton and Carbon counties. But the largest increase in household expenses is food, which has more than doubled from 2017 to 2022. Transportation and technology costs were the next fastest movers, rising 65% and 55% in the same period.
A significant portion of households in Lehigh and Northampton counties do not earn enough to top the ALICE threshold. The Morning Call calculated the aggregated the data for the two counties. The chart below shows that, while poverty rates have not changed significantly since 2010, the percentage of households above poverty but below the United Way’s survival budget climbed from 27.5% in 2010 to 35.5% in 2022.
The current statistics for struggling households are broken out for 2,410 individual cities and towns in the state in the map below. Areas shaded red have the highest percentage of financially imperiled households.
Just as financial insecurity is not evenly distributed throughout Pennsylvania, it is also uneven when looking at demographic groups. The charts below show that Black and Hispanic households are the only ones where a majority are either below the ALICE survival threshold, or living in poverty. Asian-led households are most likely to be financially secure, followed closely by white-led households.
Finally, the “E” in ALICE stands for “Employed.” The sortable and searchable table below shows the top 20 occupations in Pennsylvania with the median hourly and annual wage, and what percent of people in those occupations fall under the ALICE threshold.
The full report from the United Way of the Greater Lehigh Valley can be found here . The national ALICE web site has other published data and papers on particular demographic segments.
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