Half of Florida households struggle to make ends meet, report finds

Almost half of Florida households are gainfully employed but still struggling to make ends meet, according to a new report published by United Way that lays bare the financial burdens increasingly squeezing Floridians.

Of the 8.8 million households in the state, 4 million either were in poverty or unable to afford “the basic cost of living in their county” in 2022, the focus year in the study. Many did not qualify for public assistance.

The report, which relied on data from the U.S. Census and Federal Reserve, does not point fingers. But several policy analysts said that, following a period marked by inflation and the end of pandemic public assistance, Florida’s state government ought to do more to prevent the state from becoming unaffordable for the working class.

“To boost Floridians’ fiscal stability, we need to ensure that state lawmakers are fully investing in people and communities across the board,” Sadaf Knight, chief executive officer of the left-leaning Florida Policy Institute, told the Times/Herald in an email. “This means enacting real, targeted tax relief to Floridians struggling to make ends meet.”

The number of cash-strapped households in Florida has been increasing, and 13% of households now stand below the federal poverty level of $31,200 for a family of four, according to official data.

This ranked Florida 44th among all states and the District of Columbia in terms of financial hardships for families.

The report found that minorities struggled most, with 60% of Black and 52% of Hispanic households in Florida below what the United Way calls the ALICE threshold — an acronym that stands for asset limited, income constrained and employed.

Workers in the state’s primarily low-wage economy — cashiers, cooks, stockers and order fillers, fast food and counter workers and security guards — were also among those who were most likely to struggle.

Is there relief?

Incoming Florida Senate President Ben Albritton, R-Wauchula, said state legislators are already working to address the affordability issues in Florida.

“In Tallahassee, we have worked on short and long-term solutions to help keep our state affordable for young families, retirees, and everyone in between,” Albritton told the Times/Herald in an email.

But the challenges facing working Floridians are many.

From 2021 to the following year, the minimum cost of household necessities such as housing, food and transportation for a single adult in Florida increased from $28,344 to $30,084, the report says.

For families of four including an infant and a preschooler, it increased from $66,324 to $81,120.

In addition, with the expiration of the American Rescue Plan in 2021, pandemic assistance for families came to an end, further constraining the finances of families across Florida as tax credits reverted to 2020 levels.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has frequently blamed President Joe Biden for driving up inflation. To counter it, he advocated for toll relief for motorists and tax breaks on diapers and other household goods last year.

He also signed into law legislation intended to boost the amount of affordable housing in the state, and he has pushed for investments in trade apprenticeships and workforce initiatives.

But he also signed into law this year a bill blocking local governments from requiring its contractors to pay more than the state’s minimum wage, set to become $15 per hour in 2026. Last year, he barred local governments from adopting rent controls.

He also raised taxes on Floridians by $1 billion each year when he required out-of-state companies to start collecting sales taxes in 2021. The decision amounted to a tax break for corporations.

DeSantis and the Legislature have also refused to expand Medicaid coverage to the working poor. During the second GOP presidential debate last year, a Fox News host asked DeSantis why Florida had a worse rate of uninsured than the national average.

“We’ve had a population boom. We also don’t have a lot of welfare benefits in Florida,” DeSantis responded. “We basically say, this is a field of dreams, you can do well in the state, but we’re not going to be like California and have massive numbers of people on government programs without work requirements.”

DeSantis’ office did not respond to requests for comment from the Times/Herald.

Work still in progress

Broadening access to subsidized child care and extending hours for voluntary pre-K to all-day, and implementing a program to provide tax rebates to working-class families are among the measures that lawmakers can take to provide relief, Knight, the CEO for Florida Policy Institute, said.

Albritton, the incoming Florida Senate president, explained that lawmakers cut taxes on insurance policies and put a constitutional amendment on the ballot to help lower property taxes.

Albritton also noted that legislators have made “huge investments in affordable housing and school choice, so more families have options for where they live and how their children are educated.”

There is always room for improvement and more work to do, Albritton said, noting that inflation is “having a serious impact across the country, and there is no question that families here in Florida are feeling it.”

Still, he said that legislators passed “historic tax relief packed with tax holidays and permanent tax relief that helps lower the cost of raising children and aging with dignity.”

Albritton’s counterpart, incoming House Speaker Danny Perez, R-Miami, told WLPGLocal 10 News in April that affordability was “the greatest issue” facing the state. He did not return requests for comment on this story.

The United Way’s report lays out a series of problems culminating in a more unaffordable state, and notes that, since the Great Recession, cash-constrained Florida households have been steadily growing.

In 2022, when state and federal eviction bans expired, 47% of families that were below the United Way’s asset limited, income constrained and employed threshold spent more than half of their income on rent.

A toll on basic needs, savings and debt

According to the report:

• Families in the state struggled to pay basic items such as food, car payments and medical expenses.
• Most low-paying jobs saw an increase in their wages, with median retail sales pay in Florida increasing to $14.03 in 2022, but “wage increases … were not enough to make up for years of falling behind.”
• Child care remained one of the largest costs. “Provider shortages and lack of affordable care present fewer options for parents,” the report reads.
• Almost half of Black and Hispanic cash-constrained families in Florida went without health care because they couldn’t afford it.

People 65 and older leading households are also feeling the financial hardships, according to the report, which found that seniors have seen the largest increase in the number of households below the threshold.

“With increasing costs and insufficient retirement savings, many older adults have needed to continue working,” the report says. “In 2022, nearly 1.6 million people aged 65 and over living below the ALICE threshold in Florida did not have retirement savings beyond Social Security, and nearly 218,000 were working.”

Data from the Federal Reserve shows that, across the country, household debt balances rose by $184 billion in the first quarter of 2024.

Credit card balances are at $1.12 trillion — which is 13.1% above the level a year ago. “Those are real impacts,” said Albritton, the incoming Florida Senate president.

But while families in Florida struggle to get to the end of the month, DeSantis has used the state’s burgeoning coffers to pay down state debt ahead of schedule and set aside $17 billion in reserves, points that DeSantis has repeatedly made on the campaign trail.

Rather than helping, DeSantis and Republican legislative leaders contributed to Floridians’ hardships, said Karen Woodall, a lobbyist for the Florida Center for Fiscal and Economic Policy.

The fact that the state has been setting aside so much money instead of using it to help citizens is “criminal,” she said.

“There is no reasonable, logical excuse for people living in this state to be in this situation,” Woodall said.