San Francisco's working families need support from state, feds

It’s time for us to tackle poverty head-on.

With the cost of living skyrocketing across the country, many cities like San Francisco are grappling with how to help working families.

San Francisco has pioneered more policies than many cities nationwide. Yet, these initiatives fall short of truly supporting The City's working families because of a broken national system far too outdated to adapt to the challenges the Bay Area is facing.

San Francisco knows how to create effective programs, and research continues to show that tax credit programs are a strong way to keep families out of deep poverty.

Earlier this year, Mayor London Breed announced further support for free tax preparation services so that more families can apply for The City’s Working Families Credi t, providing eligible parents with an additional $250. The state has also continued to expand tax credits for families, creating the Young Child Tax Credit in 2019 and in 2022, the legislature passed the Foster Youth Tax Credit.

Yet, all of these measures do not go far enough. The Tipping Point Community found that about 270,000 more residents (4.3%) would be in poverty without access to safety net programs .

Such programs played the largest role in helping Bay Area families stay out of poverty. However, when the income eligibility thresholds no longer match the living wage adjustments the state has made, too many San Francisco families are unable to access the economic relief they need.

When we look at what it means to be low-income in San Francisco, it looks a lot different than you’d think. The reality is, to be considered middle class in The City, you have to make $91,000 a year, according to SmartAsset .

To qualify for CalFresh as a single-person household, you cannot make more than $19,758 annually. To put that in context, someone working 40 hours a week at minimum wage in San Francisco would earn nearly twice that amount at $37,600.

These thresholds don’t even match the region’s measure of poverty. To be considered low-income in the Bay Area, a family of four makes under $149,000. That same family would be cut off from CalFresh assistance at $40,560.

This gap is staggering. The reality for low-income families in San Francisco is that they likely make too much money to qualify for supportive programs to help them pay for their everyday necessities.

This gap puts pressure on families, leaving them at risk of housing insecurity and vulnerable to the impacts of inflation. Without access to state and federal benefits, cities are left with the choice of innovative solutions to bridge the gap. San Francisco has tried several guaranteed income programs and workforce development programs that give workers money each month to support their economic stability, including a program that provides $1,000 a month for pregnant parents who are Black or Pacific Islander to improve maternal health and birth outcomes.

In 2021, Mayor Breed also launched a guaranteed income program for local artists, providing them with monthly payments of up to $1,000 for 18 months, allowing them to continue their creative practice at the height of the pandemic.

We know guaranteed income programs work. We’ve seen the success of hundreds of pilot programs across the nation. When people are given just a few hundred dollars a month, they are able to support their families and take strides toward greater financial freedom. But it’s not enough to rely on local leaders to fight for these programs.

We need our national leaders to take action and transform how we measure poverty in this country. We must adjust our benefit thresholds to support families struggling to make ends meet. We need to expand the EITC at the federal level, starting with the Age Parity Act, which will eliminate age restrictions that prevent young workers from 18-24 and our senior workers over 65 from claiming the EITC.

These restrictions have left 7 million eligible workers without access to this powerful tax credit. We need more San Franciscans and Bay Area residents to join Golden State Opportunity in our mission to end poverty by fighting for the systemic changes that are long overdue.

We need to advance simple solutions like reforming a public benefits system that requires people to work but does not address the challenges they face while trying to work enough to support their families.

This means providing job training and affordable childcare. San Francisco has proactively created more programs to support this work. Still, we can’t expect our local leaders to be able to undo decades of bad policy choices at the federal level.

Mayors are some of the most innovative and heroic in confronting these longstanding inequities, but we need more to join Mayors for a Guaranteed Income. We need to work together to build a strong coalition of local leaders nationwide to push for the policy change we need to end poverty. We must advance solutions that create financial empowerment so that working families can meet their basic needs and have the resources they need for their families to thrive.

Amy Everitt is president of Golden State Opportunity, a statewide non-profit dedicated to ending poverty by providing all Californians with the tools to build financial well-being and thrive. Prior to GSO, Amy led state and national campaigns for Reproductive Freedom for All.