California, a rich state, is also among the nation’s poorest

Monday, Nov 05, 2018

By Elizabeth Zach, RCAC staff writer

Factoring in living costs, nearly 20 percent of Californians were living below the poverty line in 2015, 2016 and 2017, making the state the poorest in the country. The national average of Americans living in poverty those same years was 14 percent.

According to Sarah Bohn of California’s Public Policy Institute, California’s poverty map has changed.

“Indigence used to be concentrated inland, in agricultural regions with lots of cheap, seasonal labour,” The Economist notes in referring to Bohn’s research. “Now the poorest counties are on the southern coast, including Los Angeles and Orange Counties.” Moreover, most of the state’s poor have jobs but struggle to pay for housing, the price of which has significantly outpaced wages and has also stagnated because of low investment and over-regulation, according to The Economist.

“The Terner Centre for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley looked at the cost of (building) fees, plus the cumbersome appeals process and the lack of coordination between different levels of city and county governments,” write the article’s authors. “It estimated that the cost of building a unit of affordable housing had risen from $256,000 in 2000 to $425,000 in 2016, the highest level in the country.”