In last week’s column, I wrote about the people showing up at the Harmony Food Pantry in Waterloo. Five years ago, the pantry served 19 families during the entire month of August. Now, volunteers routinely see 20 to 30 families in a week. Some walk or bike there. Believe it or not, some even need food they can eat without a working stove or microwave.
The question that stayed with me was how a household gets from managing to that point. It’s easy to say food costs more, or rent does, or wages haven’t kept up. All of that’s obviously true. But, it doesn’t tell us how many people are living close enough to the edge that one more bill sends them looking for help.
So I called Therese Daly, president and CEO of United Way of New York State, to talk about a measure that tries to answer that question. The latest State of ALICE in New York report puts the share of households unable to afford basic needs at 48%.
That’s about 3.7 million households.
ALICE stands for Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed. These households earn more than the federal poverty level but less than it costs to cover the basics where they live. The report also counts households in poverty when it describes everyone below the ALICE threshold.
About 14% of New York households were in poverty in 2024; another 34% were ALICE.
I asked Daly what the familiar poverty numbers miss. She pointed to the bills that don’t care whether a household clears a federal income cutoff. Stuff like child care, transportation, groceries, housing, and health care. “So often child care is forgotten and it really should be on the forefront,” she said.
Consider a family with two adults, an infant, and a preschooler. The report’s statewide average survival budget for that household was $102,540 a year in 2024. The federal poverty level for a family of four was $31,200. Those figures describe very different things. One is a national poverty cutoff; the other estimates the cost of housing, child care, food, transportation, health care, technology, taxes and a small allowance for overruns.
It doesn’t include debt payments or saving for the future.
The $102,540 figure will stop some readers cold. I understand that. Plenty of families in the Finger Lakes live on less, and the cost of raising two very young children isn’t the cost of supporting two adults whose mortgage is paid off. “The challenges look different depending on where you live,” Daly said. A statewide number means something different in every part of the state. But, even in the Finger Lakes, Ontario County has a survival budget of just over $100,000.
ALICE calculates budgets by county and household type for precisely that reason.
Still, dismissing the number because your family could make a different budget work misses the point. The question is whether the jobs available in a community cover the costs of living and working there. The report pairs that family budget with two full-time jobs — cook and bank teller — whose combined wages totaled $76,144. The shortfall is more than $26,000, even with both adults working.
That gap should make us reconsider what we call a good job.
We count a new position, celebrate a business opening and point to a low unemployment rate. We seldom ask whether the person filling that position can afford to stay in the community that needs them. I raised that problem years ago when I argued that counting jobs alone was a poor measure of economic development. The ALICE report gives that argument a household budget.
Look at the work itself. In 2024, 71% of New York home health aides and 60% of cashiers lived in households below the ALICE threshold. Among workers in accommodation and food services, the figure was 52%. Those percentages compare workers’ total household income with the basic costs for their household and location; they aren’t simply a judgment on one hourly wage. They do, however, tell us something about the people we rely on to care for relatives, keep stores open and serve visitors.
Here in the Finger Lakes, tourism adds another complication. A restaurant or hotel worker may be indispensable in July and short on hours in January. Rent, car insurance and groceries don’t follow that calendar. Daly said seasonal workers are often expected to show up for long hours during the busy months while arranging child care on an income they can’t count on year-round. The report’s annual figures don’t capture every month-to-month scramble, but that scramble is part of how a household loses its footing.
Housing kept coming up in our conversation. Daly warned that “you can’t look at one of them in isolation,” but when I pressed her on where the pressure is greatest, she said, “I think it’s housing.” According to the report, 68% of renters below the ALICE threshold spent at least 30% of their income on rent and utilities in 2024. Forty-three percent spent half or more. Among homeowners below the threshold, 61% were burdened by housing costs.
Waterloo’s pantry volunteers described what those percentages can look like in a kitchen. Someone pays more for a place that offers less, then needs food that doesn’t require an oven or microwave. A food donation helps that night. It cannot repair the home, lower the rent, or increase the paycheck.
Obviously, there are limits to what this report proves. Its latest household data is from 2024, so it doesn’t measure every price or policy change since then. And a LOT has changed. A survival budget is an estimate, and no single number describes every family. Nor does falling below the threshold mean every household is hungry or behind on rent. The measure tells us how many lack enough income to cover a defined set of basics. What happens next depends on their circumstances and the help they can reach.
That help matters. Daly pointed to 211, which connects callers with local resources, and to United Way programs that help people navigate benefits and tax assistance. For someone whose car just broke down or whose hours were cut, the right referral can keep a bad week from becoming a crisis. Daly said it best. “In an ideal world, there is no need for a United Way,” she added near the end of our conversation. A referral isn’t a substitute for an economy in which essential work pays enough to live on.
Local officials can start by asking a harder question of every development proposal: What will the jobs pay relative to local housing, transportation and child care costs? Employers can examine wages, schedules and benefits together. Albany can use county-level budgets to see where eligibility rules leave working families between public assistance and actual affordability.
None of those steps is free or simple. Adding housing takes land, infrastructure and political will; higher compensation has to come from somewhere. Pretending those tradeoffs don’t exist has helped bring us here.
Last week, I asked readers to support their local food pantry. I still mean it. The volunteers in Waterloo are meeting a need that cannot wait for a new housing project or a better wage. After talking with Daly, though, I think we owe them more than a steady supply of donations. We owe them an honest account of why so many people need to come through the door in the first place.
If nearly half of New York households can’t cover the basics, the line at the pantry isn’t an exception to how our communities work. It’s a measure of how they work.
