A Bay Area couple with two kids can't make it on $50,000 a year

The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

Maria Frias thinks of herself as middle class.

She works as an office manager for Bay Area Legal Aid, where she draws a salary of about $27,000 a year. Her husband, Ricardo, drives a laundry truck and takes in about $26,000.

But all they can afford is a $750-a-month, one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco's Excelsior neighborhood. They sleep in the same room as their daughters, Stephanie, 10, and Andrea, 6. They have no telephone. And Frias has to set aside about $400 a month to pay off a credit card balance that went into collection.

"It's so hard," Frias said. "I'm falling behind."

The hard truth is that $53,000 a year doesn't cut it anymore in the Bay Area. Tens of thousands of working families in the region, even those with what many would consider decent-paying jobs, find a modestly comfortable standard of living is out of their reach.

A family of four in the Bay Area with two working adults must earn $77,069, equaling an hourly wage of $18.53, just to pay for basic necessities, a study released today calculates. If only one adult works, that figure falls to $53,075, largely because the family doesn't have to pay for child care, according to the report by the California Budget Project, a liberal Sacramento research group. But that one wage-earner must make $25.52 an hour.

And a single parent with two children needs to take in $65,864 annually, at an hourly wage of $31.67, to cover expenses, the Budget Project figures.

Statewide, the two-working-parent family needs an annual income of $72,343 to cover necessities; the family with one working adult must earn $50,383.

That's in a state with one of the highest minimum hourly wages in the country - $7.50. In San Francisco, the minimum wage is even higher, $9.14. The federal minimum wage is $5.85.

"Most Californians live on less than $50,000," said Michael Shires, an associate professor of public policy at Pepperdine University.

Places with affordable real estate don't seem to have these problems.