N.C. Answers: What's a 'living income' in my county?

It’s expensive to live on the cheap in North Carolina.

A single parent with a baby needs to earn $50,530 to make ends meet, according to the NC Budget & Tax Center’s Living Income Standard. Two parents with two children have to earn $69,270.

Across the USA Today Network counties in North Carolina, the living income ranges from $39,760 to $53,430 for a single-parent family of two, and $58,500 to $72,700 for a family of four. Cleveland County is the low end and Buncombe the high.

Read more below the charts.

You can’t directly compare these numbers to the 2019 Living Income Standard because the organization changed its calculations. But yes, everything has gone up.

These incomes are all way higher than the federal poverty level, also known as the federal poverty line. That’s $18,310/year for a parent and a child, and $27,750 for two adults and two children.

Even so, the NC Budget & Tax Center’s calculations are “conservative,” research manager Patrick McHugh said. “This is not a thriving and economically stable income. This is a just-making-ends-meet income.” Paycheck to paycheck.

The food costs, for instance -- $830 for a family of four, $370 for a single parent with a baby -- allow for few meals out and not much meat. In housing, two kids share a bedroom.

“We’re trying to underscore the inadequacy of the federal poverty line and the gross inadequacy of the minimum wage,” McHugh said.

The federal poverty line calculation was set decades ago by a home economist working for the Social Security Administration. It simply multiplies the cost of food and severely underestimates the price of housing, transportation, health care and child care, McHugh said.

Excepting only Gaston County, childcare for two costs more than $1,000/month. In most of our counties, it costs significantly more than rent for a two-bedroom apartment. Too bad you can’t live in your kids’ daycare.

Many readers will look at the housing estimates and find them low. With our current inflation, “These data are going to be obsolete sooner rather than later,” McHugh said.

Even more troubling, in much of North Carolina, the $15 minimum wage urged by labor activists “doesn’t even come close to paying the bills,” McHugh said.

In Cleveland, Davidson and Lenoir counties, two parents with two kids could meet the living income standard if they were each making a little below $15. But that’s not the case in the USA Today Network’s other North Carolina counties. Cleveland is the only one of our counties where a single parent could meet the living income standard making less than $20/hour.

Should we all join the roughly 11,000 people who live in Alleghany County? It has the lowest cost of living in North Carolina -- $38,400 for a single parent with a baby, $52,950 for two parents with two kids.

Maybe if you can work remotely. “The really vicious paradox families are facing … is that the jobs are mostly being created in the most expensive areas of our state,” McHugh said.

Alleghany’s number of employed people is up from its rock-bottom COVID level, but it was still only 4,029 in 2021, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

More: Wages or inflation -- which is rising faster in North Carolina?

Solutions for where we live now

Economics authorities in Buncombe and New Hanover counties nodded in agreement and shook their heads in dismay.

“I think it’s sad,” said Linda Thompson, New Hanover’s chief diversity and equity officer. And worse, “There are families in fact that live off much less.”

“This is what it’s taking just to get by,” said Vicki Meath, executive director of Just Economics in Asheville. “Which of these numbers could we reduce, and how are people living below that?”

The housing costs for Buncombe County are actually low, she noted – the fair-market rent for a one-bedroom apartment is now a hair over $1,200.

With our current inflation, “These data are going to be obsolete sooner rather than later,” McHugh acknowledged.

Inflation also means that people are running to stay in place, Meath said. “Workers are forced to continue fighting for higher wages just to continue to meet the needs they were meeting a few years ago.”

The key is to not just raise wages but lower the cost of living, Thompson said. And that requires a multiplicity of solutions.

New Hanover county government is building a supermarket in a longstanding food desert, to be managed by the North Side Co-Op. In February, the commissioners put $15 million toward affordable housing. They’ve put money toward the Starway Village affordable-housing project. Public transportation funding is also on the menu.

“It all intersects,” Thompson said. When people can’t find child care, they can’t work. If they can’t work, they can’t afford transportation. And so on.

The New Testament says “the poor you will always have with you,” Thompson said. But “just because the Scripture says that doesn’t mean we don’t need to work on it.”

Danielle Dreilinger is a North Carolina storytelling reporter and author of the book The Secret History of Home Economics, an NPR Favorite History Book of 2021. Contact her at 919-236-3141 or ddreilinger@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on The Fayetteville Observer: N.C. Answers: What's the cost of living in my county?