Carolyn DiPaolo35% of households in Palm Beach County are led by a worker who is battling to pay the bills.
More than 700 people gathered in Miami Beach last week to focus on ALICE, the growing number of working people stretching to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table.
ALICE is an acronym coined to draw attention to people who are Asset Limited, Income Constrained and Employed. The name helps humanize the statistics and makes people in this group visible and heard, said Laura Bruno, vice president of the United Way of Northern New Jersey.
Her organization launched United For ALICE after recognizing that many people were struggling to pay the bills in one of the country’s most affluent areas.
ALICE families may seem to be thriving. But rising costs for housing, child care, transportation and food often force them to choose between paying for utilities or paying for medicine. For many people in this group, a flat tire is a financial disaster.
They are also often the front-line workers who are essential to a strong economy.
“They are our neighbors. They work alongside us and hope for a better life,” Angela Williams, CEO of United Way Worldwide, told the audience at the National ALICE Summit in Miami Beach. “It’s a whole lot harder to make ends meet than it was a couple years ago, even a few months ago.”
The ALICE project collects data for every county in the United States. Organizations in 44 states use the data to promote systemic change and support for ALICE.
United For ALICE estimates that 35% of the 605,000 households in Palm Beach County were in the ALICE group in 2023, the latest data available. Add that to the 11% of county residents with income under the federal poverty level, and 46% of Palm Beach County residents cannot afford the essentials, researchers found.
Nationally, an estimated 42% of households fall below the poverty level and ALICE threshold.
Federal data, including the American Community Survey and information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is used to calculate household size, occupation and income. Researchers also estimate a household survival budget, the minimum cost to live and work, in each county. The budget includes housing, child care, food, transportation, health care, technology, and taxes. It does not include savings for emergencies or goals like college or retirement.
How much it takes to make it here
In Palm Beach County in 2023, the ALICE project estimates that a single person working full time needed to earn $21 an hour or $42,000 a year to afford the essentials. (That is well above the federal poverty level of $14,580.)
- A single parent with one child in child care had to earn $30 an hour or about $60,540 a year.
“In terms of policy, everyone’s talking about how it’s almost impossible these days to afford the situation that you’re in, but nobody puts a name on it,” Florida Chamber of Commerce CEO Mark Wilson said at the conference. “To talk about ALICE, a lot of people candidly, they don’t know. And it gives me and chambers an opportunity to say, ‘I’m really glad you asked,’ and we get to explain what it is.”
The Florida Chamber includes ALICE data in its quality of life scorecard.
Wilson said he likes the measure because it shines a light on working people.
ALICE data puts the gap between wages and affordability in each county in sharp relief.
The No. 1 occupation by numbers in Florida is retail salesperson (312,000 in 2023) with a median hourly pay of $14.89. ALICE data experts found 39% of retail salespeople statewide fall in the ALICE income category.
- Customer service representatives are the No. 2 occupation. A median hourly wage of $18.31 put 36% of the reps in the ALICE category in 2023.
The data has won the attention of state Sen. Alexis Calatayud, R-Miami, who told the audience at a conference panel that insights into ALICE families can drive systemic change that advances the American dream of upward mobility.
“The deciding voters of Republicans and Democrats right now are people who feel forgotten,” Calatayud said at the conference. “They feel that they’ve been left out of economic opportunity, and they’re looking for there to be a different system for them to operate in.”
United For ALICE leaders created a Community Advisory Committee three years ago with members who are or have been in the ALICE economic group. The committee meets monthly on Zoom and members are compensated for their time.
Their message at the summit: We are resilient and resourceful. And we need help.
Supporting ALICE families
Last week’s summit, held every other year, was part pep rally, part information exchange among United Ways and its ALICE partners.
AdventHealth, based in Altamonte Springs, focuses on ZIP codes with higher numbers of ALICE families when it recruits high school students for health careers. The nonprofit hospital group has 100,000 employees and treated 100 million patients last year.
A nurse’s assistant at AdventHealth can become a nurse earning a six-figure salary through a five-year program the nonprofit pays for, Michael Griffin, a senior vice president, said last week.
“I would love to say that we do that out of the goodness of our hearts,” Griffin said. “But it’s also because, as a business, we need nurses.”
Griffin said AdventHealth relies on ALICE and other data in its community service.
“Whether I’m talking to a Republican or a Democrat, I can talk to the numbers, and you see this wave of acknowledgment,” he said. “Now they’re going to disagree on maybe the way to attack that, but at least when you have this kind of agreement over the data, we’re speaking with one voice, then you can elevate the discussion to, how are we going to go at this?”
Walmart Foundation President Julie Gehrki, left, on stage with Stephanie Hoopes of the United Way of Northern New Jersey. (Photo: United For ALICE)
On stage at the conference, Walmart Foundation President Julie Gehrki pointed to the company’s decision in 2023 to eliminate degree requirements for many jobs as a way it is removing requirements that keep some ALICE workers from moving up.
Other partners include credit unions like ENT Credit Union in Colorado, which helped pay for the state’s first ALICE report last year. The goal is to draw attention to the needs of ALICE families and find ways for the credit union to better serve them.
“ALICE was a gift to the entire nonprofit sector to put a face on the folks that are doing all the things that they’re supposed to do and still struggling,” Sandra Veszi Einhorn, chair of the Florida Housing Finance Corp., said last week. “That’s how we change policy: by helping people understand not just the data but the people who are behind the data.”
Thank you to the Knight Foundation for inviting Stet News and supporting our participation at the National ALICE Summit.
I am a co-founder, writer and editor for Stet News. I am also a former senior editor at The Palm Beach Post. For 20 years, I oversaw some of the most consequential stories published by the paper, including the “Corruption County” reporting project that led to multiple arrests of elected officials. I am a member of the Leadership Palm Beach County Class of 2013. I live in West Palm Beach with my husband, Bill DiPaolo.
