“Child care expenses with both parents working, medical out-of-pocket expenses, not to mention other things that are necessities that didn’t even exist in the ‘60s that you really need today.” The dream of having your children do better than you “When you think about what it took to make ends meet in 1967, it’s very different from what it takes to make ends meet today,” said Bohn, who specializes in income inequality trends. But the costs of staying middle class, or jumping up the income ladder, are higher than they used to be. Stagnating incomes and rising inequality don’t necessarily mean Californians are having a tougher time making ends meet. And the gap between rich and middle class is higher here than the vast majority of other states. Incomes for the median family grew at a faster clip over the past 30 years nationwide than in California. But it is worse here than in the rest of the country. That story is by no means unique to California. “We’ve all experienced booms and busts through economic cycles, but over time the highest-income families in the state have really seen a larger growth in their opportunities relative to middle income families.” “The starkest comparison is between families at the middle and less than the middle with those at the very top,” says Sarah Bohn, research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. While earnings have ticked up since then, the brutal recessions of the early 1990s and late 2000s essentially wiped out entire decades of modest income gains. By 2014, the average California family, after adjusting for inflation, was making only 8 percent more than it made three decades ago. Starting in 1980, incomes for middle-class Californians essentially stagnated. Median family incomes rose steadily in real terms throughout the period, and by 1980 the average household was making 20 percent more than in 1967.
Well, the late 1960s and ‘70s were pretty good years. When was the best time to be a middle-class Californian? The dream of being-and staying-middle class That's a good thing.īut something is changing, and Californians can sense it. Here’s the data behind how four common California dreams are slipping away. Your average Californian is much more likely to get a college education and much less likely to be mugged today than forty years ago. All too often the gloom and doom obscures objective gains the state has made in service of a sepia-toned narrative. Now, when cost of living is factored in, we’re the poorest state in the country.Įulogizing the California dream has developed into its own cottage industry in recent years, with politicians of all stripes promising to restore our glory days. Starting in the late 1970s, California’s poverty rate crept higher than the national average. If the past half-century has been rough for middle income Californians, it’s been brutal for those lower on the income ladder. A house that 50 years ago cost about three times a younger California household’s salary now costs seven times what a younger household earns. That’s a problem because at the same time, the state’s cost of living has exploded. More than half of Californians born that year made less than their parents did by age 30. Over the past four decades, California middle-class incomes have stagnated: The median California family is making only marginally more now than they were in 1980. More than 50 percent thought younger Californians were doing worse. A recent USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll found that only 17 percent of Californians believe the state’s current generation is doing better than previous ones. Celebrity endorsements aside, there’s an increasingly pervasive feeling among those of us who actually live here that the California dream is just harder than it used to be.
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