The assumption that every parent should do paid work is a bad one
Timothy P. Carney
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While New York City definitely needs to make changes in order to become more affordable, it’s an odd claim that half of everyone living in New York City cannot afford to live in New York City.
Of course, “can afford to” has always been a subjective threshold and not always a well-defined one. This New York Times story is hooked on a new study by United Way of New York City that claims to have come up with a better measure than the official ones of “affordability.”
Certainly there is room for improvement on current measures of poverty and affordability, as different families in different neighborhoods with different situations can have very different standards of living with the same amount of income. These United Way report authors try to take this into account with a measure they call “true cost of living,” which is derived from a measure called the “self-sufficiency standard.”
Using this “New York City true cost of living,” the study concludes that 50% of New York City households do not make enough to afford the true cost of living. The specifics here are more eye-catching. “The rate of income inadequacy for households with children is 63%,” and it’s even higher for parents with children under the age of 5.
Why is the percentage so high? Because this study considers family income below $100,000 generally inadequate. “An adult with a preschooler needs $82,154 to $119,974 annually to meet basic needs depending on where they live,” the study says.
Why, in the Bronx, do two adults with one preschooler need $90,000 in income to survive?
Likewise, why has the true cost of living increased by more than 20% in two years?
The answer to both is the same: The cost of child care has increased by 22%. The study pegs childcare costs in the not-trendy parts of Brooklyn at about $2,500 per month.
And so here’s why this study assumes nobody can afford to live in New York City: because the study assumes that every single parent has a full-time paid job, and so every single child under 5 is in full-time daycare.
“The TCL assumes that all adults work to support their families,” the study declares, indicating that anything that acknowledges stay-at-home parents is “inaccurate.”
“Including work-related expenses, such as transportation, taxes, and child care, reflects the changes in workforce participation over the past several decades, particularly among women. By not including child care expenses, the [official poverty measure] continues to reflect—implicitly—a demographic model of mostly two-parent families with a stay-at-home mother.”
So now we see that this United Way study is not a mere economic study but also a culture war document. The authors posit, contrary to reality, that every New York City parent works outside the home for pay. Thus they include in the true cost of living taxes, commuting, and daycare. Thus the study erases the significant minority of mothers in New York City who stay at home until their child is in school. Alternatively, it pretends that parents who have opted out of the workforce nevertheless have costs that they have chosen to eschew, most notably daycare.
Nationwide, about one-third of married couple households with children have one parent outside the workforce, and in a similar but slightly different data point, about one-third of the mothers with children under age 6 do not participate in the labor force — that is, they are neither employed nor unemployed but are not even seeking a job.
This whole United Way study, and the conclusion that 50% of New York City residents can’t afford to reside in the city, is based not on facts but on a conviction that every single father and mother of a newborn should get back to the office. The city government states, “Both parents are in the labor force in more than half of families with children under six,” meaning some large minority of such families do not have both parents in the labor force.
It’s a common error, assuming every couple wants or has both parents working. It leads to mismeasurement and thus to bad policy.