Don’t Call It Upward Mobility If People Still Can’t Afford to Live

For several reasons, the notion of what constitutes a basic standard of living in any given area of the U.S. is a moving target. The cost of housing and medical care, the cost and availability of child care, the cost of transportation — all become real considerations in this conversation, and all of them are almost constantly shifting.

Those shifts, though, trend in one direction — up. Any attempt to calculate the quality of life in America that does not account for those escalating essential costs is a failed effort.

Michelle Murray has seen plenty of such failures. As CEO of the nonprofit Living Wage for US, Murray spends most of her time diving into the actual costs of living in every corner of the country. She knows that branding an increase in household income as upward mobility without considering all the associated costs is a lie, though it doesn’t stop some organizations from doing so.

And while the term “affordability crisis” has become a political football in Washington, D.C., the extensive research done by her organization has led Murray to a simple but unbending conclusion.

The crisis is real.

It’s getting worse.

And though there is no single fix to those truths, figuring out how much per hour someone needs to earn in order to cover the bare-bones basic cost of living somewhere is a start.

“In some of the higher-cost locations of the country, you’re looking at more than 70% of households that aren’t earning enough to cover a basic [standard] of living,” Murray said. “Our problems on affordability are even bigger than what people are talking about.”

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I reached out to Murray after seeing her draft response to a report published earlier this year by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington think tank. What the AEI’s authors wrote, essentially, was that the American middle class isn’t hollowing out after all. Rather, they declared, things look different because so many more people are moving to upper-middle-class status thanks to their increased incomes. This economy-is-healthy conclusion drew cheerful coverage nationally.

If that sounds fantastical to you, if that does not jibe with your actual life experience, I’m with you — but I’m no expert. Murray is, and the way she deftly poked holes in the AEI study is in line with how Living Wage for US tries constantly to see the bigger picture.

Among other things, Murray said, the AEI report relies on a statistical metric called the Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index to adjust household income for inflation over time. That index consistently finds lower inflation rates than does the Consumer Price Index most of us have heard of, in part because it assumes that if the price of an item rises, we’ll just select a cheaper option.

That works if you’re buying a TV, but not when it comes to medical care, gasoline, housing — things that aren’t discretionary. “Part of this is, they’re using the wrong index, and they’re doing so because it gives them the results they want,” Murray said.

The AEI study also notes that more overall household incomes are up and into “upper middle class” territory because more women have joined the workforce over the past several decades. But its report doesn’t account for the soaring child care costs that are part of that double-income tradeoff. Those costs rose 263% between 1990 and 2024 — more than twice the rate of inflation overall during that time, according to research by Living Wage for US.

The report tamps down the effects of skyrocketing housing costs, the cost of education to obtain those better-paying jobs and the cost of health insurance. The point here, though, isn’t that one study is flawed; it’s that workers’ wages or household incomes never exist in a vacuum. The price index that the AEI report used, for example, makes no distinction among geographic areas of the United States. You’d have a hard time convincing a Californian that their housing costs are the same as those of someone living in Iowa.

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Unlike the AEI study, Murray’s organization is not attempting to define the American classes. Rather, it strives to accurately determine what a living wage looks like.

Living Wage for US defines a decent standard of living as one that will cover the cost of a two-bedroom apartment at below median rent prices, a USDA low-cost diet with all meals cooked at home, transportation (a car or public system) to get to work, basic health care, and child care. It assumes two working people per household (1.73, to be statistically precise) at full-time hours.

That is an exceedingly modest standard — and even then, the organization qualifies it by recognizing that many people live far from where they work. Instead, it looks for the costs in the most affordable county within an hour’s commute of one’s job, then calculates what each worker would need to earn in order to cover the basics. Think of a San Francisco worker commuting from Contra Costa County.

For Los Angeles, the living wage works out to $38.61 per hour. In San Francisco, it’s $40.19. For Huntsville, Alabama, the figure is $24.07. It’s $28.49 in Austin, Texas, and if you’re in Worcester, Mass., it’s $30.19.

There is no single living wage. There are people, spread all across the country, who need a wage that allows them to live where they are. According to the research by Murray’s organization, half of Americans don’t reach that figure, whatever it may be in the place they call home.

For Living Wage for US, the goal is not only to elevate the national conversation about living wages to a comprehensible and largely politics-free level. It’s to directly consult with companies to help them understand what the real-life costs are for their workers, and to begin moving them toward paying wages that actually sustain their workforces, leading to lower turnover and higher productivity.

“There’s a lot of talk about people leaving California for, say, Texas. But the real story is that things are not fine in Texas, either. They’re not fine anywhere,” Murray said. “It’s the same problem no matter where you go, and you can’t seem to get away from it.”

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Living Wage for US participates in the International Labour Organization, which strives to raise wages in countries around the world. No such national wage increase is likely anytime soon in the United States, where Congress hasn’t hiked the $7.25 federal minimum in nearly 17 years. That’s one reason why Murray’s group works with businesses directly, trying to change the thinking one company at a time.

It is a slow process. The organization says it has led more than 300 individual employers to increase workers’ wages by $350 million since 2021; those employers include small businesses and the giant Hershey Company. Clearly, there is much more to be done.

“It’s been a mismatch, in that both political parties have said we’re doing so well in terms of the economy, but a lot of people are saying, ‘Wait a minute. We don’t feel like we’re doing so well,’” Murray said. “It causes political upheaval, and if someone doesn’t start addressing this really directly, it becomes difficult to keep people calm and happy in any given place.”

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