Seven out of ten. That’s the number of families who are having difficulty making ends meet despite being employed in Rochester.
That statistic comes from the latest United Way ALICE report, an acronym standing for Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed.
Stephanie Hoopes, the director of the ALICE Project and the lead researcher in the New York report says it’s important to realize poverty isn’t just about the extremes.
"Understanding poverty, you need to understand this group of people that are above the official federal poverty line, but they’re not earning enough to be financially stable."
Hoopes says 63% of jobs in Rochester pay less than $20 an hour, and most of those are part time.
"They are often unpredictable schedules, so you can see the challenge of - at the most you’re going to be earning $30,000, but you don’t know, one week or one month to the next whether you’re actually going to be getting that full salary."
Bonnie DuVinney is the Director of Operations at the United Way of Greater Rochester, and says this is a fragile statistic area to be in.
"If they have an emergency, if their car breaks down, if their childcare is not available, all those things can lead to going from just above the poverty line to being in poverty."
When creating the initiative, Stephanie Hoopes said they specifically wanted the acronym to be a name.
"We all know Alice. There are Alice’s in our families, in our neighborhoods; some of us have been Alice."
While 84,000 of these families reside in city boundaries, the numbers are not limited to downtown Rochester.
More than half of households in the villages of Brockport, Webster and sections of Gates have incomes below the ALICE threshold.
Two out of five households in Monroe County report having an income that does not meet their basic needs.