Human Services Coalition of Oregon

What does a family actually need to get by?

by Lisa Joyce, Oregon Housing and Community Services

Government uses an outdated tool for identifying people in need: the federal poverty threshold. Developed in the 1960s, the threshold largely rests on an estimate of the amount of cash income a family needed to buy enough food “for temporary or emergency use when fund are low.”

The federal government has not updated its calculations of poverty except to make adjustments for inflation. The measure does not reflect the changing lives of American families, for example, the federal definition does not reflect the costs of families in which both parents work – expenses such as transportation, child care, and clothing.

As a measure of how times have changed: when the poverty threshold was developed, food took a larger share of the typical family budget than did housing.

For its Report on Poverty – 2008, Oregon Housing and Community Services developed a “basic family budget” that reflects a family’s actual expenses – housing (including utilities), food, child care, transportation, healthcare, other necessities, and taxes.

It turns out that the federal poverty threshold falls far short of meeting a family’s basic needs. In fact, for an urban single parent with a pre-school aged child, the federal poverty threshold will fund just 45 percent of the family’s expenses.

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