Income needed to support a family fuels housing instability in Clark County
As family homelessness in Clark County increases, data shows that affording basic needs for people with children comes with a six-figure price tag.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Living Wage Calculator highlights a widening gap between what Clark County families earn and what it costs to live in the region. While an individual without children needs to earn about $26 an hour to cover basic necessities such as food, rent and healthcare, a single parent raising two children needs to earn more than $60 an hour, or $125,836 a year, according to the data.
The steep earnings needed to raise a family make it easy to slip into housing instability, advocates say.
"Many families we serve are working but not earning a livable wage, and there are very few affordable housing options in Clark County. It only takes one disruption - a job change, transportation issue, medical issue or rent increase - for a family to lose housing," said Shane Scalf, executive director of homeless nonprofit Family Promise.
Difficult choices
MIT's data shows that across different types of households, Clark County families must earn high wages to meet basic needs.
According to the data, the cost of childcare is a major driver of instability. Annual childcare is about $14,873 for one child. For a household with three children, that total jumps to $38,000.
Transportation to get to work, school and childcare eat up about $13,000 a year for a two-income, one-child household, according to the MIT data. For a household with two working parents and three children, transportation costs are more than $17,000.
The MIT data shows that a single parent with two children must budget nearly $48,000 a year for childcare and transportation. That is $4,000 a month, before paying for housing, healthcare, food and other basic necessities.
A sudden loss of income can quickly push struggling families toward housing instability. When a two-income household with two children becomes a single-income household, the working parent would need to increase hourly earnings to about $30 (an increase of 91 percent) to maintain the basic costs for living, according to the data.
The data suggests that a job loss, divorce, disability or death can change a family's housing situation overnight.
That was the reality for Monica Zazueta-Tabor.
Zazueta-Tabor lost her partner and father of her two children in 2024. She said that even when she was working part time at a daycare and her partner, Ryan Tabor, was operating a handyman business, the family still struggled to afford rent and basic necessities.
"The two of us, we were still struggling," she said. "It was always paycheck to paycheck and just making sure we had food, toilet paper and gas."
When Tabor died, Zazueta-Tabor became a single parent overnight while navigating grief and the loss of a household income.
She said she likely would not have been able to remain housed without moving into an affordable tiny-home community, which has enabled her to keep up with rent and other necessities needed for her two young children.
Family homelessness in Clark County has increased almost 50 percent from 2022 to 2026, according to Council for the Homeless data. Zazueta-Tabor said the trend does not surprise her.
She said that support programs for families can create catch-22 situations. For example, her family receives food assistance benefits. When both she and Tabor were working and earning above a certain income threshold, those benefits were threatened to be reduced. Even with both incomes, they still would not have earned enough to cover their family's basic needs, let alone additional food.
"We were very much on this teeter-totter," Zazueta-Tabor said.
She said she hears from households dealing with similar struggles. She said she regularly has conversations with families about their biggest concern: housing costs.
"(Families) are having to choose food and diapers and gas or do we pay our electricity bill?" Zazueta-Tabor said.
Scalf pointed to shrinking funding for prevention resources, shelter space and other safety nets in Clark County - leaving many working families one crisis away.
National Epidemiologic Survey data shows that children experiencing homelessness are 46.9 times more likely to face homelessness as adults.
"If we are serious about reducing homelessness long-term, we have to start by preventing and ending homelessness for families," Scalf said.
This story was made possible by Community Funded Journalism, a project from The Columbian and the Local Media Foundation. Top donors include the Ed and Dollie Lynch Fund, Patricia, David and Jacob Nierenberg, Connie and Lee Kearney, Steve and Jan Oliva, The Cowlitz Tribal Foundation and the Mason E. Nolan Charitable Fund. The Columbian controls all content. For more information, visit columbian.com/cfj.
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