New data shows more than 245,000 additional people fell into poverty in less than a year; Tipping Point Community renews call for bold action
SAN FRANCISCO— Today, new data released by Tipping Point Community indicates that a decade of progress has been reversed, with poverty in the Bay Area having increased sharply. According to the report, more than 1.8 million Bay Area residents – nearly 3 in 10 people – are struggling to make ends meet. The report, which uses the latest available data provided by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), reveals that the regional poverty rate jumped to 16.3%, a 4.1% increase between March 2023 and December 2023 that outpaces the state’s. This represents more than 245,000 additional residents living in poverty in less than a year.
“These numbers underscore the scale of the problem – and the urgency to act,” said Sam Cobbs, CEO of Tipping Point Community. “More families are being pushed into poverty because wages can’t keep up with the Bay Area’s skyrocketing cost of living. Deep cuts to federal direct assistance and local programs will only exacerbate these trends further, especially as the AI boom pushes rents even higher. We’re concerned that the failure to act quickly and at scale will result in this trend growing considerably worse in the years to come.”
The report’s findings paint a grim picture amidst cuts to CalFresh (SNAP) and the social safety net as a result of the budget standoff and H.R. 1.
Additional findings from the report include:
- Over 1 million residents are living in or on the brink of poverty despite full-time work, underscoring the widening gap between wages and the cost of living.
- Poverty rates are rising across nearly every demographic in the Bay Area, but disproportionately among Black and Latino residents – who saw an increase of 6.3% and 5.7% respectively – compared to a 1.3% increase among white residents.
- Safety net programs like CalFresh, housing subsidies, and tax credits kept over 175,000 residents out of poverty, but their effect was reduced compared to previous years due to the expiration of pandemic-era expansions. Without these programs, the poverty rate would have reached 19.1%.
- San Francisco experienced the largest jump out of all Bay Area counties, now having the highest rate in the region at 17.5%.
“Given the substantial cuts to social safety net programs through H.R. 1, we anticipate that these numbers will only worsen over the next few years, deepening poverty across the Bay Area,” said Ali Sutton, Chief Program Officer of Tipping Point Community. “If we fail to preserve the basic supports that keep families healthy, housed, and nourished, the impact will be devastating.”
From 2011 to 2021, the Bay Area’s poverty rate fell drastically from 18.7% to 10.8%. By the end of 2023, however, the region’s poverty rate had spiked to levels last seen in 2016 and nearly two percentage points higher than prior to the pandemic.
Cost of living is a huge factor in the growing poverty rate as costs have widely outpaced wage growth. Between 2016 and 2023, household income for a family of four in the Bay Area increased by 34% while the cost of living increased by 46%. Troublingly, full-time work does not ensure financial stability in the Bay Area, with half of all families living in poverty having at least one full-time, year-round worker.
To confront these trends, Tipping Point is accelerating efforts to advance the policies and systems that will lead to lasting change. Priorities include:
- Unlocking public funding to increase affordable housing
- Expanding access to childcare
- Building evidence for innovative training and apprenticeship programs
- Improving pathways to college completion for low-income students
- Increasing access to and preserving social safety net programs
In response to seismic cuts to federal direct assistance, Tipping Point recently announced a commitment to increase Bay Area giving to $1 billion over the coming decade.
Tipping Point’s impact reports demonstrate how effective these investments can be in supporting individuals and families on their path to stability. In 2024:
- Over 9,000 individuals received services that either helped them transition out of homelessness or prevented them from experiencing it.
- 97% of Tipping Point’s grantee clients maintained their housing, compared with a rate of 86% across the Bay Area.
- Tipping Point’s grantees have exceeded the statewide graduation rate of 56%, despite serving students with higher needs who face more barriers to graduation.
- Clients who completed job-training programs funded by Tipping Point saw a 133% wage increase three years post-training.
“These programs are making a real difference where they’ve been deployed, but the scale of the problem requires us to go bigger and faster,” added Cobbs. “By combining the power of proven programs with an unprecedented commitment of resources and tackling these challenges at the policy and structural level, we can bend the curve back toward progress.”
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Tipping Point Community (TPC) is a Bay Area-based nonprofit dedicated to advancing highly promising poverty-fighting solutions and critical services. Through targeted investments in housing, early childhood, education, and employment programming across the region, TPC works to cultivate community-driven nonprofit networks capable of creating opportunity and prosperity for the entire Bay Area community.
