Fredericksburg is well known for its many charms: history, quaint neighborhoods, parks, shopping, dining, recreation, entertainment. The people here are nice too: visitors are often struck by how welcoming and diverse our community is.
Despite all of its amenities amid a strong statewide economy, a huge percentage of families in our City earn more than the Federal Poverty Level, but not enough to cover the basic cost of living. They must make hard choices about covering the cost of housing, child care, healthcare, food, clothing, transportation and taxes. They work long hours, sometimes multiple jobs, but despite the historically low unemployment rate, they are not getting ahead. In fact, they are falling behind.
You see them every day. They ring you up at the checkout line. They are teachers, bus drivers, retail workers, office staff. They are your neighbors and the parents of your kid’s best friend. There’s a very good chance that you might be living month-to-month yourself (more than half of us do).
“ALICE” is a shorthand way to describe households that have jobs, but struggle to make ends meet: It stands for Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed.
An ALICE household is one whose income is above the Federal Poverty Level, but below the basic cost of living – they work hard but struggle every month to make ends meet. Poverty is only as far away as one illness, one accident, or one missed paycheck.
An ALICE household makes difficult choices every week between housing costs or childcare, healthy food or healthcare, car insurance or car repair. It’s a constant balancing act.
Being ALICE carries a host of serious risks. Some of them are:
• employees are less productive
• people have poorer diets
• education suffers
• childcare is substandard
• health care is underutilized
• more social services are needed
• more drivers are uninsured
• saving for college or building personal wealth is next to impossible
ALICE is a metric, a tool, a language for understanding the daily struggles of ordinary residents in our City. The language of ALICE allows us to identify the issues, their implications for the community at large, and the areas of intersectionality where issues overlap.
So how does Fredericksburg stack up when it comes to ALICE?
Not well. I was shocked and saddened to learn that in a 2015 study by the American Community Study, 55% of Fredericksburg households were ALICE or below the Federal Poverty Level.
In 2016 it was even worse: a staggering 62% of Fredericksburg households were ALICE or below the Federal Poverty Level.
In other words - in one year alone - during a period of economic recovery following the Great Recession - the ALICE situation in the City got worse, not better.
As the 2015 Alice Report notes: “While short-term strategies can make conditions less severe, only structural economic changes will significantly improve the prospects for ALICE and enable hardworking households to support themselves.”
In order to improve the ALICE situation, we must address the root causes and pursue structural economic solutions. It’s time.
This is not a binary choice between helping people out in the short term versus investing in long-term solutions. We can be both a thriving community and a compassionate one. We need to forget that “either-or” way of thinking. Instead, it’s time for economic solutions that leverage one another. The local economy and ALICE are two issues that overlap. Solving one will reap benefits in the other. At the intersection of the two is where our strongest efforts should be placed. I believe the key lies in workforce development.
Compared to areas to our immediate North, we lack a well-trained workforce in Fredericksburg. I hear from local business owners who have a tough time finding qualified workers here in Fredericksburg. At the same time, the job boards have plenty of low paying positions locally, but to earn more income you must (1) have the necessary skills and (2) be willing to commute some distance to work, typically in Northern VA.
What area employers want is a local talent pool from which to draw qualified workers. What Fredericksburg residents are telling me, over and over again, is that they want local jobs that pay a decent wage.
I believe the long-term economic solution to this situation lies in building a top-shelf workforce development program for students and adults that positions Fredericksburg as a regional center of excellence for creating new jobs and new wealth. All of our non-college bound high school students should be graduating with valuable career skills. This should include technical skills of course, but also soft-skills, comprehensive English as Second Language classes, and interview preparation to help applicants land good jobs. Employers will benefit, and this will attract new businesses to locate to the Fredericksburg region.
When there are more employers here, and more living wage jobs, households will be better off. More of our friends and neighbors will enter the path to home ownership in Fredericksburg. A robust business environment reduces our City’s reliance on residential real estate development and real estate taxes, reduces outbound commuter traffic, makes housing more affordable, improves the standard of living and enhances the quality of life in Fredericksburg.
No doubt about it: ALICE is a serious problem in Fredericksburg that affects all of us in one way or another. Listen to the employers, listen to the hard-working families. It’s time for serious solutions that improve our economy and our quality of life.
