Half of all Suncoast households struggle to afford essentials.
By Kara Newhouse/Suncoast Searchlight
Original Air Date: May 21, 2025
Host: Across the Suncoast, almost half of all households struggle to make ends meet, according to a new report. That report is from the United Way Suncoast and its research partner United for ALICE. It looks at what researchers called a “survival budget” in local counties. Kara Newhouse with Suncoast Searchlight reports.
Kara Newhouse: The “State of ALICE 2025: Update on Financial Hardship” report calculated the minimum income people need to afford the essentials in the place they live. That income is known as the ALICE threshold. ALICE stands for “asset limited, income constrained, and employed.”
It’s not a threshold for thriving but for merely surviving. Families whose income falls below it have to make “difficult choices between housing and medicine and childcare,” said Doug Griesenauer, Vice President of Community Impact at United Way Suncoast.
Doug Griesenauer: If you weren’t to look at the ALICE data and someone said, “this family makes $100,000,” you wouldn’t think that they’d be making financially difficult decisions, but the data show that they are.
According to the report, 10% of households in DeSoto, Manatee, and Sarasota counties fall below the federal poverty line. But an additional third of households aren’t earning enough to afford the essentials. They fall below the ALICE threshold.
So, what is the survival budget in each county?
It depends on your household type.
A family with two adults and two children in child care requires the highest survival budget, according to the report.
Suncoast Annual Household Survival Budget graph via Suncoast Searchlight.
For those families, the survival budget in Sarasota County is about $104,000. That’s more than $10,000 higher than it was a year earlier.
Griesenauer of the United Way Suncoast said that number may surprise some people.
Households that don’t have kids in child care may have lower expenses, but in some cases, their costs are rising faster. For example, in Manatee County, the biggest increase in a survival budget in the new report was for a single adult under 65. Their survival budget is about $37,000. That’s a 16% increase from the previous year.
Since 2010, the number of households in Sarasota, DeSoto and Manatee counties that are not meeting the survival budget increased by almost 37,000.
Griesenauer said this data can be used to inform decision making. For instance, he said that, in 2021, Florida Power & Light changed its assistance eligibility to match the ALICE threshold.
But in the U.S. House of Representatives, politicians are considering budget bills that could have the opposite effect.
Holly Bullard is the Chief Strategy and Development Officer at the Florida Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank based in Orlando.
She said that recent House proposals could create “a perfect storm of pain for ALICE families.”
One of those bills would reduce funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Another would allow the expiration of expanded subsidies for the Affordable Care Act health insurance marketplace. And a third bill would prohibit new taxes on Medicaid providers. Such taxes help to fund Medicaid in Florida.
The cumulative effect of those potential changes on people already struggling to afford basics worries Bullard.
She said, “It is a ticking time bomb.”
For Suncoast Searchlight, I’m Kara Newhouse. To read the full article, go to suncoastsearchlight.org/united-way-alice-report-suncoast-budget-sarasota.
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