“SAN FRANCISCO — It takes Tazo Stuart-Riascos 28,000 steps per day to make ends meet in one of America’s most unaffordable places.
He begins clocking that prodigious number of paces before sunrise, as he hustles from his apartment in Oakland to his retail job in San Francisco, then back to the East Bay for his night shift at Trader Joe’s, where he’s on his feet until 10 p.m. All that scrambling and Stuart-Riascos still just barely gets by.
He’s part of a growing number of people — many working one or more jobs — who find themselves struggling to stay afloat as the cost of living skyrockets and wages fail to keep pace, making it even harder to survive in the already-expensive Bay Area.
“It’s the new standard of living in California,” Stuart-Riascos, 36, said. “People aren’t surprised you’re working two jobs nowadays. It’s this normal thing. You try to work your way out, but you’re actually working your way further in.”
For the first time in more than a decade, the Bay Area’s poverty rate is rising significantly, jumping by more than 4 percent in less than a year, according to an analysis released Wednesday by Tipping Point Community, a San Francisco-based anti-poverty nonprofit organization founded 20 years ago by the man who is now the city’s mayor.
More than a million Bay Area residents live in poverty — an income of about $28,000 or less per year for one adult — and about 800,000 others are near the line, according to the study. It relies on data through 2023, the most recent numbers available. The spike of poverty across the region, which includes six counties that ring San Francisco Bay, outpaced the statewide increase and widened existing racial and educational disparities.
Stuart-Riascos, like other residents fighting to afford their basic needs, said he feels “stuck in survival mode” and is questioning his future in the place where he was born and raised. Two-thirds of his monthly income goes to rent — well beyond what researchers consider to be “severely cost-burdened.”
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