Nearly half of residents struggle to pay bills in one California county

By Alex Tanzi | Bloomberg

Almost half of households in Riverside, California, can’t afford usual expenses and about a third had trouble paying an energy bill in the last year, according to a Census Bureau survey.

Among the 15 largest US metro areas, Riverside had the highest share of respondents facing key measures of financial stress. In addition, one in seven said there was sometimes or often not enough to eat at home in the previous seven days, the latest Census household pulse survey shows.

Located about 50 miles east of Los Angeles, Riverside is at the heart of a warehousing-industry hub that boomed during the pandemic but has been showing signs of slowdown more recently. The metro area’s unemployment rate has jumped in the past two years to 5.5%, above the national average, and inflation there is also higher than the country’s average.

The Census Bureau began the survey at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic to provide policymakers with near real-time data on how Americans are doing. It includes measures of extreme poverty, such as whether respondents and their families are having trouble everyday bills, as well as employment, housing and wellbeing.