COVID widened the chasm between Bay Area ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’
A new poll shows how some higher-earners in the Bay Area benefited from the COVID pandemic, while low-wage workers struggled to survive.
Even as the COVID-19 pandemic slashed the finances of many Bay Area families, devastated their sense of economic security and forced them to scrimp, downsize and seek help, it simultaneously lifted others up, padded their savings and allowed them to upgrade their lifestyle.
A new poll by the Bay Area News Group and Joint Venture Silicon Valley spotlights the vast disparities between these two groups, showing how drastically the already substantial chasm between the region’s “haves” and “have-nots” has widened. Low-income workers whose jobs must be done in person experienced more pay cuts, layoffs and financial distress during the pandemic, while higher-earning people who could work from home were far more likely to say their finances improved.
In a region where inequity has long been a defining issue, experts say this growing division could have disastrous effects on our economy – potentially driving out the workers the region needs to cook our food, drive our trucks and watch our children.
Read part one of our survey: Has COVID pushed Bay Area stresses to the breaking point?
“We divided into two camps,” said Russell Hancock, president and CEO of Joint Venture Silicon Valley. “And this was already happening but people weren’t focused on it. It wasn’t in our faces. The pandemic just made it bold, stark, dramatic and inescapable.”
When polled last month, 51% of people making less than $50,000 a year said their financial situation has gotten worse during the pandemic, while 13% said it improved and 36% said it stayed the same. Just the opposite happened as people’s incomes increased: 51% of respondents making $250,000 or more reported their financial situation improved, while just 7% said it got worse.
While 5% of people making at least $250,000 lost a job during the pandemic, nearly a quarter of those earning less than $50,000 did. And people with higher incomes were much more likely to be able to work from home, lessening their exposure to the virus — 71% of people earning $250,000 or more had that option, compared to 20% of people earning $50,000 or less.
These pandemic-related impacts also fell unequally on those of different races and ethnicities, reinforcing other long-standing dividing lines. Since the pandemic began, 63% of Black and African American residents said they worried about savings, compared to 35% of White or Caucasian residents and 47% of Hispanic or Latino residents.
The poll surveyed 1,610 people in five core Bay Area counties between Sept. 22 and Sept. 26. The number of Black and African American residents who responded was relatively small, making for a higher margin of error for that group.
Before COVID, Ronnie Davis, a 70-year-old African American chef from Oakland, was selling food like southern fried chicken and oxtail dinners out of his house and getting paid to shuttle people without cars to errands and appointments. It helped supplement his disability payments, which are less than $1,000 per month.
When COVID hit, Davis had to shut down his side-hustles. Then, in the summer of 2020, Davis caught the virus and spent 12 weeks in the hospital, near death.
He pulled through, but now has about $50,000 in medical bills, credit card debt and other bills, and is struggling to stay on top of his more immediate expenses, such as his insurance, utilities and subsidized rent.
“I do what I can,” Davis said, “and what I can’t do, I tell them you have to wait. I just don’t have it.”
The pandemic has treated 40-year-old Allen Ishibashi of Campbell much differently. Ishibashi, who handles real estate acquisitions for the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District, transitioned seamlessly to life working from home. His wife, a tech worker, got a new job and a raise.
Working remotely also means Ishibashi and his wife no longer have to pay for after-school child care for their 12- and 8-year-olds — which saves them about $1,000 a month.
“We’re very fortunate,” Ishibashi said. “We didn’t get sick and our financial situation stayed the same or even improved a little.”
Higher-earners tend to hold office jobs that can easily be done from home, while lower-earners are more likely to hold positions facing the public or service-industry jobs that must be done in person — and in many cases, could not be done at all during the pandemic, said Jacob Denney, economic justice policy director for Bay Area think tank SPUR.
But that’s not the whole story.
Even among people who said their job could be done from home, less than half of those making less than $50,000 said they were actually working remotely all or most of the time, while 91% of those making $250,000 said the same. And that doesn’t appear to be by choice — 80% of people at the lowest end of the income spectrum said they’d prefer to work remotely all or most of the time. Higher-earners also were more likely to approve of how their employer handled the COVID crisis.
While Denney couldn’t say for sure what caused that disparity, he pointed out high-income jobs generally come with more benefits and flexibility.
“I suspect it’s related to how we treat low-wage workers and what we expect of them,” he said.
Contra Costa County residents are less likely to work remotely. Of those who said they can do their job from home, 65% said they were working remotely all or most of the time, compared to 71% in Alameda County, 77% in San Francisco, and 78% in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties.
Contra Costa County has the lowest median household income of the five counties, followed closely by Alameda. San Mateo and Santa Clara counties have the highest incomes.
Ever since she lost her job working with people with disabilities about 15 years ago, Susan Dupuis of Pleasant Hill had been making ends meet as a substitute teacher. When COVID closed the schools last year, Dupuis was left without an income — her old computer and spotty internet made it impossible to teach online. She received unemployment benefits for a while, until the federal COVID payments ran out. And she signed up for food stamps for the first time.
Dupuis recently went back to work, but just a few weeks after the school year started, she caught COVID. While she says the vaccine saved her life, the weeks off work struggling to recuperate once again decimated her income.
The financial stress, isolation of quarantine and constant bad breaks have taken a toll.
“I feel like I’ve kind of lost my edge and my sanity and my motivation,” Dupuis said. “I used to look at my mom in her 90s and think she’s waiting to die. And now I feel like I’m waiting to die.”
While some careers took a hit during the pandemic, others took off. Joshua Cutcher, a 34-year-old divorce attorney from Oakland, saw demand for his services stay strong.
“As you can imagine, being quarantined together was not great for some people’s relationships,” he said. “So business kind of stayed steady. And then it turned out that a law firm working from home works fine.”
Instead of commuting, Cutcher now spends those hours on billable work — which adds to his bottom line. And because he has more time to exercise and cook nutritious meals, his health has improved.
Housing is another area where people saw major changes, both good and bad. Joshua, a San Francisco resident who declined to give his last name for privacy reasons, got a raise this year at his private equity firm. When the pandemic caused rent prices to plummet as remote workers moved away, he and his wife traded in their two-bedroom apartment for a three-bedroom, single-family home with a yard — without paying more.
At the same time, 40-year-old Corinne Robinson, who owns the Winters Tavern in Pacifica, had to downsize when COVID forced her bar to close. During the worst of it, Robinson and her family moved from their three-bedroom duplex to a tiny, one-bedroom apartment above the bar. It didn’t even have a kitchen — just a hot plate.
The bar has since reopened and Robinson’s family has moved into another duplex. But with COVID still spreading, their worries aren’t completely behind them.
“It’s been pretty scary,” Robinson said. “Lots of stress.”
The online poll of 1,610 registered voters in Alameda, Contra Costa, San Francisco, Santa Clara, and San Mateo counties, was conducted by Embold Research for Joint Venture Silicon Valley and the Bay Area News Group in English, Spanish, Chinese and Vietnamese. The poll, conducted Sept. 22-26, has a modeled margin of error of +/- 2.8 percentage points.