By Isaac Ceja / The Opinion
Sep 19, 2024, 00:33 AM EDT
The majority of Latino voters registered to vote in the Inland Empire (IE) consider housing, healthy food and child care to be difficult to access, according to the Latino Experience of Access to Basic Commodities report released a few weeks ago.
According to the results, 79% of people said it was very difficult to access housing, 70% of residents expressed how difficult it is to put food on the table and 65% stressed how difficult it is to have access to child care, among other problems of primary needs.
While other basic products such as drinking water, security and the Internet are easier to access, with a complication rate of only 33%, 40%, and 44%, respectively, of the Latino voters interviewed, according to the report.
The report was produced through a collaboration between the Possibility Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Institute of Governmental Studies (IGS) at Berkeley, in partnership with the Community Foundation of the Inland Empire (CIELO).
The survey builds on the Possibility Lab’s Abundance Accelerator, which surveyed 8,199 California voters in early 2024, focusing on their ability to access 12 basic resources.
The primary resources discussed were: housing, elder care, child care, healthy food, jobs, energy, education, transportation, internet service, security, cell phone service, and clean water.
To arrive at the survey’s conclusions, the analyses focused on the responses of 227 Latino IE voters who participated in the survey.
According to Amy E. Lerman, executive director of the Possibility Lab and professor of public policy and political science, the Inland Empire is one of the most resilient and fastest-growing regions in California.
He added that the opportunities and difficulties faced by these communities, specifically the Latino population, which is the majority, are significant.
According to the 2020 U.S. Census, of the 2.3 million residents of Riverside and San Bernardino counties, the area where the Inland Empire is located, Latinos represent almost 52% of the population, a number that is expected to grow to 74% by 2060, according to a report by USC Dornsife.
“This survey report suggests some areas where Latino voters in the Inland Empire find it relatively easier to access basic services, but also that housing, jobs and child care remain harder to find or afford,” Lerman explained.
“We hope these results will be useful to funders, elected officials and others who believe, as we do, that the success of this region will influence the broader success of our state and nation.”
Other findings in the report include the gap between white voters and Latino voters in accessing basic resources in the area.
Latino voters in the IE were 19 percentage points more likely than white voters to report difficulty accessing healthy food (70% vs. 51%) and 15 percentage points more likely to have difficulty finding a good job (61% vs. 46%).
“We must keep in mind that these are likely estimates of perceived need, and that actual need among Latinos as a whole (both registered and unregistered voters) is likely higher than reported here,” said Berkeley IGS co-director G. Cristina Mora.
“In fact, despite representing an outsized proportion of the Inland Empire workforce, many Latinos still struggle to make ends meet.”
According to a report by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), at the end of 2023 the poverty rate was 11.9% in the IE, an area located about 75 miles east of Los Angeles.
The poverty rate among Latinos rose to 16.9% in 2023, and this group remains disproportionately poor: they represent half (50.7%) of poor Californians, yet they only account for 39.7% of all Californians, according to the same PPIC report.
Other findings from the report indicate that education and training are accessible to about half of Latino voters, while transportation is accessible to about half of Latino voters in IE.