Living wage gaps leave some Montana workers without enough help

Rose Bender, research director at the Montana Budget and Policy Center, said the strain showed up when families tried to get beyond immediate bills.

"I think with rising costs and wages more stagnant than rising costs; I think it can be really hard to find any extra income for savings in lower income families,” Bender said. “There are there is a good deal of research done by groups like the Federal Reserve on, the ability to gain wealth on different income groups. And, we see that folks with lower incomes, obviously, aren't able to save as much and build wealth through generational wealth. As, as easily as folks with higher incomes.”

State records showed SNAP participation dropped from more than 120,000 recipients in 2017 to just more than 72,000 this June. Monthly applications also sat below many earlier levels.

Those figures reflected access to a government program, not every household struggling to pay for groceries. That gap helped explain what food advocates called the missing middle.

Kiara Condon, advocacy specialist with the Montana Food Bank Network, said that group included people who made too much to qualify for help but still could not cover basic costs.

"We've heard from it refer to that, as the "missing middle". So, people who like you just described who make too much to qualify for any kind of assistance, but not enough to cover rent, groceries, utilities, childcare, health care, all the things that we need to survive,” Condon said. “So actually, a lot of our partner agencies throughout the state do report that, neighbors visiting the pantry do not even qualify for snap.”

Food pantries did not require every visitor to report a job status or finances, so the network could not put a statewide number on that group. It could track how often some neighbors came back.

Condon said the shift was not always more people showing up. In some cases, the same households needed pantry visits more often.

"So for families who are maybe visiting the pantry once a month or maybe once every other month, they're now visiting 2 or 3 times a month,” Condon said.

Two patterns existed at the same time in Montana: fewer people took part in SNAP while some pantry users needed help more often.

The living-wage calculator changed from one community to another because it used local costs, especially housing and transportation. That was why Bozeman’s estimate came in higher than Missoula and Billings even though it measured the same basic standard of living.

The calculator did not stop at larger cities. MIT published an estimate for every Montana county and let people adjust for household size, working adults and children, which could sharply change the total once child care or a second income entered the picture.