The numbers aren’t pretty, but they aren’t surprising, either.

Michigan’s ALICE report was released this week, a focused version of the annual study of household financial stability in our state, and it showed 44% of children in a 10-county region of northwest Lower Michigan live in households that teeter on the edge of economic insecurity.

ALICE stands for Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed, and describes households that earn enough to be above the poverty line, but less than what it costs to provide the basics — housing, food, child care, transportation, healthcare and a phone. They’re families that often are one big expense away from catastrophe.

And the most recent report — as alarming as those numbers are — isn’t precisely reflective of the situation on the ground today. That’s because those statistics are from 2019.

We know today, a couple of years into the pandemic, families in the Grand Traverse region are worse off financially than they were in 2019. That’s because, despite rising wages, rapid inflation has left most families coping with an effective pay cut of about 2%.

Worse, the region’s rapidly rising housing prices, and widespread shortage of day care has taken a deeper swipe out of family finances in the region, further eroding stability for many of our children.

Solving those two problems surely wouldn’t fish every child in our community out of instability, but it wouldn’t hurt.

Those two issues have been two of the most persistent financial stressors for families in the Grand Traverse region for more than a decade. They also are problems our community leaders have repeatedly discussed in recent years, but struggle to solve.

Today, we’re alarmed by the prospect that data collected this year likely will show more children are at risk than they were in 2019. But we also find hope in the fact that local governments are flush with once-in-a-generation cash from federal stimulus efforts.

Cash doesn’t solve problems on its own, but it certainly can fuel thoughtful solutions.

— Traverse City Record Eagle