Updated 7:35 a.m.: minor edits for clarity
Brianna Varner works two jobs, managing a McDonald’s in Richmond Hill full-time and selling real estate part-time. Her husband, a veteran, is 80% disabled and attends college on the GI bill. After researching childcare prices, Varner hired her mother to watch the kids for $150 per week.
And she’s not alone.
Nearly half of Liberty County’s households – 45% – are bringing home paychecks that don’t cover the basics. Of those households, 29% are barely making it, even when working two jobs.
That’s according to data compiled by United for ALICE, a project of United Way of Northern New Jersey, that Liberty County Development Authority CEO Brynn Grant brought to Georgia during her time on United Way of Georgia’s board. Now Grant is urging local leaders and potential employers to use that data, which is more realistic than Federal Poverty Level guidelines.
In 2024, that was $31,200 or $2,600 per month for a household of four.
What does ALICE mean?
If you’re holding down a job, driving an older used car, and have almost nothing left over for savings after you pay the bills, you know how frustrating it is to try and stabilize your household finances. If you need to seek help for a surprise electric bill, you might be told you make too much to qualify for assistance. If you have one or more small kids, you already know how expensive childcare can be.
And if none of these situations describes you, they may well apply to a relative, neighbor, coworker, employee, or someone else you know.
“We’ve all probably been ALICE, or we know ALICE,” Grant said. “People working really, really hard and still struggling, little to no savings for emergencies or future investments….Inflation and crisis hit harder in this population than in others.”
Why data matters
At the Georgia Assembly Monday, State House Rep. Al Williams also praised ALICE as “great data.”
Previously, Grant pointed out that the data is useful because it can be in rooms where decisions about housing and other kitchen-table topics are being made.
Because United for ALICE runs the numbers by county, its household budget figures paint a more detailed picture of how much it really costs to live in a given place, like Liberty County, where housing costs are exploding due to not just the larger U.S. market but also property values and some of the highest property taxes.
ALICE guidelines define two household budgets. A “survival budget” for two adults and two children in daycare includes the basic costs of housing, childcare, food, transportation, healthcare, and a smartphone plan – an economical way to get the internet. In Liberty County, that bare-bones survival budget was $77,604 in 2022.
The idea is to get households to a “threshold budget,” which offers more realistic estimates, by county, of what it costs to get by. For that family of four in Liberty County, that should be $121,032.
Georgia’s minimum wage is $5.15 per hour. Federal minimum wage, which most employers are required to pay, is $7.25 per hour. That translates into $15,000 per year.
In short, average wages in Liberty County would need to double to meet basic needs. And that, Grant says, is why the county needs more manufacturing jobs – because retail does not provide that level of pay.
A quick check of online job boards shows that, at press time, Walmart in Hinesville is advertising for a part-time stocker at $14 to $21 per hour. At World of Beer, servers make $9 and bartenders make $17.66 per hour, with managers making $44,725 to $52,441 per year. Warehouse workers are making $17 to $22 per hour. And average pay at SNF in Riceboro is running between $26.60 and $28 per hour.
The roof over your head
Liberty County faces particular challenges with housing affordability. High demand as neighboring counties become more expensive, rising home values and property taxes, and larger market forces like investors gobbling up affordable homes and higher insurance premiums, are taking a toll.
The ALICE figures for 2022 don’t account for inflation since then. Nor do they account for increased property values, partly due to limited housing stock as more people move to Liberty County, and higher property taxes associated with those increased values.
In Liberty County, ALICE rent on a “survival budget” in 2022 was pegged at $706 for a family of two adults and two children, with a “stability budget” for rent of $1,158. Median gross rent for 2019-2023, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, was $1,203.
But a quick check of housing app Zillow in January 2025 showed 3 bedroom, 2 bath apartments renting for between $1,200 and $2,500 per month and houses renting from $1,000 for a single-wide mobile home to $2,450 for a 2-story house.
Developers continue to build cookie-cutter subdivisions, sometimes pushing for more homes on smaller lots. At the Coastal Regional Commission’s January meeting in Midway, representatives of developer Smith Douglas Homes pitched 3-bedroom, 2-bath homes at lower price points — about $185,000 versus $250,000 — aimed at future Hyundai supply chain workers. However, owner Tom Bradbury emphasized that he would need local governments to let him build such a development through a proposed “workforce housing overlay district” that would allow more homes closer together and managed by homeowner associations.
Could tiny homes help?
Not everyone wants or needs an 1,400 square-foot home. Liberty County’s Unified Development Ordinance, the county’s plan for development, allows tiny homes to be built in parts of Liberty County that are zoned agricultural or agricultural residential. According to Liberty County Planning Commission Executive Director Jeff Ricketson, that accounts for “about 80 percent of the county.”
Planned unit developments, which are like HOAs where homeowners own the land under their houses, also allow tiny homes — although higher concentrations of homes would be subject to the zoning process, Ricketson said.
Such smaller homes are less expensive to heat and cool and could make home ownership a reality for many who are shut out of the market.
Watching the kids
The other huge lift for working families with small children is the cost of daycare. At Williams’ monthly meeting, the consensus was that childcare runs $1,200 a month per child in Liberty County.
Sierra Brown, 25, says she quit working because it was cheaper for her husband to work and for her to stay home with their four kids.
“We’re actually saving and putting back more money with me staying home to take care of them rather than putting them in daycare,” she wrote in a text. If she were to go back to work, it would be “probably housekeeping. But the only thing that works with kids, school schedules, and daycare hours…[is] $5-600 a week.”
Allison Miller and her husband, a soldier, have a toddler and a baby. She said they are paying $1,800 a month for childcare. When her husband deploys, she says, they’ll have to come up with another $600 per month for childcare so she can work two weekends a month.
Fort Stewart’s childcare waiting list, which uses a central clearinghouse for U.S. military families worldwide, is two years long, she said.
If you need help finding childcare, the State of Georgia offers an online search tool for Quality Rated childcare and pre-kindergaten programs.
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