Rise Together Bay Area and Insight Center for Community Economic Development’s report Promoting Family Economic Security in the San Francisco Bay Area Region included the Standard as a key benchmark in its economic models.
In California’s Santa Clara County, the Self-Sufficiency Standard was used in a sectoral employment intervention analysis that focused on the availability of nontraditional jobs, the geographical spread of those jobs, the availability of training resources, and wage rates.
The Standard has been used in California, Connecticut, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Hawaii, Nebraska, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia, and Washington State to advocate for higher wages through living wage ordinances and in negotiating labor union agreements.
New York State Department of Labor developed a self-sufficiency calculator using the Standard to determine the income required to meet basic needs based on family size and geographic location.
In Pennsylvania, many groups, including PathWays PA, have used the Standard to model the impact of a state Earned Income Tax Credit on the ability of a family to reach self-sufficient wages.
This paper examines the housing affordability crisis using a residual income approach to identify renter households whose housing expenses are too high and who lack the income to enable them to meet a basic but comfortable standard of living.
The Office of Forecasting, Research and Analysis for the State of Oregon uses the Standard to help model the impacts of tax policy.
The Self-Sufficiency Standard provides an alternative tool to understanding housing cost burden. A recent report, Shelter Poverty in Ohio: An Alternative Analysis of Rental Housing Affordability, used the Self-Sufficiency Standard to evaluate operationalize the idea of shelter poverty by evaluating housing affordability after accounting for the minimum costs for other essentials, instead of relying solely on the widely accepted measurement for housing burden– renters paying above 30% of total income– which does not provide the full picture of housing affordability.
The 30-percent of income standard is a widely used and accepted measure of the extent of housing affordability problems across the country.
The Colorado Center on Law and Policy has used the Standard to advocate for state legislation allowing local governments to set higher local minimum wages. Employers and educational institutions have also used the Self-Sufficiency Standard to set organizational wage standards in Colorado.