ALICE, or Asset-Limited, Income-Constrained, Employed households is a methodology that treats individual households as the unit of analysis to identify struggling or borderline struggling households. As opposed to other measures, such as the Federal Poverty Level, the ALICE methodology accounts for expense categories such as housing, food, childcare, healthcare, and transportation to assess a household’s ability to afford basic necessities based on their household composition.

The task of identifying ALICE today must therefore not rely too heavily on past ALICE estimates, due to data lag. However, the 33% of Hawaii households estimated as ALICE in 2018 can be used as a reference point to determine whether the ALICE population has changed in 2020 and 2021 by assessing the constituent indicators that influence an ALICE estimation.

On this page we examine indicators from the following major constituent parts of the ALICE Household Survival Budget:

Through this examination we can identify which of the three following scenarios seem most likely to have happened as a result of COVID-19:

Put simply, because we cannot rely on official estimates to identify the number of ALICE households in Hawaii as of writing, the estimate can either go up, down, or sideways.