Where housing and childcare eat up the most income

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Kimberly Adams (0:55)

Who's funding the GOP Midterm Convention in Dallas? And how much is left for working families when housing and child care are so expensive?

From Marketplace in Washington, I'm Kimberly Adams. The GOP is hosting a midterm convention in Dallas today and tomorrow, but there's been some confusion over who's funding the event and just how that money is being spent. Jody McCrary is a senior reporter at Open Secrets, which tracks money in politics, and he's been trying to answer those exact questions.

Jody McCrary (1:27)

We ran into maybe some roadblocks just because we couldn't track down any specific dollar figures.

Kimberly Adams (1:34)

He says one thing we do know about the convention is that the private group supporting the event called the Dallas 2026 Host Committee said it raised $45 million in less than four weeks.

Jody McCrary (1:47)

They collected that money from local, state, national, all sorts of individuals and companies, but they haven't identified them.

Kimberly Adams (1:57)

McCrary has been trying to hunt down some of those dollars and donors, but there's really just a lack of transparency, which is pretty common in campaign finance, and it's not exclusive to one event, one party, or one election.

Erica Franklin Fowler (2:10)

Dark money is a big factor in US election spending in particular because we can't trace where all the money goes back to.

Kimberly Adams (2:19)

That's Erica Franklin Fowler, a co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks political advertising.

Erica Franklin Fowler (2:25)

What we've seen recently is sort of the rise of what we'd call, like, mom-and-apple pie sounding groups. So things like Americans for an American America, right, that don't necessarily contain party labels attached to them.

That's important for a lot of reasons, one of which is that it's not always clear where the money is coming from and who the money supports. But whether it's ads or events, like this convention, campaigns care much more about winning than they care about efficiency. So the worst-case scenario after election day, if you have lost, is that you didn't spend as much as you had in your chest.

Kimberly Adams (3:04)

So campaigns want to spend the money they raise, even if the public doesn't know where it comes from.

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Kimberly Adams (4:35)

Paying for housing and child care can eat up more than half of the median US family's income. That's according to a report released by housing marketplace Redfin and child care marketplace Winnie. Unsurprisingly, the least affordable metro areas in the country for working families with kids are Los Angeles and New York City, where the cost of child care plus their notoriously high costs of housing devour almost all of the income for many families. The report also highlights a group of metro areas where housing costs are relatively reasonable, but the cost of child care is not. Marketplace's Kaylee Wells explains.

Kaylee Wells (5:12)

Largely, in most places, the cost of child care mirrors the cost of everything else in a city.

Chen Zhao (5:18)

So, in LA, housing is going to be more expensive, child care is going to be more expensive. I mean, burritos will be more expensive, right? Like kind of, that's the way the economy works.