New report shows 33 percent of California households are barely making it.

Diagnosing what people need is not rocket science. Neither, Peter Manzo tells me, is figuring out what those needs cost. Food, shelter, transportation, health care and childcare can all be priced out by location.

If you can’t afford all your needs, and increasing numbers of Monterey County residents can’t, you find a way to skimp by cutting costs in one or more of those categories. You double or triple up in an apartment, buy highly caloric and (price-wise, anyway) cheap fast food, hitch rides (or spend long hours taking public transit to and from your job), put off getting necessary medical care or filling pricey prescriptions and rely on relatives or neighbors to watch the kids.

Forget saving, forget little luxuries like new shoes for the kids, or a Saturday afternoon at the movies. Skimping becomes the norm.

Manzo can’t tell me exactly what people in Monterey County skimp on, but he knows they are skimping. He’s president and CEO of United Ways of California, a network of 34 United Ways that includes United Way of Monterey County. And on July 14, United Ways of California released a massive report titled “Struggling to Get By: The Real Cost Measure in California 2015.” It’s a deep and better dive into the struggles many Californians face just to get the basics, analyzed by pricing out the absolute necessities people need to get by and applying those costs to families of various sizes.

“Struggling to Get By” uses what Manzo calls a Real Cost Measure, a more advanced way of measuring the costs of living than the federal poverty line, which was born in the 1960s, relies on the cost of food as a measure and hasn’t gotten a serious update since it was created a half century ago.

The Real Cost report creates “basic needs” budgets using real costs of food, housing, transportation, health care, childcare and taxes.

According to the report, one in three California households don’t have sufficient income to meet their basic costs of living. That’s three times the proportion considered poor, according to the federal poverty level. Households led by people of color are disproportionately likely to have inadequate incomes, with 51 percent of Latino households and 40 percent of African American households with incomes below the Real Cost Measure. Just over 50 percent of households with children under the age of 6 fall below the measure, as do 64 percent of households maintained by single mothers.

Here are two more whoppers: Struggling households spend more than 50 percent of their income on housing, and some spend as much as 80 percent on housing.

In Monterey County, the Real Cost budget for two adults with one school-age child and one infant who live in rental housing is $53,113 a year. The percent of households living below the Real Cost is 34 percent.

Broken down further, in North Central Monterey County, which according to the United Ways report includes Seaside, Monterey, Marina and Pacific Grove, about 17,175 households, or 27 percent, live below the Real Cost Measure, while in Northeast County – the city of Salinas – 42 percent of households, or 15,711, live below the measure.

“Salinas is pretty high,” Manzo says. “It’s higher than the state average.”

As demoralizing as the numbers are, Manzo says the point of the report is to get people talking about the problems in hopes communities will find ways to solve those problems. There are levers that can be pulled to generate solutions – upping the level of education or skilled certification to help workers boost their earning potential, for example.

“We want to generate community-wide conversations about what to do,” Manzo says.

The report includes a quote from Theodore Roosevelt: “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have little.”

We’re not doing it. But maybe deep digging into real numbers will convince more of us that it’s a conversation worth starting, and an issue worth addressing.

MARY DUAN is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at mary@mcweekly.com