a-social-construct:

For @hansbekhart​‘s how-to-Brooklyn series, I pulled the data for working class household expenses from a 1936 Department of Home Economics survey of about 300 working-class Brooklyn families.

[This was part of a larger national survey of several thousand families, and the Dept of Home Ec was at the time part of the Department of Agriculture. So far as I can tell, the Dept asked families to keep a very detailed diary of expenses for two weeks, and then did a couple of intensive follow-up interviews in person. Most of the families in this set were nuclear married couple families, so there is some limitations for applying this to two men living together or alone.]



First, some basic numbers: I’ve done a couple posts already about income/rent/occupation/birthplace/etc in different Brooklyn neighborhoods, and if you want to play around with any of that data, you can see it here. But the tldr is the most likely occupation for a young working class man in 1930s Brooklyn would be, in order: file clerk/bookkeeping office work; unskilled factory work; and retail sales, making 50-70 dollars a month with rent about $25-30 a month. (You can see and play with the housing data here).



Obviously how an individual household distributed its expenses differed depending on what the household looked like, unemployment, if they were giving money to family, etc etc, but for 1935-1940, the Dept of Home Economics estimated the average distribution of expenses for working-class families in Brooklyn and NYC:



Food: 35%

Clothing: 5-11%

Rent: 30-45%

Fuel, Electricity and Ice: 7-8%

Household (towels, linens, soap, furniture): .5-2%

Miscellaneous (entertainment, medical, travel, school costs): 20-25%



So a monthly household budget for two working class young men living together and making $65 + $50 a month ($115 total) might look like:



Food: $40

Clothing: $5

Rent: $30

Fuel, Elec and Ice: $8

Household: $1

Misc: $31



The Dept of Home Economics said that for a family of 4, a working class monthly income of $125 a month was "not so liberal as that for a ‘health and decency’ level which the skilled worker may hope to obtain, but it affords more than ‘minimum of subsistence’ living.“ My interpretation of this from working with other Dept of Home Ec records of the period is that this is slightly above what we would call poverty-level now, and more like lower middle class or working poor. Not so much that there’s much room for savings or for emergencies, but enough to make ends meet. The Dept of Home Ec said that their working-class minimum included: “The housing allowed is a 4- or 5-room house or apartment in a fair state of repair, with an indoor bath and toilet for the family’s exclusive use. The budget includes maintenance for an inexpensive radio, a daily newspaper, and attendance at the movies once a week. It does not provide an automobile. No provision is made for saving other than life-insurance premiums.” A family of 4 on $125 would be just getting by; 2 people living together would have been doing pretty ok if both were working full time and had no periods of unemployment or expensive emergencies. The Dept of Home Ec said that a monthly income of $210/month for a family of 4 would be a much more comfortable rate which would allow for some savings, leisure travel, a car, nice consumer goods and school tuition.

I have the numbers for distribution of food expenses, but I haven’t run them yet (I can if anyone is super interested). Food prices in Brooklyn in 1940:

Beef starting at 25 cents/lb for a roast and going up from there

Bacon 30 cents/lb



Cheapest meat available: salt port at 17 cents/lb or fresh fish at 16 cents/lb



Milk delivered quarts by the milkman: 13 cents a quart, or 52 cents for a gallon jug



Eggs 35 cents/lb



Fresh fruits and vegetables including potatoes: 2-7 cents/lb, with the exception of oranges at 27 cents/lb. Bananas were pretty affordable at 7 cents/lb.



Canned fruit and veg: slightly more expensive at 10-20 cents/can



Coffee: 20 cents/lb

If you want to see what how these numbers compare to 2015 dollars, the Beareau of Labor Statistics has a calculator here, but my check of the comparisons is that most prices seem to be roughly as expensive as they are in 2015 terms, with the exception of milk having been much more expensive at an adjusted 2015 $8/gallon and coffee having been much less expensive at an adjusted 2015 $3.50. (Milk is $4 and coffee is $8-12 in my area).

Other kinds of expenses:

Funerals: For families who buried someone in the past year, the average cost for the funeral was $70, which seems quite low to me considering the average monthly rent was around $35 or so. Meaning that a funeral was about two month’s rent, which my gut says is too low, but that’s all I have data for. At least according to the MCU phase one bonus materials, Steve’s mother died when he was 18 in 1936, putting her right in this average. Though the funeral costs ranged from 30-140 dollars, so again, unclear what the actual cost of the funeral would have been.



Medical care: Most working class families in the set saw the doctor 1-2 times a year, about equally likely to see the doctor in a clinic, office, or home visit, with a cost of about a dollar a visit. The Dept of Labor’s cost-of-living calculator says that’s about $17 in 2015 money, but relatively speaking I think it would have been the equivalent of closer to $50—it’s about ten beers worth, or a little on the high side of a copay for people who have insurance now. So kind of a big expense, especially if you’re seeing the doctor a lot. Most families spent around fifty cents to a dollar a month on medicines, including non prescription things like aspirin and cough syrup as well as prescriptions.

Public transportation and cars: only about 20% of families owned a car, and for those that did, Chevys, Fords and Pontiacs were the most popular across all occupation groups. Families that did own a car spent about 20 cents per person per week on public transportation including buses, streetcars, and subway lines, and families without cars spent about 30 cents per person per week. Unskilled and lower wage workers (docks, laborers, factory work) spent more on average on public transportation, probably because they lived farther from their jobs. @hansbekhart​ has a great post on the subway/streetcar system and costs.

Entertainment: The average working class man in this set spent $3 a year on baseball games (and other sports, but lbr it’s probably mostly baseball). I haven’t been able to find out how much tickets in the cheap seats cost, but if it’s anything like a movie ticket (25 cents), that’s 12 games a year. Likewise, the average working class man saw a lot of movies–12-20 movies per year! Children saw more! That’s more than one movie a month, at a cost of 25 cents a movie.

Other fun things: The average working class man in this set bought 2-5 packs of cigarettes a week. That seems like a lot to me! But I don’t smoke. Almost all men in this set reported buying at least one pack of cigarettes a week (with the exception of life insurance agents!). Likewise, almost all men reported having at least one beer a week, with the average being 3-5 beers a week at home and 2-3 beers a week outside the home, at a cost of ten cents a pint/bottle for both.

Clothes: Working class families spent around 10% of their income on clothing and related expenses, but there’s a lot of variety in this depending on how many people were in the family, so it’s hard to say how much exactly Steve and/or Bucky would have spent. My best guess based on the data: A single man, making around 50-70 dollars a month, would have put about 2-5 dollars of that towards clothes, haircuts, things like that. A man’s suit cost in the 10-40 dollar range, and the Dept of Home Ec said that about 50% of the working class men in their sample bought suits in the $17-27 range (a suit including pants, coat and vest), preferring suits in the $22-27 range. So for someone paying $30 in rent, a suit would be a pretty big deal, but in making the choice they would tend to prefer the more expensive option in their price range. Working class families also spent around a quarter a week on laundry expenses, mostly on putting laundry out to wash instead of doing it themselves. So a family would send their laundry out to a laundress who would wash it by hand, and then get back the wet laundry to hang dry themselves.

This is the stuff I was interested in, but the dataset is really big and pretty fine-detailed, so if there’s something else you want to know about, let me know!