In the rural communities and industrial cities of western Michigan, semi-trucks carrying thousands of pounds of food are rolling into parking lots in front of churches and community centers, where growing lines of people wait for a few boxes of free groceries.
One truck can carry enough food for as many as 600 households, but some days even that isn’t enough to meet demand, which has increased 18% in the past 12 months, said Ken Estelle, president of Feeding America West Michigan.
“In our 43 years of serving this community, we have never seen such a need. It is significantly higher than during Covid and has pushed us beyond our capabilities,” said Estelle. “We’ve just seen this drumbeat increase every month with more and more people.”
From rural Michigan to mid-sized cities in Pennsylvania and the affluent suburbs of Wisconsin, food banks are reporting record levels of need that have steadily increased in recent years. Despite rising wages and low unemployment rates, many households continue to struggle with rising costs that have depleted their savings and increased their credit card debt, leaving little money to put food on the table at the end of the month, food bank directors said.
“It’s a hunger crisis,” said Joe Arthur, executive director of the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank, which has seen a more than 50% increase in demand since 2021. was at the height of the pandemic, yet there are fewer resources for these families today.”
Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — critical states in the upcoming presidential election — have become the focus of the campaign efforts of former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, both of whom are trying to address voters’ economic concerns. Harris has proposed tax breaks and incentives for low-income households, and a plan to combat price gouging by food manufacturers and supermarkets. Trump has promised to lower prices by cutting energy costs and regulations, and create jobs through cuts in corporate taxes and tariffs on imported goods.
Although the pace of price increases has slowed from the peak two years ago, costs for many essentials, such as food, remain high. A pound of ground beef costs 42% more than four years ago, a liter of milk has increased 17% and a loaf of bread is 32% more expensive. In areas where prices have started to fall, such as rent and gas, costs are still above pre-pandemic levels.
In the relatively affluent Milwaukee suburbs of Waukesha County, Wisconsin, Rochelle Gamauf said she sees new faces every week at her food bank, Friends With Food, which she founded during the pandemic.
The organization has gone from distributing approximately 420,000 pounds of food in 2022 to over a million pounds in 2023. In a recent week in September, almost 400 people came in, 48 of whom were coming for the first time – a rate of 50%. increase in the number of new families compared to last year, she said.
“I see people who have never visited a food bank in their lives,” Gamauf said. “It’s not just the cost of food that’s going up, it’s the increase across the board – it’s that their electric bills are going up, their rent is going up, and all their basic needs like insurance have increased.”
In central Pennsylvania, where Arthur said his food banks serve as many as 275,000 people a month, housing costs have become a major pressure point on household budgets.
In Lancaster County, rents for a one-bedroom apartment have increased by nearly $300 since 2020 to more than $1,300, while in Dauphin County, which includes Harrisburg, they have increased by more than $200 to $1,275, according to the apartment rental website Zumper.
At those prices, someone making $20 an hour and working 40 hours a week with no time off would have to spend more than 30% of their income on rent.
“We’re grateful that wages are going up, but if you look around our area, housing costs, the increase in rents and mortgages, are far outpacing wage increases,” Arthur said. “Household budgets are really under pressure, and the savings these households were able to build during the pandemic are long gone.”
In Milwaukee, Melody McCurtis says she hasn’t seen any benefit from a strong economy in her Metcalfe Park neighborhood, where she lives and works for a local nonprofit. Instead, she has seen a steady increase in demand in the predominantly Black community, which has historically had high poverty rates. The area recently lost 400 jobs when Master Lock closed its factory there.
“Wages are not going up for people in my community. The people who work at the Family Dollar, who work at McDonald’s, these are the jobs that we have in our community,” said McCurtis, lead organizer of Metcalfe Park Community Bridge.
At the Jewish Community Pantry, which serves the Metcalfe Park neighborhood, the number of people coming for food assistance has increased 37% in the past two years, said Heidi Gould, the pantry’s director. Not only are the numbers up, but people are coming more regularly, she said.
“It’s a different demographic of working people, not people with disabilities or unemployed or who have other factors contributing to their food insecurity, but people who are working and just struggling,” Gould said. “These are the families I did not see regularly before the Covid-19 crisis, and now they are queuing at the food bank with their children every month.”
Although unemployment is relatively low, Gould says many of the people she talks to are working, but not as many hours as they would like, or earning wages enough to cover their expenses. About 40% of the people the pantry serves have a child in the household, making child care also a major expense, Gould said.
As in other parts of the country, rising housing costs have been one of the biggest obstacles McCurtis has seen. She and her three children recently had to move in with her mother after the family’s rent was increased to $1,000 a month. A nearby apartment complex once intended for low-income seniors now rents one-bedroom apartments for more than $800 a month, according to listings on Apartmnets.com.
In Michigan, Phil Knight, executive director of the Food Bank Council of Michigan, said he’s also seeing more repeat customers. In the past, most of the people he saw come to his food banks needed short-term help due to a health problem, a family emergency or a job loss. Now, he said, food banks have become a routine necessity for households.
“It’s almost become a form of income replacement,” Knight says. “This is becoming a common practice for lower-income families.”
For food banks, it has been a struggle to meet demand, with federal aid lower than during the pandemic and overall costs rising. That has forced many organizations to cut back on the amount of food they give to each recipient, and turn away more people seeking help.
In the Dairy State, Gamauf says her pantry in Waukesha hasn’t been able to get a consistent supply of milk, butter and eggs for months. In western Michigan, Estelle said they have reduced the amount of food they give out at their distribution events from about 50 pounds to just 30 pounds. Even then, he said there are times when food runs out with hundreds of people still in line.
“Today I would say my food bank is not meeting the need,” he said. “We simply don’t have the capacity, financially or physically, to meet the demand that is currently there, so that is frustrating for all of us.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
