In key swing states, the lines at food banks are growing longer

Across the rural communities and industrial towns of western Michigan, semitrucks hauling thousands of pounds of food are pulling up to church parking lots and community centers where growing lines of people are waiting for a few boxes of free groceries.

One truck can carry enough food for up to 600 households, but some days even that isn’t enough to meet the demand, which has gone up by 18% over the past 12 months, said Ken Estelle, president of Feeding America West Michigan.

“We have never seen this level of need in the 43 years we have been serving this community. It is significantly higher than during Covid and has pressed us beyond our capacity,” said Estelle. “We’ve just seen this drumbeat increase every month of more people and more people.”

From rural Michigan to midsize towns in Pennsylvania and affluent suburbs in Wisconsin, food banks are reporting record levels of need that have been steadily increasing over the past several years. Despite rising wages and low unemployment rates, many households continue to struggle with escalating costs that have depleted their savings and increased credit card debt, leaving little money left over at the end of the month to put food on the table, food bank directors said.

“It’s a hunger crisis,” said Joe Arthur, who runs the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank, which has seen a more than 50% increase in demand since 2021. “The need that we’re seeing in our localities is actually as high as it was at the peak of the pandemic, yet there are less resources for those families today.”

Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — critical states in the upcoming presidential election — have become the focus of campaign efforts by former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, who are both seeking 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 producers and grocery stores. Trump has promised to lower prices by reducing energy costs and regulations and to create jobs through corporate tax cuts and tariffs on imported goods.

While the pace of price increases has slowed from the peak two years ago, costs for many essentials, like food, remain high. A pound of ground beef costs 42% more than it did four years ago, a gallon of milk is up 17%, and a loaf of bread is 32% higher. In areas where prices have begun to decline, like rent and gas, costs still exceed pre-pandemic levels.

In the relatively affluent Milwaukee suburbs of Waukesha County, Wisconsin, Rochelle Gamauf said each week she is seeing new faces at her food pantry, Friends With Food, which she started during the pandemic.

The organization has gone from giving out around 420,000 pounds of food in 2022 to over a million pounds in 2023. On a recent week in September, nearly 400 people came through the door, 48 of whom were coming for the first time — a 50% increase in new families compared to last year, she said.

“I’m seeing people that have never visited a food pantry in their life,” Gamauf said. “It’s not just the cost of food increasing, it’s the increase across the board — it’s their electric bill going up, their rent going up, all their basic needs, like insurance, have increased.”

In central Pennsylvania, where Arthur said his food banks are serving as many as 275,000 individuals a month, housing costs have become a major pressure point on household budgets.

In Lancaster County, rents for a one-bedroom apartment have risen nearly $300 since 2020 to over $1,300, while in Dauphin County, which includes Harrisburg, they’ve increased by over $200 to $1,275, according to apartment rental website Zumper.

At those prices, someone making $20 an hour, working 40-hour weeks with no time off, would have to spend more than 30% of their income on rent.

“We’re thankful that wages and salaries are going up, but when you look in our territory, housing costs, the markup for rents and mortgages, far outpaced wage increases,” Arthur said. “The household budget is really showing strain, and whatever savings those households were able to build up in the pandemic is long gone.”

Comments

No comments yet. Why don’t you start the discussion?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *