Between the rural communities and industrial cities of West Michigan, semi-trucks carrying thousands of pounds of food pull into church parking lots and community centers where people wait for a few boxes of free groceries.
One truck can carry enough food for up to 600 households, but some days even that’s not 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 service to this community, we have never seen a greater need. It’s much higher than during the Covid era and it’s pushed us beyond our means,” Estelle said. “We’ve seen that drumbeat grow more and more people every month.”
From the state of Michigan to mid-sized cities in Pennsylvania to affluent suburbs in Wisconsin, food banks have reported steadily increasing levels of need over the past few years. Despite rising wages and low unemployment rates, many households continue to struggle with rising costs. exhausted their savings and increased Food bank bosses say credit card debt will leave little money on the dinner table at the end of the month.
“This is a hunger crisis,” said Joe Arthur, who runs the Food Bank of Central Pennsylvania, which sees demand grow more than 50% since 2021. “The need we see in our places is actually as high as it was at the height of the pandemic, but today there are fewer resources for those families.”
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, 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 grocery stores. Trump has promised to lower prices by cutting energy costs and regulations and create jobs by cutting corporate taxes and imposing tariffs on imported goods.
Although the pace of price increases has slowed from a peak two years ago, the costs of many essential items, such as food, remain high. One kilo of beef expenses 42% more than four years ago, a gallon of milk up 17% and a loaf of bread 32% higher. In areas where prices such as rent and gas have started to fall, spending still exceeds pre-pandemic levels.
In the relatively affluent Milwaukee suburb of Waukesha County, Wisconsin, Rochelle Gamauf said she sees new faces every week at Eat With Friends, the food pantry she started during the pandemic.
The organization went from distributing approximately 420,000 pounds of food in 2022 to one million pounds in 2023. In the last week of September, about 400 people came through the door, 48 of them were first-timers – 50%. He said that the number of new families has increased compared to last year.
“I see people who have never visited a diner in their lives,” Gamauf said. “It’s not just an increase in the cost of food, it’s an increase across the board — it’s an increase in their electricity bill, an increase in their rent, an increase in all their basic needs like insurance.”
In central Pennsylvania, where Arthur said food banks serve 275,000 people a month, housing costs have become a major pressure point on household budgets.
Rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Lancaster County has risen nearly $300 since 2020 to more than $1,300, while in Dauphin County, which includes Harrisburg, it has risen more than $200 to $1,275. Zumper.
At these prices, someone earning $20 an hour, working 40 hours a week, 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 at our area, housing prices, rents and mortgages are far outpacing wage increases,” Arthur said. “Household budgets are really strained, and the savings these households were able to accumulate during the pandemic are long gone.”
In Milwaukee, Melody McCurtis said the Metcalfe Park neighborhood, where she lives and works at a local nonprofit, has seen no benefit from a strong economy. Instead, he saw a steady increase in demand in a predominantly black community with historically high levels of poverty. The area recently lost 400 jobs when Master Lock closed its plant.
“Wages are not going up for people in my community. People who work at Family Dollar, people who work at McDonald’s, those are the jobs we have in our community,” said McCurtis, who is a lead organizer of the Metcalfe Park Community Bridge.
The Jewish Community Pantry, which serves the Metcalfe Park neighborhood, has seen a 37 percent increase in the number of people coming in for food assistance in the past two years, said pantry director Heidi Gould. It’s not just the numbers, he said, but people are coming more regularly.
“It’s a different demographic of people who are working and just struggling, not people who have disabilities or are unemployed or have other factors that contribute to their food insecurity,” Gould said. “These are families I didn’t see on a regular basis before Covid and now they’re waiting in line at the monthly canteen with their kids.”
Although unemployment is relatively low, Gould said most of the people he spoke to were working, but not working as many hours as they wanted or not being paid enough to cover their expenses. About 40% of the people served by the pantries have children at home, Gould said, making child care another big expense.
As in other parts of the country, rising housing costs are one of the biggest obstacles McCurtis has seen, he said. She and her three children recently had to move in with her mother after the family’s rent was raised to $1,000 a month. An apartment complex in the neighborhood that was 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 Michigan Food Bank Council, said he’s seeing more regularly. In the past, most of the people who came to food banks needed short-term help because of a health problem, family emergency, or job loss. According to him, now food banks have become a daily necessity for households.
“It’s almost become a form of income replacement,” Knight said. “It’s becoming a common practice for low-income families.”
For food banks, it’s been a struggle to keep up with demand as federal aid drops from where it was during the pandemic and overall costs rise. This has forced many organizations to reduce the amount of food they give to each recipient and turn away more people seeking help.
At Dairy State, Gamauf said the Waukesha warehouse hasn’t been able to get consistent milk, butter and eggs for months. In West Michigan, Estelle said they have reduced the amount of food they give out at distribution events from about 50 pounds to 30 pounds. Even so, he said there were times when he ran out of food while hundreds of people were still queuing.
“I would say today that my food bank is not meeting the need,” she said. “We just don’t have the capacity, financially or physically, to meet the demand that we have right now, so it’s frustrating for all of us.”