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.”

In Milwaukee, Melody McCurtis says she hasn’t seen any benefits of a strong economy in her neighborhood of Metcalfe Park, where she lives and works for a local nonprofit. Instead, she’s seen a steady rise in demand in the predominantly Black community, which has historically had a high rate of poverty. The area recently lost 400 jobs when Master Lock closed its plant there.

“Wages are not going up for the folks in my community. The folks working at the Family Dollar, working at the McDonald’s, these are the jobs that we have in our community,” said McCurtis, who is the lead organizer of Metcalfe Park Community Bridge.

At the Jewish Community Pantry, which serves the Metcalfe Park neighborhood, there has been a 37% increase in the number of people coming for food assistance over the past two years, said Heidi Gould, the pantry’s director. Not only are the numbers up, but people are coming on a more regular basis, she said.

“It’s a different demographic of working people, not people on disability or unemployed or who have other factors contributing to their food insecurity, but folks who are working and just struggling,” Gould said. “Those are the families that I did not see regularly pre-Covid, and now they’re waiting in line with their kids monthly at the food pantry.”

While unemployment is relatively low, Gould said many of the people she talks to are working, but not as many hours as they would like or making a wage that’s enough to cover their expenses. About 40% of the people the pantry serves have a child in the household, making child care another major cost, Gould said.

Like in other parts of the country, rising housing costs have been one of the biggest obstacles McCurtis said she 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. One apartment complex in the neighborhood that was once intended for low-income seniors is now renting 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 regulars. In the past, most people he’d see coming to his food banks needed short-term assistance because of a health issue, a family emergency or a job loss. Now, he said, the food banks have become a routine necessity for households.

“It’s almost become a form of income replacement,” said Knight. “This is becoming a regular practice for lower-income families.”

For food banks, it has been a struggle to keep up with demand, with federal assistance down from where it was during the pandemic and overall costs rising. That’s 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 said her Waukesha pantry has gone months without being able to get a consistent supply of milk, butter and eggs. In western Michigan, Estelle said they have cut back on the amount of food they give out at their distribution events from around 50 pounds to as little as 30 pounds. Even then, he said there are times when they run out of food with hundreds of people still in line.

“I would say today that my food bank is not meeting the need,” he said. “We just simply don’t have the capacity, financial or physical capacity, to meet the demand that’s currently there, so that’s frustrating for all of us.”