SURVIVING ON THE EDGE
On the cusp of homelessness, a family of seven tries to make ends meet on $1,200 a month. They’re far from alone.
Every day brings a new series of painful calculations for Paulina Barajas.
The Concord mother of five and her husband, Sergio Martinez, always knew how to stretch a small paycheck. They’d lived for years on Martinez’s salary as a cook at Sizzler, barely enough to cover rent on a threebedroom townhouse and put gas in a Chrysler minivan they’d plastered with honorstudent bumper stickers. With a little help from the neighborhood church, they paid for soccer cleats, PG&E bills and toddler toys.
But when shelterinplace orders clamped down, Martinez got laid off for two months, then returned to work with his hours cut in half. Like so many Bay Area residents, he and Barajas found themselves in a disorienting situation, with a list of expenses that far outstripped their income.
“Everything is so expensive,” Barajas often says in Spanish — a nearconstant refrain. Squinting, she does a mental tally: $1,499 a month for rent. Gas for the minivan came to $45 a month. A 12pack of Top Ramen at FoodMaxx cost $7. Her husband’s current monthly earnings? About $1,200.
The financial devastation of the coronavirus is coming into focus for policymakers, nonprofits and economists, who are watching the working class slide deeper into poverty in the Bay Area and nationally. Although the pandemic unsettled lives everywhere, its impact was especially vicious for people like Barajas, who live on the margins, gritting their teeth every time a bill comes in.
A study of U.S. Census Bureau data showed that prior to the pandemic, 305,000 Bay Area renters made less than $2,800 a month — or 30% of the region’s median income. Now, that population is swelling.
Families with no savings or safety net are struggling with job losses and rent payments they can’t make, surviving on meals from the public schools or neighborhood food pantries. Even as nonprofits raise donations and cities do emergency triage — including temporary bans on evictions — some fear a much greater catastrophe could unspool in the coming months.
Without massive intervention, some observers say, the region’s already dire homeless crisis will become much worse, with many of the working poor losing housing.
“You know how they talk about a perfect storm?” asked Stephen Krank, coordinator of Vincentian services for St. Vincent de Paul of Contra Costa County, a network of churches that distributes food and other forms of charity.
“No rent, no jobs, no one can pay for PG&E,” Krank continued. “And then where do you go for help?”
In May, California’s unemployment rate hit 16.3%, scarcely dipping from a record of 16.4% in April, which outstripped the worst point of the Great Recession. The state had shed 2,267,100 jobs outside the agriculture industry in the course of a year, with the most severe damage inflicted in hospitality, trade and transportation.
That cratering of the job market had a severe human cost. Applications to the CalFresh food assistance program more than doubled in the course of a month — from 37,286 in the fourth week of February to 95,516 during the same week in March, leveling off to 66,290 applications by the fourth week of June.
And many stood to lose their housing. In the week ending June 16, the U.S. Census Bureau surveyed 1.36 million tenants in the San Francisco metro area and found that 102,160 had no confidence in their ability to pay rent in July, and 102,431 had only “slight confidence.” Of 12.3 million people surveyed statewide, 3.3 million had little or no confidence that they could afford to pay the next month’s rent.
Those lucky enough to still have jobs often work in environments such as retail and food service, in which they face a higher risk of infection and, with it, the looming possibility of being laid off or going bankrupt from hospital bills. The nonprofits and government agencies that support this population are overwhelmed by the magnitude of need at a moment of deepening budget cuts.
Workers at the Alameda County Community Food Bank saw the first inkling of widespread hunger in midMarch, days before the first regional shelterinplace order was instituted.
During the second week of the order, calls to the food bank’s emergency hotline increased tenfold to 300 a day. Drivers began pulling up to the headquarters on Edgewater Drive in East Oakland.
Many of these people had never sought donations before, said food bank spokesman Michael Altfest. They weren’t familiar with neighborhood churches or pantries; they found the headquarters and warehouse — which is not a distribution site — by frantically searching the internet.
“It’s a very natural reaction,” Altfest said. “Someone loses their job and realizes that for the first time in their life, they need food.”
The number of desperate households shot up. Food bank staff rushed to set up a drivethrough distribution center three blocks away, across a band of freeway from the hulking Oakland Coliseum. When it opened March 30, they posted signs with the address on the door of their Edgewater facility. “Looking to pick up food?” the signs asked.
Within days, hundreds of cars at a time were lining up, snaking around the parking lot and the surrounding blocks. As of June, the site regularly served 1,000 cars a day.
The same scene is unfolding all over the Bay Area, a sign of how dramatically the coronavirus and economic downturn have upended people’s lives. When workers from the Society of St. Vincent de Paul held their first popup food bank in Richmond on April 14 — handing out bags of produce and boxes of groceries from the parking lot of Catholic Charities East Bay — they ran dry within an hour and had to turn away a halfmile line of cars.
In Oakland, the school district doubled the number of meal sites among its campuses for summer, providing a lifeline for outofwork parents — house cleaners and caretakers, line cooks and construction workers.
The sheer scale of anguish has many policymakers on edge. Charity and subsistencelevel unemployment checks can go only so far.
In the short term, some observers are calling on the government to ramp up cash benefits as the most efficient way to help. One example of aid is the pandemic electronic benefits transfer card, which offers lowincome families $5.70 per child for each day the schools were closed. It empowers parents to select and buy their own food, rather than making them stand in a food line, said Stacy Dean, vice president for food assistance policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, D.C.
Experts also stress the importance of eviction moratoriums. Gov. Gavin Newsom has allowed cities to extend such protections through July 28. But state lawmakers are debating what happens afterward. Two San Francisco Democrats — Assemblymen David Chiu and Phil Ting — are pushing bills that would bar landlords from booting tenants who don’t pay rent during the coronavirus pandemic, and the State Judicial Council has paused eviction proceedings for the duration of Newsom’s emergency order, and 90 days thereafter.
Some say the urgency of COVID19 requires more deepseated reform.
“We’ll need nothing short of a fundamental reassessment of our safety net,” said Stephen Baiter, executive director of the East Bay Economic Development Alliance, an organization dedicated to economic and workforce issues.
He pointed to solutions such as universal basic income, which once may have seemed radical but now has wider appeal. Baiter also cited the need for health care to benefit gig workers, whose ranks likely will grow as other jobs evaporate.
With demands for social services picking up, some economists and activists are calling for an overhaul of the tax structure. They hope to tax middleclass and wealthy people at higher rates.
Such ideas are gaining traction. The question is whether policymakers can rally the political will to implement them.
On a sweltering Thursday in June, Barajas slowly pushed a shopping cart through the Food Maxx on Monument Boulevard in Concord, while her sons tossed groceries inside. When they arrived at the meat aisle, she gazed studiously at the price tags. Ribeye steak was $8.79 a pound — not bad, she said, plucking a plasticwrapped container from the shelf.
“It’s $11 a pound at the little market up the street,” Barajas said, shaking her head.
By the time she got to the selfcheckout, the cart was half full, mostly with bargain meats and bulk foods: tripe, beef heart, netted bags of peppers and onions, big packs of corn tortillas, cartons of yogurt and Lunchables. She pulled out a stack of coupons and paid with a government benefits card. Her 11yearold son, Abram, scrutinized the receipt: $119.
Straightening her shoulders, Barajas rolled her groceries toward the family’s minivan, with Abram and his 9yearold brother, Jacob, in tow. The car needed gas, her five sons were outgrowing their clothes, and Martinez had served only two meals at the Sizzler on Wednesday. She worried his hours might be cut.
“Problems here, problems there,” she said. “But we’re OK.”
She considers her family lucky. Barajas and Martinez each immigrated to the U.S. decades ago: Barajas was 18 when she arrived from Mexico.
She got amnesty from the U.S. government and is eligible for a variety of benefits.
“My (undocumented) neighbors are less fortunate,” she said. “They don’t have papers. They’re afraid to seek services.”
Barajas’ family, like so many others, survives on a patchwork of government subsidies and donations — just enough to keep her from entering the wave of the suddenly homeless. She picks up free meals at her sons’ public schools and baby wipes for her toddler, 2yearold Esau, at St. Francis of Assisi in Concord. To cut back on groceries, she began cooking in bulk each morning, shoveling enough meat and tortillas on the fryer to last a full day.
But with a family of seven, the refrigerator empties quickly. And then she’s back at the grocery store, poring over receipts and watching every penny until rent comes due again.