Pandemic and Poverty
Longterm economic impact on people and services is anyone’s guess
At the peak of the pandemic, seniors in Macomb County got a friendly call from the Macomb County Office of Senior Services to see how they were doing. Are you feeling sick?
Do you have enough food?
Is there anything you might need? “They told us they needed someone to do their grocery shopping,” said Sheila Cote, director of Macomb County Office of Senior Services (MCOSS), as they were out of essential care items such food, soap, toilet paper, hand sanitizer, paper towels and tissue.
Cote and her team responded but were not alone in their efforts.
Several departments assisted in putting together care packages for distribution, including Planning and Economic Development, Veterans Services, the Office of the County Executive and Human Resources and Labor Relations. Since then, more than 1,000 care packages have been delivered to Macomb County seniors, and what began as a necessity during the pandemic, funded by CARESActdollars, has become a permanent outreach programfor seniors, many of whom are low-income or living below the poverty line at the start of the pandemic.
“These ideas that we have implemented during COVID are things that we will continue to do,” said Nicole Urban, program manager for MCOSS. “There have really been a lot of positives, in what has been a really difficult time.”
Another service to seniors, that remained
operational during the stay athome orders at theheight of the pandemic, was the Meals on Wheels program.
However, what was positive for one created additional burdens for the other.
A survey by Meals on Wheels America found that nearly all of its programs were experiencing financial strain and uncertainty while maintaining critical services to hundreds of thousands more seniors than before the pandemic hit in March.
“While cities and states grapple with the challenges of reopening as cases in some areas continue to surge, much of our country’s high-risk older adult population continues to self-isolate, prolonging challenges of daily life and requiring support from organizations likeMeals onWheels,” said Ellie Hollander, Meals on Wheels America’s president and CEO.
Beginning with a benchmarking survey in April, research conducted three months later showed that the programs were serving an average of 77% more meals and 47% more seniors than theywereMarch 1, indicating a sustained increase in need for meals, and a continuing upward trajectory of senior client growth nationwide.
Poverty rates
Stacker, a data analysis website, analyzed the U.S. Census Bureau’s five-year population estimates from the 2014-2018 American Community Survey (ACS) to show the breakdown of poverty across America.
Those numbers are likely to look much different today, but will serve as the starting point for researchers and economists studying how the coronavirus has affected poverty levels.
In 2019, the U.S. Family Poverty Level (FPL) threshold for one person under the age of 65 was an annual income of $13,300; the poverty level for a family of five with three kids was an annual income of $30,510.
Themetricwas first used in the 1960s and is based on the cost of a minimal food budget multiplied by three on the assumption that food comprises a third of a household’s expenses.
The FPL is used as a threshold for determining an individual or families’ eligibility for assistance programs from SNAP benefits to Medicaid. Various social services have different caps for eligibility from 100% of the FPL or higher.
Some say 200% of the federal poverty level is a more realistic figure for covering the cost of basic needs in the United States. None of the measures captures what is known as episodic poverty, which affects workers with temporary jobs or
those in the informal or gig economies.
State levels
Overall, Michigan has 1,457,008 people living below the poverty line.
Of Michigan’s 83 counties, 45 have poverty levels higher than the state average of 15%, and 38 counties are lower.
Some of the lowest poverty levels are in southeast Michigan: Macomb County at 11.3% and Oakland County at 8.61%.
Some of the highest poverty levels are also in southeast Michigan and across mid- Michigan: Wayne County at 23.05%, Clare County at 23.45%, and Gratiot County at 18.26%.
The lowest poverty level in the state is Livingston County at 5.61% and the highest poverty level is Isabella County at 26.53%.
As a whole, the poverty rate in Michigan is 15%, slightly more than one in every six people.
The unemployment factor
At the peak of the pandemic, when the streets of Macomb County resembled ghost towns with darkened restaurants and fitness centers the unemployment rate stood at a record high of 27.10%. Now that the economy is opening up, the rate has seen a steady decline. In August the astounding rate dropped to 18.3%, and as of September had dropped to 9.8%.
The hope for everyone, be it the U.S. or its trading partners around the world, as more businesses become fully operational, and others reopen, the rate will continue to fall.
But the long-term economic impact locally, statewide and nationally is still anyone’s guess.
And guessing is something that economists rarely ever do, according to Jonathan Silberman, professor
of economics at Oakland University.
“Economic forecasting is a hazardous occupation. The only way to do it is to use the past and the past is not always a great guide to the future,” Silberman said, “What happens to the economy going forward relies primarily on how the pandemic goes and how people react to it.”
There are several variables beyond unemployment contributing to the country’s economic uncertainty, such as expanded unemployment benefits and eviction moratoriums that are keeping hundreds of thousands of residents in their homes through the economic crisis.
“What’s going on in southeast Michigan, pretty much matches with what’s happening nationally.”
Bolstered safety nets
It could have beenworse, however, without expanded unemployment benefits, according to Afton Branche, strategic projects manager for the Detroit Partnership on EconomicMobility at the University ofMichigan Poverty Solutions Center.
“One of the things we’ve seen in the past couple of months is the success to some degree of the unemployment expansion and the stimulus checks,” Branche said. “We have research to show that food insecurity is a measure of hardship, and it didn’t expand or skyrocket as far as we thought it would. Because it was flexible assistance, food was something people could spend that money on.”
Flexible cash assistance from the federal government has long standing stigmas tied to it when it comes to the poverty narrative but at the height of the pandemic it definitely provided helpful to many Americans.
These programs included the stimulus checks, expansion
of the food stamps or Enhanced Supplemental Assistance Program(SNAP) along with the additional $600 paid to each weekly unemployment check (April - July) and extending the number of weeks people could collect to the end of the year.
Also lessening the burden at the height of the pandemic were the CARES Act dollars. Approved by Congress on March 27, 2020, it provided $150 billion in Coronavirus Relief Funds (CRF) to populations of at least 500,000.
This included Macomb County, which received $152 million.
Helping the vulnerable populations such as seniors and low-income families relying on county food pantries and other forms of food assistance including the Meals on Wheels program was one of the early hurdles tackled with the funding made available to the county.
During the pandemic many businesses and nonprofits also provided county agencies and nonprofits with cash assistance in the form of grant money.
One such example is Macomb County Rotating Emergency Shelter Team, which received a grant of $50,000 grant from Co.act Detroit to support its efforts nowbut also help for the future.
The churches that provide shelter for MCREST closed in March.
As a result, MCREST has had to put the homeless population it serves in hotels, while also providing food and other basic needs such as coinage for laundry, at $4.50 a load.
“I think we have hope there’s a better understanding that social services, particularly cash assistance, are tools and they should be used for those who need it. We hope people realize it’s about supporting families,” Branche said.