Open for business?

One hundred and forty days have passed since Denitra Pearson lost her job caring for the elderly in their homes. Forty-two days have passed since she, her husband, and children lost all their belongings after a fire engulfed their house on a snowy winter night.

They’re now living in a hotel.

Fast food and non-perishables are their primary diet. There’s no kitchen in their small living quarters.

Although a Section 8 housing voucher ensures they can pay rent, they can’t find an apartment within their budget that isn’t infested with mice or mold.

Pearson, a New Haven mother of six, has an associate’s degree and two job certificates but only one of the dozens of applications she’s filled out has led anywhere, landing her another lowwage job at a local clinic vaccinating people against COVID-19. Her husband, who was a chef at a nearby university before the pandemic disrupted the college campus, is still looking for work.

“I don’t wish that on my worst enemy, like ever. This is insane. Hotel [living] is not the life,” Pearson said.

Pearson — and many other low-wage families — are waiting for the economic recovery to reach them.

Of the nearly 300,000 jobs lost almost overnight when the pandemic hit Connecticut last March, about 58 percent have returned, a figure that has not seen any appreciable improvement since September, just as the number of unemployed remains largely unchanged.

The brunt of this downturn, however, is primarily falling on certain families and neighborhoods.

While unemployment rates for Connecticut workers who were making more than $60,000 a year before the pandemic have almost entirely rebounded, employment among those who were making low-wages was still down 28 percent through the first week of February. Unemployment claims are similarly lopsided toward poor residents.

Communities that were already struggling with poverty before the pandemic were hit particularly hard when the jobs vanished. While the federal stimulus dollars and expanded unemployment benefits have helped sustain many households and small businesses in the short-term, more people than ever are relying on food pantries, racking up debt, withdrawing money from their retirement, or putting off paying rent to get them through.

“What this pandemic has done has just really exposed and magnified some of the issues that we already knew were there. But now, you can’t ignore it. You can’t ignore businesses closing at alarming rates. You can’t ignore students that are off track,” said AJ Johnson, the pastor of the Urban Hope Refugee Church in Hartford’s North End and a community organizer with the Center for Leadership and Justice. “It just has exposed and magnified things in a way that the world can see it.”

That attention is fading, he worries.

“A year later, people are starting to move and start to get their lives back together and working has become a real thing — and so it becomes a distant thing of the past,” he said. “I’m afraid that we might miss a moment — where when we say ‘Black Lives Matter’ and really matter — I’m afraid that we are driving by that moment to do something really substantial.”

In an effort to keep the spotlight on this issue, numerous

It’s unclear just how many companies have gone out of business in Connecticut since last March. The state’s business closure data is not meant to measure business levels.

However, the number of small businesses that are open is drastically down. In low-income neighborhoods, small businesses that are open now compared to last March is down by 37 percent compared to 34 percent in middle-class communities. This typically private financial transaction data collected by Harvard Economist Raj Chetty’s team shows no noticeable gains in businesses reopening since the vaccine rollout. The U.S. Census Bureau’s bi-weekly surveys of small business in Connecticut also indicates more companies each week are reducing their workers’ hours than increasing them.

Retail vacancy and foottraffic data collected by some municipalities and local business organizations also offers some clues.

In downtown New Haven, businesses being able to partially reopen last June helped, but foot traffic has lingered at 65 percent below its pre-pandemic levels ever since. Several of the businesses didn’t survive, and by the fall, one out of every five storefronts downtown were vacant, according to the city’s deputy economic director.

“We did see an immediate bump in our pedestrian statistics — and then it plateaued, and that’s kind of where we’ve stayed,” said Win Davis, the executive director of New Haven’s Town Green District, which tracks foot traffic.

In downtown Bridgeport, one out of every eight ground floor businesses, which are most often retail establishments, were vacant before the pandemic. Now it is one-insix.

Nationwide, retail foot traffic is down by nearly 60 percent, with cities seeing much sharper declines that suburban communities, according to Springboard, a company that measures pedestrian traffic by installing small electronic devices in communities around the country, including a handful in Connecticut. The firm’s research also shows that shoppers are more than twice as likely to shop at an outdoor shopping mall during the pandemic than a downtown area.

Some attribute the exponentially higher unemployment rates among city residents and low-income residents to the drop-off of retail and hospitality jobs that were once fueled by customers who are now working from their suburban homes. In Bridgeport and New Haven, about half of the pre-pandemic workforce commuted from the suburbs. In Hartford, two-thirds of commuters traveled from the surrounding towns.

“Places like Hartford were struggling before in terms of economics — and with people working from home, Hartford doesn’t work. Hartford’s economics are just not working,” said Johnson. Hartford — which had the second highest unemployment rate