"It feels like I’m the string quartet on the Titanic," M. said — referencing the quartet playing as the ship sank — while they cradled two paper grocery bags brimming with food.
They stood outside William Temple House, a large Tudor brick building capped with a blue rooftop that houses a food pantry.
M., who did not give their name, gently placed the bags onto a chair and moved under the shade of a tree, explaining the visit to William Temple House is a necessity since they are currently unemployed and struggling to meet basic needs.
William Temple House is a nonprofit that provides food, counseling and clothing for free. In the past year, an increased number of people are requesting services. The nonprofit’s pantry, open three days a week, used to serve 20 to 40 people each day — now, they serve roughly 60 people each day.
“With the rising cost of food, any help I get from family and friends doesn’t last as long,” M. said.
M. is housed, but experiencing instability because it’s hard to make rent. They’re job hunting in earnest, and in the meantime, the food pantry allows them to have a supplemental source of food.
“They had frozen blueberries,” M. said, explaining they love fruit but have been subsisting on “lots of pasta” lately. “The first time I came (to William Temple House), I almost cried from gratitude.”
The experience of not having enough to eat is not universal, but is likely more common than people think. For those who have food security, hunger — or the threat of it — can be something invisible. But in Oregon, not only is food insecurity already common, it’s becoming more prevalent.
In Oregon, poverty and need are among the highest levels they have been in recent years. Cost of living is rising and inflation makes this problem even worse. Since March 2021, post-pandemic lockdown, average rent in Portland increased 40% — the highest increase in the nation, according to Redfin. A deep housing crisis is part of the cause, though as Street Roots reported in June, building more housing may slow surging rents for a time — but it won’t raise wages or bring rents down to a more affordable rate. As of the most recent census, nearly 50% of all Oregonians spend more than 30% of their income on rent, placing them outside the federal standard of affordability.
Across the board, entities providing supportive services are experiencing a higher demand than ever before. Need is rampant, and requests for food — a core measure of societal need and health — continue to rise.
Historic need
Since the pandemic began, the Oregon Department of Human Services, or ODHS, faced a historic rise in need for food, cash, day care support and domestic violence services, according to Jake Sunderland, ODHS press secretary.
“We know that many families are experiencing hardship and are struggling to meet their basic needs,” Sunderland said.
Together, the ODHS and Oregon Health Authority serve approximately 1.5 million Oregonians, which translates to roughly a quarter of the state population relying on services in some form. According to Sunderland, both agencies face growing demand as communities throughout the state continue to be impacted by COVID-19 and the rising cost of food and other basic living expenses.
“As Oregonians continue to experience economic hardship due to the COVID-19 pandemic, they are applying for medical, food, cash and child care assistance at historic levels,” Sunderland said.
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, ODHS reports a significant rise in enrollment for services across some of its core programs:
Enrollment in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)increased by 95,563 households, a 27% increase.
Enrollment in Employment Related Day Care (ERDC) increased by 2,597 Families, a 36% increase.
Enrollment in the Oregon Health Plan increased by 343,776 members, a 32% increase.
The same trends are true for other entities providing support for basic needs.
211info, the community-based nonprofit providing a centralized system for connecting people with various local, state and nonprofit resources throughout Oregon and Southwest Washington, is seeing the rise in need.
Cara Kangas, director of partnerships at 211info, said call volume increased over the past two and a half years. In order to meet the demand, the 211info call center shifted to operate its phone lines 24 hours a day in July 2021.
Overall, yearly requests rose from 43,000 in 2020 to 48,000 in 2021 — an increase of 5,000.
According to Kangas, the top five services 211info provided were rent payment assistance, help with electricity bills, community shelter access, food stamps and requests for low-income subsidized private rental housing.
The top five unmet service needs were homeless motel vouchers, rent payment assistance, gas money, discount electricity and temporary financial assistance.
Rent is unattainable
A core cause of this kind of need is the cost of housing, which absorbs significant amounts of people’s paycheck. Betty Brown, executive director of Open Bible Community Pantry in Portland, said unaffordable rent is a prominent driver for those accessing the pantry.
“The problem is that I don't even understand how rents can be this high,” Brown said. “You know, it's so much. It's crazy. It's just unattainable.”
Unaffordable rent is also a central precursor to homelessness, which is on the rise in Oregon and throughout the nation.
Steve Berg, vice president of programs and policy at the National Alliance to End Homelessness, said communities across the nation are “overwhelmed with the number of people that are falling into homelessness and the difficulty of moving people out of homelessness.” Losing the ability to pay rent or afford a place to live is the first domino to fall in the path to homelessness, Berg said.
“It's really related to housing and the cost of rental housing,” Berg said. “I mean, we've seen new research showing that the amount of homelessness in a community is very directly related to how much it costs to rent an apartment. And it’s not really related to anything else; it's the one thing (that) correlates, which is no big surprise.”
Housing services are a common and growing request as people face increasingly unaffordable rents.
“Housing services have always been our number one request, and prior to the pandemic, they accounted for a third of our contact volume,” Kangas said. “Now they account for just under 47%.”
211info asks callers to answer optional demographic questions when they call. The data isn’t comprehensive but call responses show more callers are homeless.
Between July 2020 through June 2021, 55,000 callers completed the survey. Of this group, approximately 18% reported being homeless.
The following year, the survey yielded more respondents and a greater percentage saying they were homeless: from July 2021 through June 2022, 67,000 people responded to the survey, and of these, 21% reported they were homeless.
Low wages and high prices
The other contributor, of course, is inadequate pay. Many people, Berg said, are “homeless just basically because they can't afford housing, because they can't get a job to pay enough to afford housing.”
In some cases, people lose employment, or they simply work jobs that don’t pay enough.
This defies a common idea about homeless people being in the circumstances they are as a result of mental health or addiction. While both are overrepresented in unhoused communities, the central cause for homelessness in many instances is financial. But because so many people may not appear homeless, they are, in a sense, invisible to housed people.
“It's not the ones that come to people's attention,” Berg said. “Because if you're walking down the street and you see someone who's homeless because of economic reasons, you know, there's nothing about them that's different than anybody else. And that's appropriate because they’re just like anybody else.”
Oregonians are facing an uphill battle of surging rent and living costs coupled with low wages. According to Kangas, 82% of people who provided information this year reported less than $4,000 in monthly income.
Minimum wage in most parts of Oregon is $13.50 hourly, which at full time totals $2,160 a month before taxes. In non-urban counties, this number falls to $12.50 hourly. In Portland, where rents are among the highest in the state, a $14.75 full-time hourly wage still only totals $2,360 before taxes.
The result is a reality in which many struggle to maintain basic necessities like food and housing, and sometimes have to choose between these needs and other things, like transit, heat, mental health and medical care.
“We hear stories from callers who may be living in places not meant for habitation, but need gas vouchers or money for fuel in order to keep their vehicles warm and cell phones charged,” Kangas said.
Living with this kind of uncertainty, or worse, hunger and lack of shelter, takes a toll, Kangas explains.
“We know the social determinants of health play a big role in a person's overall well-being: access to affordable food, transportation, housing, physical health, education and physical environment,” Kangas said.
Relative to other states, Oregon offers more resources for those experiencing poverty. But it’s still not enough to meet the need.
“We have seen over the years that community need often outweighs what resources may be available at any given time, in any particular location,” Kangas said. “Pandemic-related resources have come and gone, but there continues to be a need for permanent, affordable, and safe housing, food security, affordable and stable health care, and trustworthy information about these and other programs.”
Free food helps make ends meet
Food pantries are a first line of defense to free up cash for other expenses. People often seek out free food so they can afford to other pay bills, like rent and power, Brown said.
“Families come to our pantry to offset the cost of a lot of things,” Brown said. “People literally use the pantry to offset the cost of stuff. When the pandemic started, we decided that we'll have to become once a week, every other week or so is what we were doing before.”
In January and February 2020 the Open Bible Community Pantry served 1,438 families, representing 4,672 individuals. In the most recent two month period, this number doubled: in June and July 2022 the pantry served 2,970 families, representing 9,217 individuals.
Other food banks show the same rampant need. The Oregon Food Bank, which operates a statewide warehouse and five of the 21 regional food banks in the Oregon Food Bank Network, has experienced increased demand for services. Ashley Mumm, Oregon Food Bank public relations manager, said demand rose to more than 1 million people in the past two years. In 2019, Oregon Food Bank served 865,000 people in Oregon and Clark county. In 2021, they served 1.2 million.
“A market in Vancouver recently shared that their visits are up over 40% in recent months, and many are families with two incomes — people working full-time who now aren’t able to make ends meet,” Mumm said.
Oregon Food Bank partner agencies also report more requests for food, Mumm said. Free food pantries in the Portland area reported seeing more than a thousand new families in May alone. Mumm said local partners reported an annual increase in demand, one noting a 34% rise and another in the Columbia River Gorge reporting working with 12 to 15 new families every week, in addition to the influx of returning families that stopped coming during the pandemic.
While the realities facing Oregon residents are stark, Mumm emphasized there are resources available.
“Food is available,” Mumm said. “Yes, inflation is making our work challenging, but we are here and people should come get food if they need it.”
Poverty is harrowing
“People can’t thrive when they are facing interruptions in their ability to see a doctor, choosing between paying bills or buying food, losing paid work in order to care for a child or are unable to afford basic necessities for their families,” Sunderland said.
The result is a deteriorating quality of life. The most recent census data estimates 11% of Oregonians — one in 10 people — lives in poverty. Because census data doesn’t represent overall needs, it doesn’t fully encompass the commonality of Oregonians lacking the ability to meet their basic needs.
“There's no hope; there's hopelessness," Brown said. "That's what is ultimately generated, this hopelessness you run into trying to get what you need.”
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