At the San Antonio Food Bank, the Cars Keep Coming
Last month, aerial photos of a packed parking lot became a nationwide symbol of economic insecurity. If anything, the anxiety has only deepened.
At the San Antonio Food Bank, the Cars Keep Coming
Last month, aerial photos of a packed parking lot became a nationwide symbol of economic insecurity. If anything, the anxiety has only deepened.
Julia Nix pulled her silver Ford Escape into Traders Village, an 80-acre flea market on the outskirts of San Antonio’s southside, around 8:30 p.m. on Monday, May 4. The place was closed; beyond the parking lot’s empty expanse, she could see trees, fields of scrubby grass and, farther out, the lights of a nearby industrial building. She turned off the ignition, unbuckled her great-granddaughter, Elizabeth, from her car seat and made a bed for her across the back seat, where the 4-year-old nuzzled into her baby blanket and fell asleep.
Nix, 69, is a bus driver’s assistant, but she hadn’t watched over angsty high school riders or squirmy pre-kindergarteners since school was closed, some two months earlier. She was raising Elizabeth on her own, and, until the virus came along, felt as if she was on relatively stable financial ground. But her contract with the school district, which pays her $10.96 an hour for 32 hours a week, would run out in early June. There would be no bus work this summer; the children she usually babysits for were at home with their recently unemployed parents. And who could say whether school bus rides would actually resume in the fall?
Sitting uneasily in an unfamiliar part of town, Nix tried to reassure herself: She had, at least, secured the first spot in line at the San Antonio Food Bank — which would start giving out groceries at 9 o’clock the next morning. As she waited, she thought about her childhood. As a girl, she picked cotton in rural Texas alongside her parents, who were migrant workers, her father from Mexico. ‘‘I know what it feels like to go without,’’ she says.
Within hours, other cars started arriving. A few drivers got out and made small talk from a distance. They were out of work, furloughed, anxious. Like Nix, they were lining up early because they knew the last time food was distributed at the same flea market, a month earlier, on April 9, some 10,000 cars showed up. Pictures of the vehicular armada appeared everywhere — on ‘‘Good Morning America’’ and ‘‘Dr. Phil,’’ on news outlets in France and Japan, on sites like TMZ and the social media accounts of celebrities — and laid bare the fragility of so many financial lives.
San Antonio is the economic heart of a swath of south-central Texas called the Alamo, where thousands have lost their jobs, particularly in restaurants and the oil and gas industry. Like other major cities in Texas, San Antonio relies on tourism. Before the pandemic, one in seven San Antonians worked in the hospitality industry, but by mid-May, already 26 conventions had been canceled, citywide, representing 186,000 hotel rooms not occupied, and $123 million in lost revenue. The city’s tourism agency, Visit San Antonio, has furloughed nearly half its staff. Unemployment claims have also poured in from what had been a booming health care sector. As of May 15, more than 140,500 workers countywide had filed unemployment claims, a number that, of course, doesn’t include undocumented workers. By the end of June, a local economist estimates, unemployment could reach up to 21 percent. Before Covid-19, the San Antonio Food Bank fed 60,000 people a week across 16 counties; now it is feeding 120,000 a week.
San Antonio’s mayor, Ron Nirenberg, believes the worldwide attention focused on his city last month ought to prompt a long overdue reckoning. ‘‘That it took a pandemic for us to stop and assess just how precarious the economic conditions are for millions of American families is unfortunate, but let’s not waste the moment to address it,’’ he told me. It’s not as if economic hardship is new to San Antonio: The city has the highest poverty rate of the country’s 25 largest metro areas. Some 64 percent of San Antonians identify as Latino; a Pew Research Center survey conducted in April found that the financial pain caused by the pandemic is falling disproportionately on black and Latino adults, with 61 percent of Latino respondents and 44 percent of black respondents saying they, or someone in their household, had experienced a job or wage loss due to the coronavirus outbreak, compared with 38 percent of white adults.
The kind of financial and bodily pre-existing conditions that make a person particularly vulnerable to this virus have their own pre-existing conditions, often deep systemic ones. For years, Democrats in Washington have been citing a figure from the Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households, a survey of thousands of Americans conducted annually since 2013 by the Federal Reserve: ‘’40 percent of Americans can’t come up with $400 in an emergency’’ is how Senator Elizabeth Warren summed up the oft-cited statistic in a CNN op-ed last May. ‘‘We saw that statistic with our own eyes on April 9,’’ Eric Cooper, the president and chief executive of the San Antonio Food Bank, told me. ‘‘Miss one paycheck, and your world goes upside down.’’
Brian Billeck, the 52-year-old marketing manager of the flea market, pitched in at the April 9 food-bank distribution. He helped jump-start cars when batteries died, and procured fuel when people ran out of gas. Several times the ambulance was called out to attend to those overheating as the temperature climbed toward 90 degrees. He refers to that day as a ‘‘wake-up call.’’
Billeck saw friends who lost their jobs in that line; he saw vendors from the flea market and members of his staff who had been furloughed. He says he saw every kind of San Antonian there. At one point a man even drove up in a brand-new BMW. People in nearby cars started chiding him: How can you come here in that car? Billeck heard the man explain how he was the sole breadwinner, how he’d been out of work for four weeks, how he and his wife and three children had run through their savings, how he would have driven a different car, but the household’s other car had already been repossessed.
By midday, when the distribution was scheduled to end and food supplies were running low, more than 4,000 cars still waited in line. Cooper, the food bank’s president, called the warehouse and told them to send out more semi-trucks. The city manager dispatched the city’s parks-and-recreation staff to relieve exhausted volunteers, and eventually 1.5 million pounds of food were given out. Every car in line left with a trunkful of groceries.
About 200 cars behind Julia Nix, Charles Jones got in line at 5 a.m. He’d never been to a food bank before, and he wasn’t sure what to expect. Jones spent his career in operations management, most recently for a military contractor, and while his modest savings and social security — he is 72 — were enough to cover his basic living expenses, after he moved to San Antonio four years ago he started driving for Lyft to make some extra money. Until mid-March, he had been making about $150 a day, mostly driving tourists and service workers to and from the San Antonio River Walk and the Alamo; shuttling college students around the city’s University of Texas campus; and taking travelers to and from the airport. Then suddenly, the normal ride-share tides all but stopped. On April 21, another car smashed into his four-door black Dodge Charger, which meant weeks of repair — and no rides or income. ‘‘A lot of bills came due,’’ he says. Even after a lifetime of work, he didn’t have the kind of savings that could cover himself and a girlfriend and her 15-year-old daughter.
Jones waited in his rental car until a volunteer told him to pop his trunk. He navigated slowly through various tented stations where things like frozen chickens, dried beans and gallons of milk were piled high. At Station 11, he got loaves of bread. When he pulled forward to Station 12, Robin Hunt was there, working her first day as a volunteer, plunking boxes of premade Hormel dinners into trunks and the beds of pickup trucks and then tapping the side, as she’d been instructed, to signal that the driver should move forward to Station 13 for boxes of produce. Hunt had been struck by the images on the news of 10,000 cars in line. ‘‘I saw my city hurting,’’ she told me. So, like a lot of San Antonians — the airwaves have been full of food drives and calls to donate; in April of last year, the food bank raised $2 million, compared to $4 million this April — she signed up to help.
Hunt was out of work, too. She had her own interior-design business, but people couldn’t let outsiders in their homes, and a commercial project at a hospital was halted. She hadn’t been paid in two months. She applied for a small-business federal disaster loan but hadn’t heard anything back. At 57, she was worried about her own situation, but her husband still had his job at an engineering firm. They owned their house outright, and their children were grown and living elsewhere. Hunt had the kind of economic buffer against destitution that wasn’t much in evidence in the cars before her.
‘‘It doesn’t take a lot to look at someone’s face, even with a mask on, and see fear,’’ Hunt told me. In almost every car, at least one set of distressed eyes looked back at her. Some people who drove through Hunt’s station were crying; others tried to explain themselves through their open windows in the minute or two they spent idling. ‘‘They’d tell me, ‘I’ve never been here before,’ ‘I work in the hotel industry,’ ‘I can’t believe I have to do this,’ ’’ Hunt says. ‘‘I think they wanted me to know that they weren’t takers.’’
Hunt kept saying over and over, ‘‘I’m so glad you’re here.’’ She smiled as wide as she could under her mask, so they could see it in her eyes.
Scenes From an Economic Collapse:Glassboro, N.J.Baton Rouge, La.Milwaukee, Wis.Las Vegas, Nev.Pueblo, Colo.Crete, Neb.San Antonio, Texas
Malia Wollan is a contributing writer and the Tip columnist for the magazine.