BAYTOWN — After Michael Alves lost his job at a pipe supply company in April, his household finances were challenging, but not dire. He made his rent, kept up car payments, kept food in the refrigerator.
The situation, however, changed drastically at the end of July, when a federal pandemic assistance program that provided an extra $600 a week in unemployment benefits expired. Facing impossible choices, Alves, 62, drained his small 401(k) savings to pay off his car, hoping to find work before falling too far behind on other bills.
That hope was in vain. Still unemployed — and still furiously sending out resumes— Alves is struggling to afford the medications for his wife, who has suffered two strokes. He has no idea how he’s going to pay the $1,400 a month for rent and utilities.
“We’re going to be homeless, basically,” he said, “if we don’t get some help.”
Alves is among the millions of workers across the country desperately waiting for help as the coronavirus pandemic reaches new peaks, the economic recovery slows, and Congress returns from another recess no closer to finding agreement on a new round of relief spending.
The Democratic-controlled House and Republican-controlled Senate remain far apart on the size and scope of another package even as economic experts, including Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, urge more spending to aid workers, families and businesses hurt by the pandemic and avoid long-term damage to the economy.
The need to act, meanwhile, is becoming more urgent. Two more unemployment assistance programs are set to expire at the end of the year, which would cut an estimated 12 million Americans from benefits, according to the Century Foundation, a think tank in New York and Washington.
Here in Baytown, where unemployment, at 15 percent, is the highest in the region, social service providers are bracing for another surge in requests for rental, utility and food assistance should more people lose unemployment benefits. When the supplemental $600-a-week payments ended in July, the requests for help doubled or tripled, the providers said.
At the nonprofit Love Network of Baytown, phone calls for rental assistance jumped to about 100 a month after July from 30, said Gladys Pryor, the program manager. Earlier this year, most applicants were workers living in the country illegally who didn’t qualify for governmental assistance. Now, Love Network is getting requests from families who lost unemployment benefits and struggle to pay for food, shelter and other necessities.
“Once those additional funds were taken away we saw a big increase in calls,” Pryor said. “A lot of people ran out of benefits or their time expired.”
For many who can’t find work, it’s not for lack of trying. Alves said he applies for jobs every day. Sometimes he gets interviews, other times he never hears a word back. Either way, a job offer has yet to materialize.
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“There’s so many people out there. It’s very competitive and for someone (my age), it’s kind of difficult,” Alves said. “I got all these years of experience, but I don’t have a degree. I spent all my time working, I didn’t have time to go to school.”
In the meantime, Alves has been forced to cut back significantly. Some reductions, such as eliminating restaurant meals or saving on gasoline by visiting his adult children in South Houston less frequently, have come easily. Others have not.
Alves gave up his health insurance because he couldn’t afford the $2,000-a-month premium after he lost coverage with his job. He’s paying for his wife’s medications out of pocket, about $500 a month, and hoping that nothing goes wrong.
“Between medical bills, rent and stuff you got to have,” Alves said, “there is just not enough money.”
A boom-bust economy
Baytown, a city of more than 75,000 about 25 miles east of Houston, was built on the oil industry, starting with the discovery of the Goose Creek oil field in the early 20th century and the development of the Humble Oil, now Exxon Mobil, refinery. Here, refinery and petrochemical towers distinguish the skyline more than any building.
The crash in energy demand spurred by the pandemic hit the city hard, driving unemployment to a peak near 24 percent in May before retreating to 15 percent in October. That’s still more than double the rate for the Houston metropolitan area and state.
B. J. Simon, associate executive director of the Baytown-West Chambers County Economic Development Foundation, said the unemployment figures aren’t as bleak as they might seem, given the structure of the community’s labor force. Baytown has a high share of industrial contract workers who cycle in and out of workforce, elevating the unemployment rate even in good times.
Historically, the city averages an unemployment rate of about 8.5 percent, compared to 5.5 percent for the Gulf Coast region.
He added that the city’s sales tax revenues are stable. Sales taxes in September, the most recent month available, reached $1.9 million. up from $1.75 million a year earlier. The City Council’s finance committee described the sales tax collections as “resilient and robust.”
The view, however, is different from the Cuban Cafe, just down the road from the Exxon Mobil refinery. Before the pandemic, the phone would start ringing at 4 a.m. with breakfast orders, and, not long after that, a line would form as tables quickly filled with engineers, contractors and other workers.
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The restaurant could depend on large lunch orders to cater meetings at Exxon and other businesses, which the owner, Melissa Scott, estimates accounted for 20 to 30 percent of her business. Now, with most people working from home, those orders are long gone.
Scott said she’s managed to keep all her staff working with the help of a $6,000 low-interest loan from the federal Paycheck Protection Program, a small business relief initiative in the $3 trillion CARES Act. But the longer the pandemic drags on, the more likely it becomes that she will have to lay off workers, barring additional aid.
“I could always go back down to just me and my husband like we started out, but that means eight other families would have to learn how to provide for themselves elsewhere,” Scott said. “I don’t want to do that to them.”
Rent or heat?
Just as the Paycheck Protection Program helped keep small businesses in operation and employees in jobs, the additional $600 a week in federal unemployment benefits helped households stay afloat. When that program expired, many families were forced to juggle bills, facing the choice of paying the rent or utilities, said Hilda Villalobos, executive director of Baytown Resource and Assistance Center.
In many cases, they chose the rent. The number of people seeking help from her agency to pay utility bills tripled to 90 in October from 30 in July, when the enhanced benefits expired. Many families have fallen far behind, with bills running into the hundreds of dollars and utilities preparing to cut electric and natural gas service for nonpayment.
“It’s not that people don’t want to pay, but they can’t,” Villalobos said. “Some of our clients are one of two, one of three families in one home. Everyone is trying to survive.”
Craig Olds, 52, called the resource center in tears when his wife and son caught colds after his heat was cut off for non-payment of his gas bill and temperatures fell into the 40s. Olds, an operator in a steel mill, had his hours cut in March and was laid off in September.
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For the first time in his life, he found himself going to food pantries, not to donate, but to feed his own family.
“It's, it's crazy,” Olds said. “I mean, I never in my life — in my 50 years on this planet — I've never been this way.”
At Hearts and Hands of Baytown, a ministry of Iglesia Cristo Viene, more than 30,000 families used its food bank from January to October, nearly double the number served during the same period last year.
For real
Executive Director Nikki Rincon said she wouldn’t have been able to meet the demand without help from school districts and other nonprofits that provided volunteers, space to collect and distribute food donations, and in some cases, funding. She suspects that many of the people stopping at the food pantry are coming for the first time.
“When you do intakes outside and see that someone had a $90,000 salary,” Rincon said, “and now they’re showing up at 5 a.m. to wait for a box of food, you know there is a real issue.”
becca.carballo@chron.com
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Families drain savings, struggle to pay bills while waiting for federal support - Houston Chronicle
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