The economic crisis in Black America
Keith Turner is baffled when he hears rosy news reports about the economy. “Are we living in two different worlds?” said the 53-year-old New Yorker and father of three. The Economic Hardship Reporting Project and Hammer & Hope spoke with Black Americans facing unemployment, rising costs and growing financial uncertainty.
In Turner’s world, the economic picture is grim and getting worse. Inflation has supposedly cooled, but the shockingly high prices of the past few years remain, putting a strain on the budgets of even middle-income households. Unemployment hovers around 4%, but the official statistics don’t count millions of people who don’t have work. The Republicans’ cuts to Medicaid and Affordable Care Act subsidies to pay for the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill’s tax cuts for the rich have led to skyrocketing health care costs that are swelling the ranks of the uninsured.
In October, billions of dollars’ worth of expenses from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program were shifted to the states, leading to further cuts and the possible elimination of food stamps altogether in some places. Onerous new work requirements for Medicaid recipients go into effect on Jan. 1, 2027. And with no end in sight for Trump’s war on Iran and erratic tariff threats, prices will likely only keep going up, especially for essential goods like gas and food.
Historically in the United States, Black people have been hit the hardest. According to a 2024 Consumer Financial Protection Bureau survey, 63% of Black households reported having difficulty paying bills or expenses, far higher than the overall rate of 43%. A 2022 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 56% of Black people have health care debt, compared with 37% of white people. In 2025, the percentage of Black American men aged 25 to 54 who were employed was under 80%, compared with an employment rate of nearly 90% for white, Latino and Asian American men in the same age range.
As of July, Turner is one of the unlucky Black men on the wrong side of that statistic. He had been providing the bulk of the income for his family of five. His wife, ZuShanna Turner, had worked as a teacher before the couple had children, but they decided that the high cost of child care made it impractical for both to continue in their jobs. So ZuShanna stayed home, working remotely part-time as a mental health counselor and taking care of their three kids, while Keith remained the primary breadwinner.
That all came to a screeching halt one day this summer. After working for 14 years in the Major League Baseball marketing department, eventually earning a salary of just over $100,000, he had his job eliminated in July. “It was totally unexpected,” he explained. “It’s kind of like before you step onto the street, and you look both ways, and there are no cars anywhere for blocks, and you’re just walking, and out of nowhere, you get hit.” The first few weeks, he said, were like going through the stages of grief. “I’m still dealing with it,” he said. “It’s this anxious feeling I get in the morning, and that’s what wakes me up.”
Turner had hoped to stay in his position until retiring but is instead facing a saturated job market and the new AI-driven realities of the search for work. For now, the Turners are surviving off Keith’s severance package, which will last him until February. After that, the future is unclear. He said, “The kids ask me, ‘Dad, you got a new job?’ ‘No, still looking.’ ‘Where you going to work?’”
Meanwhile, the mainstream media insists that “the American economy has been surprisingly resilient,” as the Associated Press put it in July. “The job market has bounced back this year from a lackluster 2025, giving consumers the wherewithal to spend.” Puzzled analysts acknowledge the widespread feelings of financial anxiety but attribute them to a “vibecession.”
But Keith Turner is living in the world that many of the Black people in the United States live in: a world of precarity and fear, where you scramble to get by in the best of times and suffer in the worst of them.
Higher prices are a symptom of economic distress likely to be acknowledged by political leaders. Inflation hit a four-decade high in 2022, peaking at 9.1% in June of that year, and while the inflation rate has gone down, the higher prices haven’t. But the statistics alone don’t convey how lower-income families, especially lower-income families of color, have borne the brunt of the affordability crisis.
Lower-income families spend a much larger portion of their income on necessities, and the prices of these goods and services have risen faster than others and stayed higher. The average price of ground beef nearly doubled from its pre-pandemic price of $3.86 per pound to $6.92 in August. Milk has gone from $3.19 to $4.23 per gallon and eggs from $1.53 to $2.27 per dozen. Average electricity bills have jumped from 13 cents per kilowatt-hour to 20 cents and could increase further as AI data centers continue their sprawl. And of course, Americans are being hit hard at the pump, with average gas prices shooting past $4 per gallon as of late October.
The burden of these higher prices falls more heavily on Black and Latino families not only because they are disproportionately represented among lower-income Americans but because of other factors, such as the food deserts of impoverished urban neighborhoods that relegate residents to shopping at smaller corner stores because supermarkets that often have lower prices are so hard to access.
Those burdens are no easier to bear in smaller cities like Jackson, Mississippi. Brooke Floyd, a mother of two who works at the People’s Advocacy Institute, a social justice organization in Jackson, said that families in her city have seen “every single bill” rise: groceries, mortgages and rents, insurance, and especially utilities. Longstanding problems with Jackson’s water system, including the botched installation of electronic water meters by the tech giant Siemens, have led to residents receiving erroneous water bills that run into the tens of thousands of dollars. “They say you need to get on a payment plan, but I’m like, ‘A payment plan for what?’” Floyd said. “I don’t have it.” One apartment complex, she said, had its water shut off completely because the water bills weren’t paid. “It’s scary,” she said. “I don’t know how families are making it right now.” She continued, “It does make me think when I’m lying in bed at night, ‘What are these babies eating?’”
Floyd’s question is all the more urgent in the face of the Trump administration’s assault on federal programs to combat hunger and malnutrition. The Big Beautiful Bill included the largest funding cut to food assistance in history: $186 billion. Black Americans are already three times more likely to experience food insecurity than white Americans, according to a Federal Reserve study.
The hunger gap could grow worse as more Black people go through what Cortlin Harrison has. Harrison was born and raised in Buffalo, New York. His father served in the military and afterward got a job in the federal government, working with veterans. His work in the public sector afforded the family relative stability and allowed Harrison and his brothers to pursue higher education. Harrison spent two years at Niagara County Community College before leaving school and getting a job at Starbucks, where he got into union organizing. He later worked as a housing organizer, making about $55,000 a year. But for the past several months, he has been unemployed and has had to adjust his budget and his diet.
“Food is really expensive; transportation is really expensive. It’s just all super expensive,” Harrison said. “What I would get for $100 now probably costs, like, $150.” Without a job and with the price of food rising — “Yeah, thanks, Trump,” he said — some groceries like meat were now out of reach. Harrison also lost access to food stamps because of new federal work reporting requirements. Unable to afford rising bills and rent, he moved back in with his parents. “But it’s tough on them,” he explained, “because it’s already expensive for them to afford to live for themselves, so they can’t pay for any of my expenses.”
Kareem Edmonds is used to people telling him that unemployment isn’t his fault. “People will say, ‘You know, you don’t deserve this,’” Edmonds said. “And they’re right. But that’s not changing the fact that we have to play with the hand we’re dealt.”
Sitting in the backyard of a Brooklyn, New York, cafe in August, Edmonds’s deflated demeanor was a stark contrast to how it was last summer, when Economic Hardship Reporting Project and Hammer & Hope first met him. Edmonds, a 31-year-old son of Afro-Guyanese immigrants, had been bubbling over with enthusiasm after Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor. But in the weeks before the second meeting, he had lost his part-time job at a private school offering technology classes — and along with it the modest $18-an-hour wage that had kept him afloat. Because his hours had been reduced first, Edmonds was already taking money out of his savings and retirement to pay his bills. But he had worked hard to try to keep his job as he watched the school downsize. “It was such a blow to me,” he said. “I was actively trying to avoid that outcome for years, and it finally happened.”
Edmonds isn’t alone. The official unemployment rate, which has ranged from 4% to 4.5% recently, may not sound that bad. But the government’s main jobless statistics leave out so-called discouraged workers who are not actively looking for jobs, as well as underemployed workers who need more hours to make ends meet. A recent analysis by the National Jobs for All Network that took account of discouraged and underemployed workers put the real unemployment rate closer to 10%.
To understand the full picture, the sociologist Algernon Austin emphasizes the importance of looking at employment rates — the share of the working-age population with a job. By this measure, Black men lag behind white, Latino, and Asian American men. But Austin points out that structural inequality is clear even from the official jobless statistics, which showed Black unemployment surging above 8% in November 2025. “If white America faced Black America’s unemployment rate,” Austin said, “they would be saying, ‘Is this a recession?’”
Once you lose a job, finding new work is tough — and in an economy where they have historically been the “last hired, first fired,” Black people face even greater challenges. Kearni Warren worked for years at nonprofit and advocacy groups organizing around issues of environmental racism in Chester, Pennsylvania, where she was born and raised. A lifetime spent in the predominantly Black city of about 30,000 people had taught her an unwelcome lesson in structural racism. The city is home to the country’s largest waste incinerator, and its public water authority is facing a private company’s hostile takeover attempt. Household income is about half the national average, and the poverty rate — 3 in 10 people — is almost three times the national average.
In 2024, Warren left her job. She had been working for an organization that prided itself on being Black-led; her bosses often brought her in to meet with funders to project an image of diversity. But behind the scenes, she said, she was being undermined and mistreated by supervisors. She decided to leave her position rather than endure a work environment she considered toxic. Warren spent 18 months out of work, trying to stretch about $2,000 a month in unemployment benefits to make car and mortgage payments that totaled about $1,200 per month. She received food stamps but got no help with electricity bills, which averaged about $300 a month, because her unemployment benefits put her above the income limit for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program. “Thank God for family members who supported me during that whole time, but it does affect your self-esteem,” she said of her time struggling to pay the bills while searching for new work. “It gets to a point where you don’t even want to look at your rejection letters.”
“It’s a job, interviewing, because you have to study these companies,” Warren said. “You have to practice. You have to show up when you’re feeling defeated. You have to show up and put on a positive and confident demeanor.” And that was on top of almost daily virtual meetings to prove that she was looking for a job in order to maintain food stamp benefits. “It’s a host of emotions that are taking place when you’re unemployed for so long,” Warren said. “You wonder if it’s ever going to end. You know, you just feel really, really, really down. You kind of watch life pass you by.”
As Warren struggled to find work, she tried using her middle name, Michelle, and a postal code from a more affluent, predominantly white suburb on her résumés — in response to what she believed to be greater hostility toward Black and brown job applicants resulting from the Trump administration’s wholesale assault on DEI initiatives and other anti-discrimination measures. “That was a really kind of stressful time,” she said, “not knowing what they were going to do to those of us who are working in environmental justice.” Warren said the job search became “very stressful because I have a unique name.” She continued, “When you’re doing these interviews, you don’t know if they’re screening you. You don’t know why you’re not getting a job. You think that you do very well, then you don’t get a callback. I went for about a year without even getting an interview. And then finally I started getting interviews, but I wasn’t getting hired.”
Thirty miles north of Chester, in Upper Providence Township, Pennsylvania, Tonita Austin recounted a similar experience. She said that she has been working in accounting for 30 years and never had a problem finding work before — whether part-time or full-time, whatever was necessary to support her two children as a single mom. She is now 61 and still supports her children, ages 19 and 25, who have autism and ADHD. But now Austin has been unemployed for a year. Over the course of the last year, Austin has had to use about $16,000 from her savings and retirement accounts, nearly draining both. She has had to go to food pantries and is considering selling her home. Her daughter lost Medicaid benefits as well as the outpatient psychiatric support she used to receive at the Crozer-Chester Medical Center, now closed. Her son, who works part-time at McDonald’s, is also uninsured. Austin’s blood pressure has been rising. “It’d be different if it was just myself that I had to worry about,” she said. “You’re always scrambling to try to find something to keep the lights on, to find a job that either isn’t out here anymore, or you’re just not the right color.”
Black women have fared the worst in the job market, suffering the greatest losses in employment compared with other demographics. According to a 2026 analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, the job losses for Black women were driven almost entirely by layoffs in the public sector: “Large employment losses and labor force departures among college graduates were a direct consequence of the Trump administration implementing massive federal layoffs and buyouts over the last year, a sector where nearly half of Black workers have a bachelor’s degree or higher.” ZuShanna Turner said she has “a lot of friends that are in limbo” because of the large number of layoffs. She said her friends tell her, “Please pray for me because my job is saying this or my job is saying that. And these are women with degrees, with experience in the business for 20 years.”
Job losses among experienced workers have knock-on effects when new college graduates try to compete for a shrinking pool of positions. The young Black workers interviewed for this article reported that the entry-level jobs they have applied for are often filled by overqualified applicants. Edmonds, for example, has been looking for design work, the career he spent years in college trying to get into. “I came in the game too late,” he said. “There are senior designers that are taking junior design positions. And now with the advent of AI, it’s a whole other ballgame.”
Warren, a college graduate with years of work experience, finally landed a retail job at a department store in June. “It’s a pay cut, and it’s hourly,” she said; her previous job paid about $72,000 a year. “But I do receive benefits.” She continued, “I didn’t think that I would have to start over like this. You know, that’s not part of your life plan. But at least I’m working, and I can hold my head up high.”
When Kareem Edmonds reflects on his family’s experience, the magnitude of how little has changed — or has changed for the worse — hits hard. His parents emigrated from Guyana in the 1980s and hustled to find work. Like him, they pushed themselves to get through extra schooling in order to find more fulfilling work, but the opportunities weren’t there. “Their whole experience was just not being able to do with their lives what they wanted to do,” he said. “Here I am in the same, same way.” He paused, then sighed and said, “I’m sorry. I think I’m just left hurting with that.”
Problems finding employment at a decent wage, a health care emergency, housing costs rising faster than income, obstacles to education, an encounter with the criminal justice system — all of these mutually reinforcing factors make it difficult for Black Americans like Edmonds to get ahead, no matter how hard they try. As Edmonds put it, the “popular idea of meritocracy, you’ve just got to try to work hard, like pick up some bootstraps, like fry those fries — it’s a bunch of bullshit.” He had worked his way through college, which took him seven years. “I’m a case in point. I did my time,” he said. “I worked tougher jobs. At one point, I was working all seven days. I had no breaks.”
Conditions in predominantly Black cities like Jackson offer a concentrated picture of the compounded effects of centuries of systematic racism. Floyd ticked off the problems: “Neighborhoods not being well-resourced, grocery stores not being accessible, health care not being accessible. If you don’t have a car in Jackson, that’s a problem because buses aren’t regularly available.” She added that 22 schools had closed over the past few years, along with several hospital departments. “Now you have empty buildings in neighborhoods. So what does that tell our children?” Mississippi, Floyd noted, has the highest infant mortality rate in the nation. “When our Black babies are born,” she said, their survival is in jeopardy from the outset, and the dangers continue throughout their lives. “All these hurdles, just to live,” Floyd said. “Not thrive — just to live.”
Conditions for rural Black people are even worse. LaTosha Brown grew up in Selma, Alabama, and later helped co-found the voting rights group Black Voters Matter. As she sees it, people in rural America have been used as “lab rats” to see how deep cuts to the country’s social safety net can go — and the first to be experimented on are Black folks. According to a 2023 study, 12.7% of rural white Americans live in poverty, significantly higher than the national average. But among rural Black Americans, 37% live under the official poverty line. Brown said that rural African Americans are treated “as extractive resources” to be used but not valued by those in power. The extent of that extraction is evident in the loss of land. Black people collectively owned 14 million acres of land in 1910; today, they own less than 2 million acres. According to a Congressional Black Caucus Foundation report, between 1992 and 2002, 94% of Black farmers lost some or all of their land, three times the rate of white farmers.
Though getting an education increases the chances of having work, employment rates for Black people are lower than for their white counterparts at every level of educational attainment. And that’s after overcoming the tremendous obstacles to gaining an education. After running a children’s program at a nonprofit in Jackson for more than 20 years, Floyd saw what happened to the children she had helped access higher education. “A lot of kids, when they hit the finish line, they don’t have the support that’s needed for the next level,” she said. By contrast, Floyd had help from her family when she took breaks to work before going back to school to graduate. “Other young people don’t have that,” she said. “It’s over, and then you’re back in the neighborhood you grew up in. If it’s not a positive place, we know what can happen.”
Both Keith and ZuShanna Turner described the hurdles they faced to get to college and then to stay there. In part, this is a question of wealth. It’s a lot easier to get through college if your family has money and you don’t have to work your way through school or battle hunger and financial insecurity while trying to study. White households inherit five times as much wealth as Black families. Black households have far greater debt loads than their white counterparts.
ZuShanna made it to college against the odds. She was raised by a single mom whose financial fortunes went from relative stability — based on working three jobs — to economic collapse after a local church took advantage of her. She spent the bulk of her school years without a home, her family bouncing around among a motel, a shelter, and people’s floors until the family moved back to live with her grandmother. Remembering how difficult the plunge into poverty was for her, she recalled being sent to school with no lunch. “I would eat her lunch,” Turner said of a friend who always brought an ample lunch to school. “She’d eat an Oreo and bite her sandwich, and then she’d be like, I’m full. And I’m sitting there eating everything because I didn’t have breakfast. I didn’t have lunch.” She continued, “I remember feeling ashamed that I was eating her food, but also, like, I don’t have anything.”
Despite the hardships, Turner graduated from high school with honors. She eventually made her way to Oral Roberts University with personal loans. But there she struggled, far away from home and with no preparation for college, she said. Confronting overt racism for the first time at a predominantly white, evangelical university, Turner described feelings of depression, often sleeping until class and then going back to sleep afterward. Her loans sometimes covered basic expenses, sometimes not. “It was the choice of do my laundry or eat. Don’t want to walk around smelling, so I’m going to do my laundry,” she said. Fears of reliving her past pushed her forward despite the racism, the financial burden and the mental exhaustion. “I don’t have anything else to fall back on,” she explained. “If I don’t persist and get this degree and get a job, get two jobs, I’m going to be out on the street.”
Keith Turner’s parents had emigrated from Jamaica and insisted on the importance of an education, the kind that they never had; they were able to go to school only through third grade. His parents worked hard to give him and his brother better opportunities. Turner said he barely saw his father, who worked three maintenance jobs. “We accepted it because my mom used to say he’s working hard to keep a roof over our head and food on the table,” he said. “We understood, and it was expected of us. We were taught: Go to school, get good grades, get a good job.”
It was a struggle. “I didn’t have any mentors or anything,” Turner explained. In high school, “my parents were like, I can’t help you.” He said, “I had to take the SAT, which I had no clue what that was.” Once at City College of New York, he flipped a coin to decide his major: architecture. That was an expensive choice, it turned out, because of the extra materials needed. So after three years, he switched to computer science and ultimately decided to take a break from school to help with the family’s financial burden. “My parents,” he recalled, “they never made an issue.” But he said they would look at the tuition bill — which rose from about $1,500 a year to $3,200 for city residents during his enrollment in the 1990s — and “have this serious look on their face. And then they’d be like, All right.” Turner put one semester’s tuition on a new credit card, maxing it out. “At least for that one semester,” he said, he was able to tell his parents, “Y’all don’t have to worry.”
Turner never did return to school, torn between feeling that he owed it to his parents to finish college and wanting to help out financially. Instead, he worked his way through computer science jobs to build a career that, for a time, offered some degree of financial stability — and some free baseball games, though he’s never been a big fan. Until it all suddenly came apart in July.
Edward Dupree considers himself lucky. Having worked at Whole Foods for 10 years and found a relatively affordable apartment in Philadelphia — the rent is $750 per month — he said, laughing, “I could be a lot worse.” Dupree recalled feeling financially whole for the first time in the spring of 2020 because Whole Foods briefly paid an extra $2 an hour in hazard pay due to the coronavirus pandemic. Finally, he recalled being able to say, “OK, I’ve paid my rent, I paid my utilities, I’ve gotten my groceries, and I still have a little bit of money. I can go hang out with my friends. I can go, you know, buy a video game. I can do the things that you’re told you’re supposed to be able to do, especially in a capitalist society.” Though the hazard pay came and all too quickly went, his wages rose incrementally over the years, reaching about $21 an hour.
Though Dupree works at a supermarket, he has to shop strategically at three different grocery stores and rarely allows himself the luxury of buying food at his own expensive workplace, despite having an employee discount. Still, having stability in his job has given him the capacity to provide “some sort of safe harbor for other people.” He was able to help one of his sisters a few years ago, and another sister and her son are currently staying with him. He’s watched friends, family and co-workers go through much harder times than he has: forced to skip medications, facing sky-high electricity bills, unable to afford rent or going through mental health crises.
Dupree feels content in his job. He knows the produce better than anyone, likes the people he works with, and helped lead the unionization efforts at his store — the only unionized Whole Foods thus far. But he also remembers the day that he decided not to try to move up the ladder. Recognizing his strong work experience and knowledge, a supervisor had recommended him for a regular local news segment about seasonal produce. Dupree got a haircut and wore a nice shirt for the occasion. He was introduced to the newscaster, but a regional manager turned him away, telling him, as he recalled, “Well, we’re trying to showcase healthy food.” After a moment of confusion, he understood. “Because this is a health segment, a bigger guy can’t talk about greens or fruit or produce,” he said. “When she did that, I was like, Nah, f---k this place, because they understood my reputation throughout the department and my work ethic.” The manager, an older white woman, did the segment instead, and that sealed his disillusionment with how things work at Whole Foods. “After that, I was like, yeah, I’ll just be a worker.”
It was a strange moment for Dupree but not an uncommon experience. Many people interviewed for this article had a story that illustrated the old saying: It’s not what you know, but who you know — and who you look like. This reality goes beyond personal slights; it gets to the heart of occupational segregation. When the economic sociologist Deirdre Royster studied white and Black graduates from the same vocational high school in Baltimore in the 1990s, she concluded, “Both black and white students had attended the same school, performed at comparable levels, and demonstrated similar strengths and weaknesses of character. Nonetheless, even in this carefully matched sample, race continued to be a powerful predictor of wages and employment.” This proved true in blue-collar as well as white-collar occupations, Royster found.
Of course, racism plays out far more violently through the criminal legal system. Nearly 2 million Black people are arrested every year; their arrest rate is more than double that of whites, and their incarceration rate is nearly five times greater. The economic consequences are devastating. Recent research estimates that about 60% of all formerly incarcerated people are jobless, and the rates are much higher for formerly incarcerated Black people.
Tamaya Dennard’s year in prison led her to become an advocate for formerly incarcerated people, working at the Center for Employment Opportunities in Cincinnati after she was released in May 2022. “It’s really hard,” she said. “It’s discouraging for folks.” While many companies claim to be “fair-chance employers” that don’t exclude applicants who have been imprisoned, neither the data nor the experiences that Dennard learned about bear this out. When she went to bat for formerly incarcerated people, she found that even with skills and certifications, they would hit a wall with employers: “Not that employee, or not that kind of person.”
“I’m playing in my mind my grandparents’ sayings,” Brooke Floyd said. “You know, trouble doesn’t last always and things will get better.” Despite the heartache she’s gone through, she feels hopeful for the future. She finds that hope in the small and large ways that people support one another, building community gardens, looking out for one another’s safety, and more.
Floyd and nearly every other person interviewed for this article counted themselves lucky compared with how bad things could be. Despite facing their own challenges, they expressed more worry about other people. Tonita Austin said, “Black women have been the rocks of our community. I hope somehow we can save one another from losing all hope.” Through the People’s Advocacy Institute, Floyd has helped organize massive relief efforts through the Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition, a network of community organizations founded during the COVID-19 pandemic that supports people who need assistance through a mutual-aid fund.
Aisha Nyandoro, also in Jackson, founded Springboard to Opportunities, a nonprofit that offers a guaranteed income program for Black mothers — because on $7.25 an hour, she said, “there’s no way that you can work your way out of poverty.” Facing a right-wing state government and the reactionary Trump administration can feel “like walking up a mountain of lard also covered in butter,” she said. But at the same time, she added, “I have never been under the illusion that the work should not be hard.”
Dee Reed, an organizer with Black Voters Matter in Alabama, described a story that she says typifies the community response she is seeing everywhere she goes. In a Chevron station recently, the woman in line in front of her had only $4 to pay for some gas. Reed thought she looked like someone who was “putting $4 in her tank to get from point A to point B” to go home after work. Reed had another few dollars and said, “Sister, here’s a few more.” Then the guy standing behind her offered a few more. Before she knew it, $25 had been collected among the people in the store.
“We got us” is the theme, said Reed. “Ain’t nobody gonna save us.” Meanwhile, Kearni Warren helped three women she knew who were homeless due to rising rents or taxes. Cortlin Harrison and Edward Dupree have been involved in workplace organizing efforts, and organizations like Black Voters Matter are making sure that Black communities are heard in the face of right-wing redistricting efforts to disenfranchise them.
“It may seem dark right now,” Floyd said. “But joy comes in the morning. We’re going to be OK.” In all the ways that people are struggling to make things right, “we’re going to win,” she said. “We have no choice but to win.”
Co-published by The Economic Hardship Reporting Project and Hammer & Hope.
This story was produced by The Economic Hardship Reporting Project and Hammer & Hope, and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
