Consider This from NPR - Scenes From A Pandemic Economy: 4 American Indicators

Episode Date: February 11, 2021

The pandemic economy has left different people in vastly different situations. Today, we introduce four American indicators — people whose paths will help us understand the arc of the recovery. Hear their stories now, and we'll follow up with them in a few months: Brooke Neubauer in Nevada, founder of The Just One Project; Lisa Winton of the Winton Machine Company in Georgia; Lee Camp with Arch City Defenders in Missouri; and New Jersey-based hotel owner Bhavish Patel. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Bhavish Patel has been in the hotel business for decades, so he's seen a lot of upheaval from 9-11 to the Great Recession, and none of it has compared to this moment right now. I think the past year is the worst we've ever seen it. Patel's family business owns seven franchise hotels, like Hampton Inn or Comfort Inn. They're in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Illinois. With COVID, basically most of our properties are either running like between a 10 or 15% occupancy. In a normal year, I know 100% occupancy is not normal. What is typical for you? So for us, we can range anywhere from 60 to about a 75, 80% occupancy. And now you're looking at 10 to 15%.

Now we're looking at 10 to 15%. To stay in business, he has cut as deep as he can. Some hotels only have one person working at a time since there are hardly any guests. He's furloughed some employees and laid off others, people who've worked for him for ages. It really hurt me because you get to know these employees. They're like family to you and you're their livelihood too. You're putting food on the table. You know some of the kids.

And yeah, it was hard. It was really hard. When the pandemic hit, big parts of the U.S. economy just turned off. Today, parts are creeping back and some sectors are actually thriving. Meanwhile, government help has been sporadic, uneven. Do you think this experience says anything more broadly about the American dream and a person's ability to build something lasting in this country. It depends on how you believe in your American dream. I think to some, maybe, they might give up and say, this is just, it's not going to work for me anymore. I give up. It's going to go in a

different direction. Consider this. The pandemic recession has put different people in vastly different situations. So today, we're introducing you to four people who will help us understand the arc of the economic recovery as we follow them in the months ahead. We're calling them our American Indicators. From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's Thursday, February 11th. This message comes from NPR sponsor, BetterHelp, the online counseling service dedicated to connecting you with a licensed counselor to help you overcome whatever stands in the way of your happiness. Fill out a questionnaire and get matched with a professional tailored to your needs. And if you aren't satisfied with your counselor, you can request a new one at any time free of charge. Visit betterhelp.com slash consider to get 10% off your first month. Get the help you deserve with BetterHelp. Decades before the civil rights movement of the 1950s and

60s, Marcus Garvey attracted millions of followers with a message of Black self-sufficiency and Black nationalism in Africa. For our Black History Month special series, The Seismic Influence and Complicated Legacy of Marcus Garvey. Listen now to the ThruLine podcast from NPR. It's Consider This from NPR. When you talk to people about their economic situation these days, the conversation often boils down to one question. What's keeping you going? I have a dream. My father started this small company. I want to expand upon the company. I don't want to see it go down. Bhavish Patel is our first American indicator.

He literally grew up in a hotel. In 1976, his dad came to the U.S. from the U.K. and bought a 25-room property near an Air Force base in New Jersey. The family lived there. Bhavish told me he's been working in hotels since he was eight. We helped clean rooms. I used to be a lifeguard at our property. We did maintenance. I did lawn care. lifeguard at our property. We did maintenance.

I did lawn care. You name it, I did a front desk, all aspects of the industry. So he's not about to walk away from something he's been doing his whole life. And I'm not going to let it go down without a fight. I'm going to put every ounce of energy I have between myself. My wife is here to stand by me all the time. And so we'll do what we need to do to keep it afloat. Listening to Patel, you could imagine that if you just tread water hard enough, you can keep your head above the surface, even in this choppy economy. But sometimes the waves are just too big. I'm trying to find a place to live. I can't find nothing. I can't find another job. I've been

looking and looking. This has been a whole year now, you know, going on a year. I still can't find anything. I've been doing applications. Cynthia was a housekeeper at a hotel in St. Louis, no connection to Bhavish Patel's company. When travel basically stopped last spring, she got laid off along with all of her colleagues. They laid us off. They sent a letter saying sign up for unemployment and everything. So I signed up for unemployment. I didn't get unemployment until four or five months. So she fell behind on rent. She lives with her two adult children and her eight-year-old grandson in a house where she says sewage is backing up. She hasn't paid rent in about a year, and her landlord wants her out.

And I know these people want us out of this house. I want to be out of here just as bad they want us out because I'm not like that, not paying my bills and don't want to pay. I want to pay. Many people facing eviction right now are like Cynthia. They're disproportionately people of color, often parents. We're only using her first name because she doesn't want to hurt her future chances of finding a place to live. We met Cynthia through a housing attorney in St. Louis named Lee Camp, and he is our second American indicator. Yeah, I think what we're experiencing is a moment of loss in this country that is no one's fault. He works for Arch City Defenders, an organization that represents tenants,

and he's dealing with what he describes as a tidal wave of evictions. It's not the tenant's fault that they've lost their jobs, generally. It's not the landlord's fault that their tenants are losing their jobs and not available to, or not able to afford their rent at this moment. President Biden extended a federal moratorium on evictions, but that only covers about a third of rental properties in the U.S. And Camp told me he's also seeing extrajudicial evictions. Like people come home to find their stuff is in the street.

The locks have been changed. There's been no official process. Some of these tenants have dealt with housing instability before, and the pandemic has just made everything worse. That being said, there is a kind of second tier of individuals that have never been through these issues. A lot of our service industry workers and individuals like that, that now have fallen into housing insecurity. And unfortunately, we are in a public health crisis. And one of the defenses to this pandemic is remaining in your home. And we need to keep people housed to stymie the spread of this deadly disease. Okay, so imagine that we're checking in with you again, three or six months from now, which we hope to do.

What do you hope you'll be able to tell us at that point? That remains difficult. I am writing things in pencil versus pen. I have stopped trying to predict what I'm going to be doing in three months

or six months. I am optimistic that we'm going to be doing in three months or six months. I am optimistic that we are going to be on the backside of this pandemic by then. However, on the back end of this pandemic, we will see families saddled with debt like we have never seen. We will still likely be dealing with mass evictions, which will turn into homelessness into the streets.

You know, I hope that the tsunami of evictions never happens. And I hope that because a tsunami is a natural disaster that can't be prevented. Well, we can prevent this. So remember how I said that this recession is hitting different people differently? Well, our next American indicator is someone who is also busier than she's ever been. But for her, it's a good problem to have. Hi, I'm Lisa Winton, and I am one of the owners of Winton Machine Company, located in Suwannee, Georgia. We're about 25 minutes north of Metro Atlanta. She started this company with her husband George more than 20 years ago.

Her background's in business, he's an engineer. And today they've got about 40 employees building machines that let their customers make tubular parts for everything from the Mars rover to missile defense systems. Think about a refrigerator. In the back of a refrigerator, you'd have a serpentine coil used for heat transfer. It could be you're sitting out at the pool. It could be your lawn chair that you're sitting on has bent tubing. She gave us a Zoom tour of her business the other day. This is our manufacturing facility. The factory floor is a huge high-ceilinged space full of half-built machinery, mammoth spools of copper, and rows and rows of shelving stuffed full of metal parts.

About 20 masked workers are spread out across the space. We build our machines here. We do everything pretty much on site. So we have engineers on site, and we do... Sounds like Godzilla's on the other side of the factory floor. I don't know what they're doing today, but it's loud. And so what this machine's going to do is it's going to make safety rails for the tops of buildings. Right now, many American businesses are struggling, but Winton Machine Company is actually doing really well. And Lisa Winton told me a story that helps illustrate why. When the pandemic first hit, I thought, huh, I

guess I should stock up on some food. And I never had an extra refrigerator, an extra freezer. And so I said, well, I'm going to go get an extra freezer to stock up on things. I couldn't find one anywhere. And I actually reached out to one of our customers who make them. And I said, do you guys have any in production? Like, are they going to be in the stores? And they were just so far behind. Did you get the hookup? I did not. Oh, no. Over the last year, Americans with money have spent less on travel or restaurants, and instead they've bought a lot of stuff.

Spending on durable goods was one of the brightest spots in the economy during 2020. People bought outdoor furniture and refrigerators, the kinds of things Lisa Winton's customers make. And while there are still fewer people employed in manufacturing than there were a year ago at this time, Lisa Winton says in this sector of the economy, a lot of business owners can't find enough qualified employees. Because we have the skills gap and they're good paying jobs. And then we have people who are looking for jobs, but are not trained and skilled and educated.

All right, from Georgia, let's head west now to Nevada, where Brooke Neubauer sees the transformation of this pandemic economy week after week. You know those images we've seen all over the country of cars lined up for hours at food banks, stretching for miles down the highway? Well, Brooke is at the front of those lines. Every month we have 13 locations to access food and we distribute about 17,000 people in three hours. She's the founder of the Just One Project. It's the largest mobile food pantry in the state of Nevada.

And Brooke Neubauer is our fourth and final American Indicator. Tell me about the change that you have seen since the pandemic hit. So we had an increase of 200%. For 2020, we served 386,000 people. And compared to what we served in 2019, it was 162,000. And now it's a different animal because now you have people from all walks of life. So now you have people that were casino executives in our lines. Executives, not just people who were doing housekeeping at casinos, but executives. Absolutely. I always used to tell people anyway that hunger has no face. You can't judge who has less food in their pantry because of their situation that they're going through. And now that's as real as ever. And before, our clientele was people living below the poverty line or people that had job displacement, but not like it is now. Food pantries across the country are seeing the same thing. The organization

Feeding America says it has seen a 60% average increase in demand during the pandemic. And about 40% of the people showing up these days have never needed help before. When you see those people coming through the line who tell you that they were a casino executive, or that they have never needed to seek help from anyone before and that this is a new thing for them. Does it make you nervous about the fabric of society and the strength of the safety net? I think that we are going to take so many years to recover. I think that that's the hardest thing. You know, for me, we're really focusing on sustainability so that we can be here for the community for a long term, because I know that the people that are in

our lines right now, they might be with us for a very long time to come. Brooke Neubauer, founder of the Just One Project in Las Vegas. President Biden has said the economic recovery is one of his top priorities. His first big legislative package is a coronavirus relief bill worth almost $2 trillion. So if it passes, what impact will it have on hunger or evictions, hospitality or manufacturing? Well, we'll find out in the coming months as we check back in with the people you heard today to experience the economy through the eyes of Bhavish Patel, Lee Camp, Lisa Winton, and Brooke Neubauer, our American Indicators. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.