$2 Trillion Coronavirus Rescue Plan Leaves Behind Cleveland's Black Communities

Everywhere Miriam Scott looks, she sees an unrelenting crisis closing in on her church and her flock.

On a Saturday in June, her First Love Outreach Ministries handed out more than 20,000 pounds of food, just shy of what it would typically distribute in an entire year. She’s counseled members of her congregation in Cleveland’s impoverished East Side whose relatives have been struck down by Covid-19 and those who’ve lost jobs and are struggling to pay rent. She’s worried she’s falling out of touch with the parade of vulnerable men who head straight from prison to the homeless shelter and used to fill her pews for Sunday services now held on Facebook. She’s not quite sure how she’s going to pay for the new boiler and roof her church needs. Or the past-due electric bill. Every time she flicks the light switch, she does so with a little prayer that there will be light.

What Pastor Scott worries about most, though, is that this pandemic is going to take away the church she and her husband, Robert, have spent more than a decade building between their shifts as corrections officers. And, more important, that losing the church will leave those who rely on it in a neighborhood where more than half the people live below the poverty line searching for a new spiritual home as the nation deals with its own epochal predicaments.

In a pandemic that’s wreaked widespread economic havoc, Cleveland has been among the hardest hit cities in the U.S. Its unemployment rate peaked at 23.1% in April, after one-fifth of its labor force, mostly lower-income service workers, lost their jobs in a matter of weeks. Yet Scott’s accumulating emergencies represent the all-too-easily forgotten collateral damage. A tiny church serving a vulnerable corner of American society is having a life-or-death moment that will never show up in the data. And it’s doing so with little help at a time when the government and economists are hailing all that’s being poured into the economy and calling for more.

“I’m literally on the last thousand dollars in the bank,” Scott says one morning in June, her eyes tearing up as she sits among plastic bags full of food ready for distribution that fill the pews where people once sat. Yet every time she goes looking for help, “all the doors are shut.”

The $2 trillion rescue that Congress passed in March ranks among the most aggressive in history. Viewed through the aggregate data, there’s no doubt that the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act has saved the economy from a slide into depression and helped millions of families weather the initial plunge into lockdown. Its $1,200 stimulus checks, enhanced unemployment benefits, and flood of money for small businesses, along with the billions of dollars the Federal Reserve has pumped into financial markets, are an expression of an American policy elite that has at times seemed determined not to repeat the mistakes of the last crisis. Concerns about deficits, debt, and inflation have been set aside. The consensus these days has rallied around a whatever-it-takes approach that, though focused on businesses and markets, has included social programs setting new benchmarks for economic impact.

And yet in Cleveland’s predominantly Black neighborhoods, their streets pockmarked with vacant lots and abandoned buildings, home to childhood poverty levels that rival those in developing nations, you find lots of stories like Scott’s that are emblematic of who’s being left behind.

At a time when the U.S. is engaged in another conversation about its foundational racial inequities, the rescue is amplifying those imbalances in places like Cleveland, where half the population is Black, and fueling the anger of a new generation in communities too used to being left out.

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