Mary Gomez waits in line for lunch outside the Spartanburg Soup Kitchen.
“It’s good, you can come here and you can eat and nobody bothers you,” Gomez says. “It's a good place.”
It’s also a busy one. The queue behind Gomez gets longer as we speak. By the time the doors open, the line snakes down the walkway and onto the sidewalk along South Forest Street.
Gomez found her way here from Greer, a small but growing city halfway between Spartanburg and Greenville.
“I've been coming here about a month,” she says. “Not every day. We don't have the gas to come every day.”
Gomez, 78, has trouble getting the money for gas on the $900-plus dollars per month she collects from Social Security. Spartanburg Soup Kitchen is a vital lifeline for her since her trailer burned down two years ago.
“I lived in Greer for 17 years [before] the trailer caught on fire,” Gomez says, adding that she can’t afford the kinds of rents that apartments are going for in Spartanburg these days. Real estate tracking firms like Zillow and Apartments.com set the county’s average rent between $1,065 and $1,450 per month in April.
“I just draw nine-something a month,” she says. “I can't do nothing. It's just really bad.”
Gomez’s plight in finding an affordable place to live is increasingly common in South Carolina, as the escalating cost of housing and slow pace of attainable development is creating longer lines at community lifeboats like Spartanburg Soup Kitchen, Pathways Community Center in Rock Hill, HOPE in Lancaster, and dozens of other places people can get food and shelter help.
The issue is especially noticeable among residents over 65, who make up a sizeable chunk of this line. Senior homelessness is increasing all over the country, including in the Upstate. Amy Hicks, chair of the Division of Health Sciences at Bob Jones University, recently told NBC’s Greenville affiliate that the Upstate region is “seeing this burgeoning epidemic of elderly people who are losing their homes.”
So, seniors are coming to Spartanburg Soup Kitchen in greater numbers. But so is every other age group, says Executive Director Lou Sartor.
Even just a few months ago, Sartor says, she saw 100 to 150 visitors a week coming in for meals.
“It could be anywhere from 350 or more now,” she says. “In the last week, our numbers have drastically increased.”
Some of that uptick had to do with it being Easter. Families usually come in for Easter baskets and games as well as meals. But as life gets more expensive in the region, Sartor says she’s simply seeing more people line up outside for food.
Even at the grocery store, she says, people are coming up to her, concerned for their futures.
“With so many people knowing me, a lot of them have come to me to say, ‘We're going to soon be in the line if food continues to increase,’” she says. “They can't pay for their medication, do the food, and pay the mortgage. This is why we see so many people coming in.”
It isn’t just seniors increasingly showing up for lunch, either. Sartor says more families are dropping in too. Spartanburg Soup Kitchen has a children’s section, in fact, where families can eat together. It’s right next to a wall of something just as vital as food to people experiencing homelessness and severe housing insecurity – shoes.
If you’ve never been too poor to buy new shoes, you might not realize how quickly they can wear out, especially if you spend your days walking on asphalt and concrete. Or if you’re living on the street but still need to go to work.
So Spartanburg Soup Kitchen now has a “shoe closet,” which, really, is a wall of shoes in sizes from children’s to, so far, a pair of men’s size 16. Sartor says the shoe closet started when a gentleman came in a few days before starting a new job, but didn’t have the money to buy a pair of size 12 steel-toed boots.
“At the time, we didn't have any shoes here,” Sartor says. “So Monica, my assistant, she went about some steel toe shoes. The very next day, one of my volunteers came in with size 12 steel toe shoes. This man has been working ever since.”
Sartor likes to say that Spartanburg Soup Kitchen feeds souls and soles. Outside, William Wright, a career construction worker who lost his home after his mother’s medical bills drained the family, is a beneficiary of the soup kitchen’s shoe closet. He got a pair of shoes after losing a job he had last summer when the boss fell ill.
“I'd wore my work boots completely out,” Wright says. “[Lou Sartor] gave me a nice pair of tennis shoes. Now I walk good and comfortable. I didn't have the money at the time … to go buy a pair.”
Despite his setback – which he sees as temporary bad luck – Wright is in good spirits. The soup kitchen brings him a large measure of peace and stability, and he’s glad to know the place isn’t going anywhere, as it had been rumored to be (but, again, isn’t).
He’s trying to land a job at a local quarry and says he’s happy about his chances.
But he’s less optimistic about where things more broadly are heading, and worries he’ll have a lot more company at lunchtime here soon.
“If you’ve got three or four kids, you can't hardly afford to stop and buy gas,” Wright says. “Prices are going to jump on food. They're going to have to up some wages to try to be competitive, where people can try to afford to rent an apartment or house and afford groceries. They're going to have to level the field somehow [else] it's going to be more people out on the streets, you know?”
