"I'm Going to Freeze." Workers Struggle to Pay for Food, Housing and, Especially, Heating Fuel
Along with the climbing costs of gasoline, groceries and rent, residents face skyrocketing heating bills. Sharing House and other groups are trying to help.
BREVARD — Freida Fisher, picking out clothes from the racks and shelves at Sharing House, went mostly for the fuzziest items available — sweaters, sweatshirts and cozy pants.
“This is what you do when you don’t have heat,” said Fisher, 56, as she stuffed the bulky supplies into a white plastic trash bag.
“You warm up. You put on more layers.”
After paying for groceries, gasoline and lingering medical bills from a long bout with leukemia, the roughly $550 Fisher makes each week as a server at a Mills River restaurant hasn’t left nearly enough cash to cover the skyrocketing cost of heating fuel, she said.
She’s been getting by with “a little electric heater” while she scrambles to find fuel supplements from non-profit assistance organizations, Sharing House and the Salvation Army.
“Right now, there’s no possible way I can afford $600 for 100 gallons of fuel,” she said.
Fisher is far from alone in Transylvania County as the highest inflation rates in decades take a heavy toll on the finances of both Sharing House and its clients, which it calls “neighbors.”
Rent and house payments are taking a ever-bigger chunk of paychecks. Food stamps are covering a smaller portion of monthly grocery bills. And hikes in gasoline prices are especially crippling to the many residents in remote areas of Transylvania who drive long distances to shop and work.
Then there’s heating oil.
The price of a 100-gallon shipment — the minimum load that suppliers will deliver to homes — has ranged between $300 and $400 in recent years, said Jackie Curtis, Sharing House’s crisis services manager.
This year, it’s nearly double that amount and climbing fast. As she spoke on Tuesday, the price of kerosene had soared to $645. One day later, according to Marcia Pangle, Brevard office manager of Henderson Oil, one of the main suppliers in Transylvania, it had jumped another $10, to $655.
“Everything is increasing,” Curtis said, “but what’s dramatically different this year is the cost of heating.”
Generous Folks Needed
The good news is that more fortunate county residents can — and usually do — help out their less-fortunate neighbors.
“Luckily, I feel we live in an incredibly generous community,” said Kristine Tuggle, the group’s finance and operations manager. “When there’s a need, all you have to do is say so.”
To be clear, that’s what Sharing House is doing now — saying there’s a need.
The group depends on donations from individuals and church groups for the bulk of its annual $2.5 million budget, including funds to help families facing crises such as eviction, utility shut-off —or, as is increasingly common — a bone-dry heating-oil tank.
Besides visiting the website, prospective donors who want to lend a hand to neighbors — and receive a take-out meal — can sign up in advance for the Power Up! fundraiser scheduled to run from 4 to 5:30 pm Nov. 20 at St. Phillip’s Episcopal Church on Main Street in downtown Brevard.
The annual event, sponsored by a group of local religious groups, is specifically targeted at heating bills. It raised $30,000 last year, according to a press release about the event. This year, in the face of rising fuel prices, “the goal is to exceed that amount.”
If there are usually plenty of donors to Sharing House — at 164 Duckworth Ave., just west of downtown Brevard — there are also plenty of residents who need its broad range of services.
Any family earning less than twice the federal poverty threshold qualifies for this assistance. And so far this year, Sharing House has aided 1,507 families, including 191 who requested help for the first time. Those families include a total of about 3,500 members, or more than 10 percent of county residents.
“Transylvania is a poor county,” Fisher said. “People think it’s wealthy, but for the locals it’s not.”
Sharing House is best known for providing direct supplements of food — a full shop for groceries once a month and weekly supplies of fruits and vegetables, Curtis said. It also allows neighbors to choose up to 20 items of donated clothing.
But, more and more, Sharing House is distributing vouchers.
Thanks partly to a $100,000 infusion in funding from the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), the group has provided $71,000 in emergency rental or home-payment assistance this year, up from $28,000 in the pre-Covid year of 2019.
“I would say it has more to do with demand (than the amount of money available),” Tuggle said, “more demand and more demand for larger amounts of money. We all know housing costs in Transylvania County have just gone up exponentially . . . We went through those (ARPA) funds in four months.”
The total amount of vouchers, which includes housing assistance and supplements for heating oil bills, has climbed from $314,000 for all of 2019 to $400,000 so far this year, Tuggle said, “and we’re just entering the heating season.”
The group typically limits the value of vouchers for families facing an emergency to $200, Curtis said, but it can add to that amount with discretionary funds from sources such as the ARPA grant and Power Up! Pangle, whose company works closely with all providers of heating oil supplements, said the vouchers it receives from Sharing House are now often about $400.
Most of the group’s neighbors are, like Fisher, working people. And even families near the top of the range of its eligibility threshold — about $55,000 for a family of four, for example — are struggling as prices climb.
“I think it’s a misconception that we serve a lot of people who don’t work,” Curtis said. “They work and they work hard,” she said, but often in modestly compensated jobs such as house cleaners or caregivers.
Increased costs for one necessity adds strain to pay for all others, and sometimes just a little help such as the monthly food supply can “loosen budgets” and allow families to cope with other bills.
Until, that is, they are hit with an unexpected cost.
“It’s scary because I work with families that are doing their best and once something outside of the realm comes in and disrupts them it is incredibly hard for them to get back on their feet,” Curtis said.
Sometimes the setback is a major car repair. More often it’s a trip to the doctor or hospital.
“One little thing goes wrong with their medical care and it sucks them dry,” she said.
Strokes, Cancer — then Heating Bills
For example, Curtis said, she met earlier this week with the family of a stroke victim that couldn’t find the money for heating oil.
“The family was all trying to scrape it together so a family member who just had a massive stroke could be comfortable,” she said.
Fisher was diagnosed with leukemia in 2015 and though she is now in remission, she said, she still receives “tons of medical bills. Tons of them.”
She will no doubt see more bills after a recent fall at her apartment left her with a badly bruised femur, she said. “I’m black all the way around the top part of my leg.”
Though tests showed no broken bones or dangerous blood clots, the injury required a trip to Transylvania Regional Hospital and a weeklong absence from work.
“There goes $400 to $500 I won’t have, and how do you make that up?” she asked. “You don’t. You’re not going to make that up.”
She receives $194 worth of food stamps monthly. This is intended to pay for three weeks of food, she said, but it now covers “about a half month’s groceries for me, and if I buy coffee, sugar and creamer, it’s not even half month’s groceries.”
Her long commute means that gasoline consumes a large percentage of her take-home pay, she added. And though she lives rent-free in a Rosman apartment damaged by Tropical Storm Fred last year, she’s responsible for repairs that have cost her thousands of dollars.
She has seen worse times, she said; besides surviving cancer and a recent stint of homelessness, she lost her 24-year-old son in a car accident.
“I’ll get through this,” she said. “I’m a soldier, honey.”
But she also said, “I have never in my life seen the cost of heating what it is this year.”
The county Department of Social Services is another source of assistance for energy bills, and has expanded such programs in the face of rising costs, said Director Amanda Vanderoef. But the program Fisher qualifies for doesn’t start distributing federal funding until the first of the year.
She has received a $200 heating-oil voucher from Sharing House, she said on Tuesday, and “I got to go to the Salvation Army tomorrow and get what I can get from them.”
She expected the total would leave her about $200 short of the cost of a delivery, and at least on Tuesday, she had no idea where she would find the money.
“What am I going to do in November and December?” she asked, before answering her own question.
“I’m going to freeze.”
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