People on the east side of Saginaw city are more used to seeing buildings come down than go up. Bulldozers have erased houses, schools, department stores and factories over recent years as jobs disappeared and the population plummeted.
But builders will soon be at work in one corner of the Michigan city constructing a sprawling extension to Saginaw’s largest soup kitchen after demand soared through the Covid-19 pandemic and then as rampant inflation hit a community where many people live on the edge financially.
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In what is expected to be a knife-edge US election decided by a few voters in a handful of key battleground states, the Guardian is exploring Saginaw, Michigan. It is a swing area in a swing state whose voters will bear an outsize influence on the outcome of the fight between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Chris McGreal is on the ground in Saginaw in the run up to November’s election examining the issues that voters of all political backgrounds care about.
Saginaw voters: tell us which issues will decide the US election
The East Side Soup Kitchen now serves meals to more than 800 people a day, double the number provided during the pandemic, which itself was up on previous years. It also distributes food to children through local youth clubs and churches.
Few of those who use of the kitchen think that whoever is elected as president next week will slow the demand in a city with a 35% poverty rate, but that does not mean they don’t think it will make a difference. And their votes, too, are up for grabs in a bellwether county that Joe Biden won by just 303 votes in 2020.
On the day that Harris campaign canvassers visited the soup kitchen, Angelica Taybron was eating lunch with her three-month-old daughter, Tyonna, sleeping at her side. Taybron, who is unemployed, could not say enough good things about the kitchen.
“They really help me out here with my baby. They helped with formula and Pampers when I need it. They help me provide for my daughter,” she said.
Help, said Taybron, is what she’s looking for in a president and so she’s voting for Kamala Harris.
“She’s gonna help the people that’s lower. Trump is for people that’s higher. Kamala is for the people that’s struggling,” she said.
Taybron’s partner, Darshell Roberson, also relies on the food kitchen as she struggles to find work. She sees it differently.
“I voted for Biden but I really feel like Biden has failed me. I trust Donald Trump. In the last election I didn’t vote for him. I was kind of scared of him a little bit, but once I really got to watch him and look at him I liked him,” she said.
The soup kitchen’s director, Diane Keenan, said those who arrive for a hot meal each day, and cake for dessert, come from every walk of life. Sitting at the large round tables dotting the dining room are elderly people struggling to get by on small pensions and those driven into debt by medical bills alongside former prisoners rebuilding their lives, and the unhoused, some of them brought down by drug addiction.
“Many are working but they’re working poor,” said Keenan. “They work but they just don’t make enough money to make ends meet with the cost of food, the cost of gas, rent, mortgage payment, insurance, that type of thing. We have a lot of senior citizens and elderly come through. They’re on a limited income and sometimes they have to choose, do I get my medicine or can I get some food?”
The need is so great that earlier this month the state donated $1m to help fund an expansion to the soup kitchen with a larger dining hall and kitchen, freezers big enough for forklifts to drive into.
In a city with one of the highest crime rates in the US, Keenan is trailed by two security guards as she walks around the outside of the building to describe the closure of a neighboring road to provide a covered area for people to pick up meals by car.
The drive-through began when the dining hall closed during the pandemic. Keenan kept it going because she said there are people in need of food who are too embarrassed to come into the building or are not well enough to do so.
Keenan described the kitchen is “felon-friendly”, helping to provide a fresh start for those who have been in prison.
Stanley Henderson served 30 years for a non-violent robbery. After his release in 2015, he worked at a steel mill known for employing former prisoners and then volunteered at the soup kitchen. A couple of years later, he was taken on as a worker and is now in charge of providing coffee and soft drinks.
Henderson has watched demand for the soup kitchen rise as Saginaw’s factories closed and jobs were lost. He hasn’t seen a notable improvement in economic conditions under the US president.
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“The minimum wage isn’t enough for people to sustain themselves through a whole month. We see people coming in when their money runs out for groceries,” he said.
The vice-president is promising to make the economy work better for ordinary Americans if she’s elected. Henderson is sceptical.
“I am hesitant to say that she will because I don’t know. I just don’t know whether there’s more jobs under a Republican or Democrats. I don’t know if the job environment is going to improve. It’s possible it will improve up under the Republicans. They may push employment harder than the Democrats,” he said.
For all that, Henderson said there was “no question” that he will vote and that it was going to be “straight Democrat” because he believes the party does more to look after people living in poverty. He said his friends and neighbours were paying attention to the election in an area of the city with traditionally low turnout, and that he thinks most of them will vote.
Henderson, who is Black, also thinks Harris’s race will bump up turnout in his part of the city, although not like for Barack Obama’s election.
“She might encourage people to vote who don’t normally want to. I’d say about 5% more,” he said.
But there are those who do not see the point in voting.
Auralie Warren is retired and struggling financially after working at KFC for much of her life. Inflation has hit her limited income hard as she helps raise her grandchildren after her eldest daughter died of a brain tumor in February and her youngest daughter was diagnosed with stomach cancer.
“It’s getting harder out there. Food prices are going up. [The soup kitchen] helps me because I’ve got a fixed income. So when I eat here it saves money on food that I can then spend looking after the grandkids,” she said.
“I also come to mingle with people and then I get clothing for my grandkids. If you ask for something, like my daughter needed earmuffs because she has cancer and her ears get cold, they make sure to add them.”
But Warren has never voted in her 76 years and has no plans to do so. Politics didn’t seem worth her time or effort.
“Whatever’s gonna happen is gonna happen. I figure, even if I go [and vote] it won’t make no difference. I mean, it’s shocking but I just never did. I got so busy, I just don’t bother myself, I guess,” she said.