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BEIJING — China’s President Xi Jinping met American business leaders at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Wednesday, as the government tries to woo back foreign investors and international firms seeking reassurance about the impact of new regulations. 

Beijing wants to boost growth of the world’s second-largest economy after foreign direct investment shrank 8% in 2023 amid heightened investor concern over an anti-espionage law, exit bans, and raids on consultancies and due diligence firms. 

Xi’s increasing focus on national security has left many companies uncertain where they might step over the line, even as Chinese leaders make public overtures toward foreign investors. 

“China’s development has gone through all sorts of difficulties and challenges to get to where it is today,” Xi said, according to state media. 

“In the past, [China] did not collapse because of a ‘China collapse theory,’ and it will also not peak now because of a ‘China peak theory,'” he said. 

Stephen Schwarzman, co-founder and CEO of private equity firm Blackstone, Raj Subramaniam, head of American delivery giant FedEx, and Cristiano Amon, the boss of chips manufacturer Qualcomm, were part of the around 20-strong all-male U.S. contingent.  

The audience with Xi — organized by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, the U.S.-China Business Council and the Asia Society think tank — lasted around 90 minutes, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. 

The source, who declined to be named as they were not authorized to speak to the media, had no immediate comment on what was discussed. The National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and Asia Society did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the meeting. 

A statement from U.S.-China Business Council said the participants “stressed the importance of rebalancing China’s economy by increasing consumption there and encouraging the government to further address longstanding concerns with cross border data flows, government procurement, intellectual property rights, and improved regulatory transparency and predictability.” 

The U.S. and China are gradually resuming engagements after relations between the two economic superpowers sank to their lowest in years due to clashes over trade policies, the future of democratically ruled Taiwan and territorial claims in the South China Sea. 
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An analysis by Britain’s Royal United Services Institute has found that many Western nations still rely on Russian nuclear fuel to power their reactors, despite efforts to sever economic ties with the Kremlin following its 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Henry Ridgwell reports from London.
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Tehran — Iran’s currency fell to a record low on Sunday, plunging to 613,500 to the dollar, as its people celebrated the Persian New Year. 

On Sunday, people were trying to exchange rials for foreign currency at Tehran’s main hub of exchange shops in Ferdowsi Street, but most were closed due to the Nowruz holidays, which are run from March 20 to April 2. 

Mohsen, a 32-year-old employee at one of the exchange shops, said the holiday was contributing to the low prices, “The price is not real, the demand for purchasing dollars is very high, but there are just a few exchange shops open.” He and other Iranians spoke on condition their last names not be used, because of potential repercussions for speaking to foreign media about the country’s economic struggles. 

The two-week holiday is an opportunity to travel abroad, driving demand for U.S. dollars and Euros. 

Mojtaba, a 49-year-old father, was shocked: “The rial fell 5% compared to the last six days, while the whole country is on vacation!” 

Niloufar, 28-year-old wife and her husband Behzad, 30, said that they’d booked a weeklong tour of Turkey at a discount rate, but were now looking at spending as much as full-price tour. 

The exchange rate strongly affects other markets, including housing and rentals. 

The price was 590,000 to the dollar on March 18, the last workday before the holiday. 

Many Iranians have seen their life savings evaporate as the local currency has depreciated. Today, it’s worth about one-twentieth as much as it was in 2015, when Iran signed a nuclear accord with world powers. 

Since then, it’s fallen from 32,000 rials to the dollar to the hundreds of thousands. In February 2023, it briefly reached a nadir of 600,000 reals to the dollar, and since then has not risen above 439,000. 

The government’s Statistics Center put the country’s inflation rate for Feb. 2024 at 42.5%, while Central Bank said it was more than 46%. There is no explanation for the discrepancy. 

Iran’s relations with the west have been at exceptional lows since then-U.S. President Donald Trump abandoned a deal that called for the country to end its nuclear program in return for access to frozen funds and other benefits. President Joe Biden said he was willing to re-enter a nuclear deal with Iran, but formal talks to try to find a roadmap to restart the deal collapsed in August 2022. In the meantime, tensions in the Middle East have increased significantly, making nuclear diplomacy with Iran more complicated. Iran has further angered Western countries by supplying armed drones to Russia that have been used in its invasion of Ukraine. 

Dire economic conditions have contributed to widespread anger at the government in the past, but have also forced many Iranians to focus on putting food on the table rather than engaging in high-risk political activism amid a fierce crackdown on dissent. 

The rial’s record low came less than a month after a parliamentary election that saw the lowest turnout since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, whose results were dominated by hard-line politicians. 

Hard-liners have controlled the parliament for the past two decades — with chants of “Death to America” often heard during its sessions.
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Tel Aviv, Israel — During China’s annual national legislature this month, Premier Li Qiang announced plans to construct more solar and wind farms as well as hydropower projects.

China is already the world’s largest producer of renewable energy and also holds near-monopolies on the globe’s renewable energy manufacturing and supply chain. Last year alone China produced more solar panels than the U.S. has ever produced in total.

China’s dominance in electric vehicle battery components and solar power panels has rattled Western governments, including those of the European Union and the United States, which blame Beijing’s “huge” state subsidies. The U.S. has responded with its own subsidies and incentives to boost American production.

China is also the world’s biggest consumer of fossil fuels and the globe’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide. But analysts say that puts Beijing in a good position to partner on renewable energy growth with a somewhat surprising group — oil producers in the Persian Gulf.

Gulf States including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Kuwait and Iraq produced about a third of the world’s crude oil in 2022, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. But they’re also diversifying away from those industries with help from China, say analysts.

Energy and Geopolitics Researcher Elai Rettig at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University tells VOA it’s a mutually beneficial investment as the shift to green energy will free up oil for sale to the Gulf’s main consumers in Asia, especially China.

“In that region, oil is cheaper than water,” notes Rettig.  “The more you invest in the Gulf, the more you can trust they’ll see you get oil even under sanctions. China is the biggest oil importer in the world and needs to make sure someone will sell them cheap oil if there’s a confrontation with the U.S.”

But it’s less about the Gulf states’ love of China and more about Beijing’s ability to deliver on large-scale projects at lower costs, says Li-Chen Sim, a nonresident fellow at the Washington-based Middle East Institute.

“The Chinese can produce low-priced, polysilicon for solar panels because labor costs are cheaper, so products are cheaper. Solar model assembly in China is 50% cheaper than in Europe,” she told VOA.

Western countries have raised tariffs on Chinese imports and offered fresh subsidies to encourage domestic competition. The European Union this month approved import taxes on Chinese electric vehicles and is considering them for solar panels.

The EU this month moved closer to banning products made with forced labor, which is expected to include polysilicon components for solar panels made in China’s western Xinjiang region, which supplies nearly half the global demand.

The United States stopped all imports from the region in 2022 as part of a crackdown on forced labor imposed on the region’s ethnic Uyghur Muslim minority, which China denies.

Despite pushback from the West, plunging solar prices are making it harder to compete with Chinese manufacturers.

Nonetheless, China has some competition when it comes to renewable energy in the Gulf States, says Sim.

“China plays a role [in the Gulf] in the financing, contractor and equipment sectors — in financing they are significant. But in fact, not as significant as the Japanese,” she said.  “Japan’s role in green energy financing in the Gulf is huge.”

During his July 2023 Middle East tour aimed at promoting Japan’s green technology and regional economic ties, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida signed signed 23 agreements with the UAE to strengthen cooperation and existing partnerships.

Japan in 2017 became the first country in the world to formulate a national hydrogen strategy with plans to become the first “hydrogen society.”

But it will have to compete with China, already the world’s top producer and consumer of hydrogen, though most of it is generated with high-carbon emission fossil fuels like coal.  
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Nairobi, Kenya — With a week until Easter, chocolate lovers should brace themselves for higher prices when they purchase their favorite seasonal treats.

A nonprofit environmental group says cocoa costs three times more than it did a year ago because of climate change and the El Nino weather effect. Prices reached $8,000 per ton this week, compared with $2,500 last year at this time.

Amber Sawyer, a climate and energy analyst at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, or ECIU, a U.K.-based nonprofit group, said the volatile weather patterns in the top cocoa-producing countries of Ghana and Ivory Coast have affected international commodity prices.

“Chocolate producers are trying to buy up cocoa, but there’s a reduced supply of it,” she said. “So obviously, because of the reduced supply, the demand has gone up, and the prices have therefore gone up for confectionery companies who make chocolate. These costs are now being fed through to consumers.”

Ghana and Ivory Coast, which produce nearly 60% of global cocoa, experienced heavy rains in December. Flooding caused crop damage and led to cocoa plants rotting with black pod disease.

Extreme heat has hurt, too.

“That’s affecting not only the crop, because it’s difficult to grow cocoa in these conditions, but also the farmers themselves,” Sawyer said.

“Farmers have gone from having too much rain to not enough rain, which means that they’re behind on production and unable to sell on the international markets,” she said.

Ghana has reduced its cocoa production estimate this year from 850,000 to 650,000 tons due to adverse weather conditions and smuggling.

United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization data show cocoa is grown in countries that are most vulnerable and less prepared to deal with climate change.

A U.K.-based World Weather Attribution website analysis released Thursday showed that West Africa experienced an intense heatwave in February, with temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit).

Izidine Pinto, a researcher with the Royal Netherlands Metrological Institute connected with the website, said the heatwaves and heavy rainfall affect people’s lives and jobs.

“Climate change is making rainfall heavier and heatwaves like these more intense,” he said. “These changes to extreme weather are making life more dangerous for people in West Africa. … This is damaging livelihoods … damaging crops and making food prices more expensive.”

Weather experts note that heatwaves used to occur once every 100 years before widespread fossil fuel burning, but in today’s climate, heatwaves happen once every 10 years.

African countries bear the brunt of climate change despite contributing the least to greenhouse gas emissions. The ECIU urges wealthier nations to offer financial and technical aid to assist farmers in managing the impact of severe weather and climate change.
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NEW YORK — Reddit soared in its Wall Street debut as investors pushed the valued of the company close to $9 billion seconds after it began trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

Reddit, which priced its IPO at $34 a share, debuted Thursday afternoon at $47 a share. The going price has climbed even higher since, with shares for the self-anointed “front page of the internet” soaring more than 55% as of around 1:20 p.m. ET.

The IPO will test the quirky company’s ability to overcome a nearly 20-year history colored by uninterrupted losses, management turmoil and occasional user backlashes to build a sustainable business.

“The supply is pretty limited and there’s strong demand, so my sense is that this is going to be a hot IPO,” Reena Aggarwal, director of Georgetown University’s Psaros Center for Financial Markets and Policy, said ahead of Reddit’s trading Thursday. “The good news for Reddit is it’s a hot market.”

Still, she also anticipates Reddit’s IPO to be volatile. Even with a sizeable “pop,” it’s possible that some might sell their shares to reap their gains soon after, potentially causing prices to drift.

The interest surrounding Reddit stems largely from a large audience that religiously visits the service to discuss a potpourri of subjects that range from silly memes to existential worries, as well as get recommendations from like-minded people.

About 76 million users checked into one of Reddit’s roughly 100,000 communities in December, according to the regulatory disclosures required before the San Francisco company goes public. Reddit set aside up to 1.76 million of 15.3 million shares being offered in the IPO for users of its service.

Per the usual IPO custom, the remaining shares are expected to be bought primarily by mutual funds and other institutional investors betting Reddit is ready for prime time in finance.

Reddit’s moneymaking potential also has attracted some prominent supporters, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who accumulated a stake as an early investor that has made him one of the company’s biggest shareholders. Altman owns 12.2 million shares of Reddit stock, according to the company’s IPO disclosures.

Other early investors in Reddit have included PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, Academy Award-winning actor Jared Leto and rapper Snoop Dogg. None of them are listed among Reddit’s largest shareholders heading into the IPO.

By the tech industry’s standards, Reddit remains extraordinarily small for a company that has been around as long as it has.

Reddit has never profited from its broad reach while piling up cumulative losses of $717 million. That number has swollen from cumulative losses of $467 million in December 2021 when the company first filed papers to go public before aborting that attempt.

In the recent documents filed for its revived IPO, Reddit attributed the losses to a fairly recent focus on finding new ways to boost revenue.

Not long after it was born, Reddit was sold to magazine publisher Conde Nast for $10 million in deal that meant the company didn’t need to run as a standalone business. Even after Conde Nast parent Advance Magazine Publishers spun off Reddit in 2011, the company said in its IPO filing that it didn’t begin to focus on generating revenue until 2018.

Those efforts, mostly centered around selling ads, have helped the social platform increase its annual revenue from $229 million in 2020 to $804 million last year. But the San Francisco-based company also posted combined losses of $436 million from 2020 through 2023.

Reddit outlined a strategy in its filing calling for even more ad sales on a service that it believes companies will be a powerful marketing magnet because so many people search for product recommendations there.

The company also is hoping to bring in more money by licensing access to its content in deals similar to the $60 million that Google recently struck to help train its artificial intelligence models. That ambition, though, faced an almost immediate challenge when the U.S. Federal Trade Commission opened an inquiry into the arrangement.

Since Thursday just marks Reddit’s first day on the public market, Aggarwal stresses that the first key measure of success will boil down to the company’s next earnings call.

“As a public company now they have to report a lot more … in the next earnings release,” she said. “I’m sure the market will watch that carefully.”

Reddit also experienced tumultuous bouts of instability in leadership that may scare off prospective investors. Company co-founders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian — also the husband of tennis superstar Serena Williams — both left Reddit in 2009 while Conde Nast was still in control, only to return years later.

Huffman, 40, is now CEO, but how he got the job serves as a reminder of how messy things can get at Reddit. The change in command occurred in 2015 after Ellen Pao resigned as CEO amid a nasty user backlash to the banning of several communities and the firing of Reddit’s talent director. Even though Ohanian said he was primarily responsible for the firing and the bans, Pao was hit with most of the vitriol.

Although his founder’s letter leading up to this IPO didn’t mention it, Huffman touched upon the company’s past turmoil in another missive included in a December 2021 filing attempt that was subsequently canceled.

“We lived these challenges publicly and have the scars, learnings, and policy updates to prove it,” Huffman wrote in 2021. “Our history influences our future. There will undoubtedly be more challenges to come.”
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A China-funded international airport in Nepal opened more than a year ago but still hasn’t received international flights. With loan repayments for the Pokhara airport due to start soon, many worry Nepal has fallen into a debt trap. Henry Wilkins reports.
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Washington — The Biden administration has reached an agreement to provide Intel with up to $8.5 billion in direct funding and $11 billion in loans for computer chip plants in Arizona, Ohio, New Mexico and Oregon. 

President Joe Biden plans to talk up the investment on Wednesday as he visits Intel’s campus in Chandler, Arizona, which could be a decisive swing state in November’s election. He has often said that not enough voters know about his economic policies and suggested that more would support him if they did know. 

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said the deal reached through her department would put the United States in a position to produce 20% of the world’s most advanced chips by 2030, up from the current level of zero. The United States designs advanced chips, but its inability to make them domestically has emerged as a national security and economic risk. 

“Failure is not an option — leading-edge chips are the core of our innovation system, especially when it comes to advances in artificial intelligence and our military systems,” Raimondo said on a call with reporters. “We can’t just design chips. We have to make them in America.”

The funding announcement comes amid the heat of the 2024 presidential campaign. Biden has been telling voters that his policies have led to a resurgence in U.S. manufacturing and job growth. His message is a direct challenge to former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, who raised tariffs while in the White House and wants to do so again on the promise of protecting U.S. factory jobs from China. 

Biden narrowly beat Trump in Arizona in 2020 by a margin of 49.4% to 49.1%. 

U.S. adults have dim views of Biden’s economic leadership, with just 34% approving, according to a February poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs. The lingering impact of inflation hitting a four-decade high in 2022 has hurt the Democrat, who had a 52% approval on the economy in July 2021. 

Intel’s projects would be funded in part through the bipartisan 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, which the Biden administration helped shepherd through Congress at a time of concerns after the pandemic that the loss of access to chips made in Asia could plunge the U.S. economy into recession.  

When pushing for the investment, lawmakers expressed concern about efforts by China to control Taiwan, which accounts for more than 90% of advanced computer chip production. 

Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat up for reelection this year, stressed that his state would become “a global leader in semiconductor manufacturing” as Intel would be generating thousands of jobs. Ohio has voted for Trump in the past two presidential elections, and Brown in November will face Republican Bernie Moreno, a Trump-backed businessman from Cleveland. 

Wednesday’s announcement is the fourth and largest so far under the chips law, with the government support expected to help enable Intel to make $100 billion in capital investments over five years. About 25% of that total would involve building and land, while roughly 70% would go to equipment, said Pat Gelsinger, CEO of Intel. 

“We think of this as a defining moment for the United States, the semiconductor industry and for Intel,” said Gelsinger, who called the CHIPS Act “the most critical industrial policy legislation since World War II.” 

The Intel CEO said on a call with reporters that he would like to see a sequel to the 2022 law in order to provide additional funding for the industry. 

Biden administration officials say that computer chip companies would not be investing domestically at their expected scale without the government support. Intel funding would lead to a combined 30,000 manufacturing and construction jobs. The company also plans to claim tax credits from the Treasury Department worth up to 25% on qualified investments. 

The Santa Clara, California-based company will use the funding in four different states. In Chandler, Arizona, the money will help to build two new chip plants and modernize an existing one. The funding will establish two advanced plants in New Albany, Ohio, which is just outside the state capital of Columbus. 

The company will also turn two of its plants in Rio Rancho, New Mexico into advanced packaging facilities. And Intel will also modernize facilities in Hillsboro, Oregon. 

The Biden administration has also made workforce training and access to affordable childcare a priority in agreements to support companies. Under the agreement with the Commerce Department, Intel will commit to local training programs as well as increase the reimbursement amount for its childcare program, among other efforts. 
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A recent series of Ukrainian drone strikes targeting Russian oil refineries has significantly reduced Moscow’s processing capacity — as Kyiv and its allies aim to deprive Russia of its main source of revenue. Henry Ridgwell reports from London.
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WASHINGTON — Lori Shelton can’t fathom ever having the money to buy a home — and that’s a major reason why so many voters feel down on the economy ahead of this year’s presidential election.

Shelton, 67, drives an Uber to help pay rent in Aurora, Colorado. An advance on her pay covered her apartment’s security deposit. But it also cut into her next paycheck, leaving her bank account dangerously low when the rent was due — a cycle that never seems to end.

“I’m always one step behind,” said Shelton, her voice choking up. “It’s a nightmare, it’s a freaking nightmare right now.”

The United States is slogging through a housing affordability crisis that was decades in the making. At the root of this problem: America failed to build enough homes for its growing population. The shortage strikes at the heart of the American dream of homeownership — dampening U.S. President Joe Biden’s assurances that the U.S. economy is strong and underscoring the degree to which Republican Donald Trump, the former president and presumptive GOP nominee for 2024, has largely overlooked the shortage.

The lack of housing has caused a record number of renters to devote an excessive amount of income to housing, according to a Harvard University analysis. Not enough homes are for sale or being built, keeping prices elevated. Average mortgage rates have more than doubled and further worsened affordability.

In fact, the Census Bureau reported that homeownership fell slightly at the end of last year in an otherwise solid economy. If it wasn’t for shelter costs, inflation — Biden’s most pronounced economic problem — would be running at a healthy and stable 1.8%. Instead, it’s hovering around 3.2%.

Administration officials are confident that shelter inflation will soon cool, but the damage across several years is apparent to advocates and economists.

“I’ve been doing housing work for 30 years — the housing affordability challenge is the worst I’ve ever seen in my career,” said Shaun Donovan, a former secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Obama years who now leads the nonprofit Enterprise Community Partners.

Donovan noted that this is an increasingly bipartisan challenge that could bring the political parties together. Expensive housing was once the domain of Democratic areas such as New York City and San Francisco. It’s now moved into Republican states as places such as Boise, Idaho, grapple with higher prices.

“It is a first-tier issue almost everywhere,” he said. “And that is changing the national politics around it in a way that I think is quite different than I’ve ever seen.”

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, said that the outcome of the November election could ultimately depend on the path of 30-year mortgage rates.

Rates currently average about 6.74%. If they dropped closer to 6%, the odds of a Biden victory would increase. But rates moving near 8% might enable Trump to prevail, Zandi said.

“Given the current housing affordability crisis, higher rates will make owning a home completely out of reach for nearly all potential first-time homebuyers,” he said. “Since homeownership is a key part of the American dream, if it appears unattainable, this will deeply impact voters’ sense of the economy.”

Biden, a Democrat, acknowledged the pain many are feeling in his State of the Union address earlier this month and in his budget proposal released on Monday.

The president wants to fund the building and preservation of 2 million housing units — a meaningful sum, but not enough to solve the shortage. He also proposed a tax credit worth up to $10,000 to homebuyers. Over the past three years, he has increased rental assistance to 100,000 households.

“The bottom line is we have to build, build, build,” Biden said Monday in a speech to the National League of Cities. “That’s how we bring down housing costs for good.”

Rapidly climbing home prices were also a festering problem under Trump, who first achieved celebrity status as a real estate developer. While president, Trump called for limiting construction in the suburbs. He claimed during the 2020 election that Biden’s policies to spur building and affordability would “destroy your neighborhood.”

During the 2018 to 2020 years of Trump’s presidency, the country’s housing shortage surged 52% to 3.8 million units, according to the mortgage company Freddie Mac.

The Associated Press contacted Trump’s campaign for his policy plans but did not get a response. The America First Policy Institute, a think tank promoting Trump’s vision, said the key is to cut government borrowing to reduce mortgage rates. The former president has pledged to reduce deficits, but an analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget shows that his policies in office will have likely added more than $8 trillion to the national debt.

“The best way for us to improve access to homeownership for young people is to get interest rates back down, not to provide subsidies that cause housing unaffordability to worsen,” said Mike Faulkender, chief economist at the institute.

Lower rates might play well with voters, but most economists say they would at best offer temporary financial relief. Purchase prices would likely adjust upward in response to greater demand from falling rates.

Construction, the more enduring solution, would take years to achieve and require new rules by states and cities. The administration is trying to incentivize zoning changes, but the major choices are outside the White House’s control.

“Even as incomes are going up and the economy is doing well and inflation is coming down, people can’t buy homes,” said Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at the brokerage Redfin. “That’s like the biggest problem for Biden because it’s not one that he can solve.”

The general rule of thumb is that people should pay no more than 30% of their income on rent or a mortgage. A typical household looking to buy a home would have to devote 41% of its income to mortgage payments, according to Redfin.

There are far-reaching economic risks because of this. High housing costs can lead people to cut back spending elsewhere. Advocates said it enables landlords to neglect their properties since there is always a ready tenant.

Evictions can worsen health and educational outcomes for children and exact an even wider cost on society, said Zach Neumann, a Denver-based lawyer who provides more than $30 million annually in rental assistance through the nonprofit Community Economic Defense Project.

The cumulative costs of evicting poorer renters are “$20,000 to $30,000 a year when you include shelter nights and emergency room visits,” Neumann said. “It’s really overwhelming when you think about the total numbers and these folks are fighting to have a roof over their heads.”

While there is bipartisan agreement on the need for more housing, there has yet to be a significant plan that has passed the House and Senate. Biden has proposed housing aid throughout his administration that never materialized.

“Had Congress passed some of the investments that the president has called for since the beginning of the administration, had they done that three years ago, as he was advocating, we’d have affordable units coming online right now,” said Daniel Hornung, deputy director of the White House National Economic Council.

But Mark Calabria, who was director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency during the Trump administration, said that many of the federal tools to increase housing such as the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit could further push up demand without adding enough construction.

“My worry would be we’ve done a number of things that increased demand when the problem is supply,” said Calabria, now an adviser with the libertarian Cato Institute.

But for renters such as Lori Shelton in Colorado, the debate about how to add housing supply is cold comfort when she owes rent now. She’s previously dealt with the threat of eviction and late fees. She gets some rent money from her son, but she has also relied at times on her church to cover the $2,399 a month.

“I don’t think the majority of us have that savings account,” she said. “If you spend that much on your rent and your groceries and your car and your bills, you don’t have much for a fallback.”
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