Parthenia “Ms. Pat” Chaney was born and raised in Houston’s Sunnyside community. She went to college at the University of Houston, Clark Atlanta University and the University of Texas at Dallas and had a 37-year career, first as a surgical nurse and, later, an accountant. She moved back to the home she grew up in and is now one of millions of Americans barely getting by on a monthly government check.
Chaney said she got a notice earlier this month that because she’d reached the “official retirement age” of 66.8 years old, her disability benefits — stemming from a 2010 foot fracture that forced her into expensive orthopedic shoes and left her unable to drive a vehicle — will now be folded into her Social Security check. She’s not sure what the next payment will look like. Adding to her fear and frustration are the tariffs that President Donald Trump announced last week and then walked back, at least temporarily.
“Things are already tight and prices are already high,” Chaney said. “The anticipation of all this is actually scaring me. Just plain ol’ eggs are $5. Things are going up. I have medication costs. I have doctors that I have to pay, Uber when I can’t do METROLift. The tariffs, yeah, they scare me. It worries me.”
Economists say it’s too soon to tell whether Trump’s reciprocal tariffs will tank the American economy and force a recession, but Houstonians who live on fixed incomes say they’re already feeling the effects. This includes people like Dan Fox who says he lost $100,000 in stocks, his retirement savings.
It also includes 73-year-old Fannie Patten, who worked for 42 years on an assembly line for Goodman Manufacturing, checking air conditioning units for leaks. She met her husband at Goodman and the couple has been married for 39 years. Patten and her husband each receive about $2,000 a month from Social Security. They don’t live extravagantly but their combined monthly checks provide enough to fund an occasional trip to Luby’s after Sunday services at One Church at Bethel Family.
“All you can do is keep living,” Patten said. “We made it through all these other terrible presidents like Nixon and all of them. We’ll make it through [Trump].”
Grocery prices are too high and Trump’s tariffs are concerning, Patten said Friday while waiting for a ride from METROLift at the Sunnyside Health and Multi-Service Center. But senior citizens are helpless. They can’t just launch a side hustle to bring in some extra cash. They are forced to adjust their spending and forego luxuries, Patten said.
“People don’t understand you have to make it work,” Patten said. “You can’t say I don’t have enough for this or that. We just don’t complain about nothing. Complaining ain’t going to make it better. We can’t worry about money. Everybody’s trying to get rich. I’ll be dead and gone before that happens.”
Patten said she’s fortunate to have a two-income household and three daughters who make sure their parents don’t go without. It’s tougher for people like 41-year-old Denia Zuniga, a forklift operator, who relies on government assistance to feed her child.
“I think everybody is worried about the tariffs,” she said. “The more you work, the more they take away from you.”
Trump’s tariffs and the uncertainty he’s created by announcing, then rescinding, then changing the exempted items, was fodder for late-night television shows all weekend. But it’s not a joke to Chaney, who said she’s worked hard her entire life and isn’t asking for a handout.
“What they put me through … When I had the accident, that forced me into early retirement,” she said. “I was 52, and the government just flat-out told me I wasn’t old enough [to collect Social Security] so I didn’t get it until I was 55. I had to struggle to get money that was taken out of my paychecks. It was my own money. I had to hire an attorney to get my money.”
Those who live on meager Social Security checks are cringing as they see the prices of groceries going up. Many aren’t concerned with their savings plummeting in the stock market because they don’t have any savings anymore. Those close to retirement age have determined they’ll have to work a few more years. Trump loyalists, however, say it’s going to hurt for a while but we’ll be out of the economic slump within a year or so, and the president is doing what’s necessary to right the wrongs of the Biden Administration, which they say drove the country into debt.
Chaney isn’t buying it.
“I don’t hold truth to that,” she says politely. “He’s looking out for the rich people of the world, not the poor people or the middle-class people. We’re already struggling. We don’t have money to invest in the market. He’s playing a rich man’s game and if you’re rich, you’re all for it.”
Chaney’s monthly check is less than $2,000, and her family home is paid off. She’s divorced and has no children. Some senior citizens are still paying a mortgage or rent at a pricey assisted living facility and she doesn’t know how they’re able to pay the bills.
“If you don’t start out with much, you’re not going to be able to go too far, and it’s going to get bumpy quick.”
“If you don’t start out with much, you’re not going to be able to go too far, and it’s going to get bumpy quick,” she said.
Through her travels on the METROLift rideshare service for the disabled, Chaney met a pair of friends in their 80s and 90s — one from south Houston and one from Alief, who meet up to go to a farmer’s market in Midtown. One gets $11 a month in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits and the other gets $13 a month.
“This is supposed to be your food budget for one month,” Chaney said. “They pool their money together to get vegetables so they can make some kind of a soup. If that’s not a mess, I don’t know what is. I can’t handle that. I’ve started to keep a little money in my pocket and I give them $20 so they can buy a little extra. My mom and dad are both gone now, but when I was living in Dallas, I used to always think that if I was good to somebody else, maybe in my absence, someone would be good to my parents.”
Fox, 80, retired from working in the oil fields and teaching high school chemistry and Spanish, and has lived in west Houston since 1979. The widowed grandfather has some money in the bank and owns his home but says the best-case scenario in Trump’s tariff push is that perhaps the president’s loyal followers will see what a mess their leader has made. Trump’s tariffs cost him six figures in the stock market over the past couple of weeks, he said. The market will eventually bounce back, experts say, but the uncertainty is making businesses and consumers uncomfortable in the meantime.
“Experts say free trade is almost always a good idea,” Fox said. He referenced the “disastrous” 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariffs that raised U.S. import taxes in an effort to protect American farmers during the Great Depression but instead triggered retaliatory tariffs from other nations, stifling international trade and worsening the economy.
“This is not the first time that high tariffs have been imposed,” Fox said. “We don’t need to scratch our heads and think, could this be a good idea? We know. History is behind the concept of free trade with very few exceptions.”
Rain Eatmon, founder and CEO of Acres Homes Community Advocacy Group, spends her days connecting residents to resources so they can get a bag of groceries or pay their utility bills.
“Your average resident at Acres Homes isn’t going to dive too deep into what tariffs are until you make the connection that it has something to do with rising costs,” Eatmon said. “That’s when you see the passion start to come out. More often than not, it’s a little bit of panic, it’s a little bit of disgust and it’s a lot of questions as to why things are moving in such a fluctuating state.”
Acres Homes is one of the top 10 most impoverished communities in Harris County, Eatmon said.
“We’re already dealing with a vulnerable population in Acres Homes that is in dire need of any and all assistance, which is why we work closely with the Houston Food Bank and MD Anderson and other partners to help residents find food distribution and other resources like SNAP and [Women, Infants and Children] to help them apply and kind of take care of the gap,” she said. “You have a lot of the population that’s now in the throes of these will-be-won’t-be tariffs that are still trying to figure out if they’re going to be able to afford their next meal or just live comfortably.”
Pearl Cajoles, director of marketing and communications at the Houston Food Bank, said there’s no data yet showing that tariffs have caused or will cause an uptick in the number of Houstonians needing assistance.
“While tariffs might affect our acquisition of food, we have had a long history of being able to serve our neighbors even when need increases or in times of crisis,” she said.
As the fear and uncertainty grows in Houston communities, it’s a good time to uplift one another, Eatmon added.
“I would really love to see the light bulb go off in our respective circles and say, this is the perfect opportunity for me to get to know my neighbor better,” she said. “I can’t control what Donald Trump does but I can control the relationship I have with my neighbor. Growing up, I was raised to believe that whenever you’re in a funk or a down place, giving and serving actually does more for you than just sitting in the funk.”
It’s the Uncertainty, Economists Say
Dietrich Vollrath, an economics professor at the University of Houston, said it’s reasonable for Americans to panic.
“You should be worried for two reasons: the scale of the tariffs proposed on April 2, even with walkbacks since then, is so out of the norm … so off the charts, that it will completely disrupt trade into and out of the U.S.,” Vollrath said.
“The second thing you should be worried about is the sheer uncertainty about what’s happening with them because they seem to change every day. If you’re a consumer you already don’t know what you’re going to pay [for a particular item]. It disrupts the consumer’s spending decision, so we delay. If we delay consumption, that puts a damper on economic activity.
“On the firm side … The businesses don’t know whether they’ll be able to get parts or equipment and if the costs will double. The businesses are essentially going to hit pause as well. They’ve kind of baked in a recession, no matter what, because everybody’s pumped the brakes. That’s the problem — both the scale of this and the uncertainty.”
Vollrath said it’s challenging to wrap his head around the president’s rationale.
“It’s clearly not what a bunch of economists would have told you would be a smart move,” he said. “The tariff numbers they first came out with are frankly ridiculous … There doesn’t appear to be any clear target here or any clear motive, so it’s kind of impossible to assess.”
It would be like borrowing $50,000 to buy a car and then asking the manufacturer to add an extra $20,000 fee, Vollrath said.
“In the long run, this shakes out to something terrible. This demonstrably will make the country poor and worse off,” he said. “There’s no silver lining. There’s no way we come out ahead.”
However, Kenneth Medlock, co-director of the Master’s of Energy Economics program at Rice University, has a more optimistic outlook, cautioning Houstonians to “weather the storm” and suggesting that the short-term impacts will only last a year or two.
“Right now — and this is going to sound strange — the tariffs themselves are not really the story. It’s more about the whiplash and the uncertainty,” he said. “Are there going to be tariffs? How big are they going to be? What commodities are they going to impact? Will energy be exempted? What’s the retaliation going to look like? All those things were not really questions six months ago, and here we are.
“Ironically in many ways, if we just had a tariff and it came in and landed and it was, say, 10 percent and the retaliation from abroad was reciprocal 10 percent and it was done and stopped, then the uncertainty would not be great and people would work through it,” Medlock added. “But it seems like every day there’s a different discussion that emerges … For the long-term economic well-being of industrial complexes — and Houston is in the heart of a major one — that’s not good because uncertainty is an impediment for industry … Imagine if you’re in the logistics business trying to manage a supply chain, how the hell do you do it right now?”
Some have already retired and are watching their 401(k)s disappear overnight.
Vollrath pointed out that not everyone has a year or two to weather the storm. Some have already retired and are watching their 401(k)s disappear overnight. Wealthy people can weather the storm; everybody else has to pass on avocados and bananas and may not be buying Christmas presents for their grandchildren or planning a trip out of state.
“It’s, am I going to feed my kids? Am I going to have a job?” he said. “The recession fears are real and people are right to be worried about it.”
A surge of government expenditures that occurred in the second half of 2024 can be directly tied to the inflation we’re seeing at the grocery store, Medlock explained, adding that we’ll see the potential fallout from tariffs later, possibly over the summer. Companies will raise prices once they have to start building and rebuilding inventories, which will take a few months.
The current situation is different from previous economic downturns, which were driven by a global pandemic or the 2008-09 global financial crisis, Medlock said, noting that the federal government’s fiscal policy is driving what’s happening now. However, the economist said Trump changing his mind on tariffs and reversing course within a 24-hour period signals that he hasn’t gone completely rogue and is listening to expert advice.
“There was a lack of liquidity that emerged in the bond market and that was scary,” Medlock said. “Literally the next day the 90-day pause was issued. You see things like that and you think it appears like they’re listening.”
The residents of Acres Homes, however, don’t feel like anyone is listening to them. They feel slighted by the federal and state government and they’ve lost trust in their leaders, Eatmon said. To get a bag of groceries at the Houston Food Bank, residents don’t have to provide proof of income but they do have to give some general information about who they are, which raises concerns among the immigrant community.
“A lot of our immigrant-status residents don’t feel comfortable giving their information for fear of being doxxed or targeted,” Eatmon said.
The fear extends to those who were born in the U.S. and are simply afraid of what Trump will do next. A 29-year-old employee at the Sunnyside Multi-Service Center asked to remain anonymous and said Trump’s policies are harming the country.
“How is it that the president’s whole movement is to make America great again but he’s tearing us apart?” the man said. “Does he not know that he’s hurting the American people? Does he not care?”
Short-Term and Long-Term Effects
Economists agree for the most part that prices will increase on almost everything thanks to the tariff battle. That means lumber, steel and aluminum prices will go up, a blow to the homebuilding and automotive industries, but also clothing and food prices are rising, hurting small businesses and consumers. And tariffs could have a crushing impact on port cities like Galveston.
Trump branded the reciprocal tariffs — taxes on imported goods from dozens of countries who also tax the U.S. — as “Liberation Day,” announcing April 9 tariffs of over 100 percent that would “make this country very rich.” He then backpedaled by delaying tariffs for 90 days to countries excluding China because Beijing “announced a new round of retaliation,” according to the New York Times. The Dow Jones Industrial Average immediately made steep gains after dropping the day prior. But by the following day, those gains had been cut in half.
Economists have said the uncertainty creates harm, leaving businesses, consumers and investors in fear of what the president will do next.
However, if the Trump administration is “successful in doing what it’s trying to do, it will negotiate a lot of bilateral deals,” Medlock said.
“You’ve already seen some countries come to the table and express a desire to [negotiate],” he said. “China is a different issue altogether. That’s one that both sides of the aisle have been pretty aggressive about. Trump imposed tariffs in the latter half of his first term against China and then Biden doubled down and increased them. Trump has increased them again. That’s an issue that’s connected to national security that’s not going to fade anytime soon. If the administration can figure out a way to negotiate deals with all of the U.S.’s other trading partners, then the China issue becomes a bilateral issue and it’s not as damaging. The supply chains will figure out ways to work around the U.S.-China trade conflict.”
Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston, said Houston has a global economy, so dramatic alterations to financial interests can create some downstream complications for local businesses.
“Houston is booming,” he said. “People are moving here. They’re building houses, buying cars, shopping more, so any general increase in prices related to tariffs could have a slowing effect on Houston’s economy.”
The effects will be both immediate and long-term, Rottinghaus added.
“The immediate ones are the most politically damaging. The long-term ones are kind of a slow burn for Republicans worried about what’s going to happen in midterms,” he said. “The goal of having these tariffs in place is to try to reduce the trade deficit and to promote domestic manufacturing. That can be effective as a long-term strategy but Houston’s general operations would require a lot of time to lead up to that. You’ve got to train a workforce. You’ve got to have the capital infrastructure and you’ve got to have the financial moment to act. That’s a long-term prospect that’s a challenge for any economy, even one as generally nimble as Houston’s.”
Small business owners have pointed out that the tax is paid by the importer and will be passed on to the customer. Cars will cost about $4,000 more, according to reports. The promotion of American-made goods is a noble idea but it won’t work in the short term, critics say, because the U.S. doesn’t have the infrastructure to manufacture all the products used on a daily basis. Labor, materials and overhead costs will increase.
In one of Trump’s change-of-heart moments last week, he said cell phones, computers and some other electronics would be exempt from the tariffs imposed on China. That’s a relief for many, who were told a new American-made iPhone could cost $3,500, but there’s also the threat that the president will change his mind yet again.
“People have asked, isn’t one of the motivations here to return manufacturing back to the U.S.?” Vollrath said. “The answer is, that won’t happen, not on any scale that is appreciable. You don’t want that to happen. Being a heavily manufacturing country is being a pretty poor country.”
Baby boomers are worried about their savings and those who were planning to stop working may have to reverse course, Rottinghaus said. And the Texas political climate is about as uncertain as the economy. Republicans like U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee, are already pushing back on tariffs to insulate themselves in upcoming elections.
“For people who had hoped to retire soon, that seems unlikely right now,” Rottinghaus said. “That definitely has a ripple effect when it comes to the politics of the midterms. The bigger factor is that these tariffs are going to happen at a point where you may have increasing inflation. You do have a lack of government assistance financially and maybe an erosion of the capability of the relied-upon government assistance to get people through their lives. That is the perfect storm politically that could create real problems for Republicans in the midterms.”
Medlock said he’s not worried because he’s more focused on the long run than the short run.
“The very short run can be volatile and can generate a lot of angst and panic,” he said. “Panic is never good. If you get into a panic mode, it can drive self-fulfilling prophecies. If people just take a step back and look at the long-term underlying strength in the U.S. economy, they’ll realize there is a structural foundation here that’s going to be really hard to dismantle for any president, no matter how bad the policy approach that they take. It might mean we go through some short-term pain but … it’s something we will come out of.”
Chaney said U.S. government leaders ought to be ashamed of themselves. “What are they thinking?” she said. “It’s hurtful.”
Eatmon said the residents of Acres Homes are turning their fear into resolve. “A lot of our seniors have gone through economic uncertainty before, so when they do express their concern it’s always followed with some sort of religious statement that God is going to provide,” she said. “Even with the young people, it’s, What can we do?”
So what can people do?
“We focus on what we have control over and what spaces we can create,” Eatmon said. “In order for us to stand the test of time, we have to become resilient again — not just in word, but in action. That resilience comes in a level of self-sufficiency that, by the grace of God, we have access to in the neighborhood.”
Trinity Gardens, Greenspoint and subdivisions surrounding Acres Homes are creating an “agricultural renaissance,” learning how to grow their own food, putting gardens into schools and supporting farmer’s markets and flea markets in the area.
“Governments and empires and large corporations that are supposed to have rule over people tend to crumble from time to time, but smaller-knit communities withstand whatever is going on at the top level,” Eatmon said. “They’re able to sustain themselves because they rely and depend on each other … We were never meant to walk as individuals. We were always meant to walk hand in hand. I think the chaos of the administration is going to breed stronger communities.”
