Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast
Hurrying to drop off her rent check near her home in Jackson, Mississippi, Jasmine Roberson took a deep breath and did the math: She was seven days late, which took an extra $70 out of her already empty bank account. She has a looming $500 car payment, three boys to feed, a gas tank to fill, utilities. And she has to cover all of this and more with a week less of wages in her pocket, all because a lack of drinking water forced her to make a choice: caring for her children after schools and daycares closed or going to work.
“I really had no choice,” Roberson, a 29-year-old single mother, said. “It was either my kids having nowhere to go or going to my job, and I chose my kids. It was a stressful moment that put me behind and now I am trying to hold on.”
To make matters worse, she can no longer get help paying for rent. Last month, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves announced that he was ending the state’s participation in a federal pandemic rental assistance program—which he called a “cruel” “socialist experiment”—and sending back about $130 million in aid funds. About two weeks later, Jackson’s 150,000 residents, 83 percent of whom are Black, were hit with another water crisis that made daily life a lot more difficult and expensive to get through.