By Darragh Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 23, 2006; C01
You cannot tell. The parking lot betrays no secrets.
Here in America's richest county, outside the red wood barn in downtown Leesburg, the cars come. And come. About 40 a day: the PT Cruiser, a cavernous Expedition, a gleaming Hyundai Tucson, two Toyota Camrys. Owners lock their doors with a button on their car keys, then head inside wearing a sleek black business suit, or tasseled loafers, or a jacket that's the pressed, fresh white of a daytime Clorox commercial.
They have all the accoutrements of consumption. They look as if they might have run their hand over the hood of the used Jaguar around the corner -- for sale at $23,500 -- or popped into the nearby English Manor, where a bird cage the size of a small closet costs $1,130, and a toile breakfast-nook chair has been marked down to $1,825.
Instead, they are crowded inside this barn, standing in line for an hour -- waiting for free milk. They fill out forms stating how many adults and children live in their home, and which of the following "extras" they would be interested in receiving, " if they are available ": coffee, flour, tea, sugar, peanut butter, yogurt, eggs, dry milk, baby wipes, diapers.
Here at the food pantry, peanut butter is an extra.
The clients of Loudoun Interfaith Relief, which gave away food to 3,300 county residents in August, are in economic freefall. As they wait in line, some talk about the latest census statistics -- recent news stories about how Loudoun County's 255,500 residents are living in the single wealthiest jurisdiction in America. Its median family income is more than $98,000 a year. Half of the county's households make even more.
Everyone here is part of the half that makes less. Way less.
Some are defiant. "Yeah, I saw that," says a sarcastic Kizzie Jackson, a 29-year-old who lives in Leesburg and cares for her grandmother, her daughter and two small cousins. "I saw that." Her voice gets angrier. "Yeah, right ."
Heads nod around her.
"You're either up or down," says a woman in a pink Ralph Lauren T-shirt, turning to Jackson and smiling grimly. "There's no one in the middle."
"And basically," Jackson agrees, "everyone here is down."
Some are ashamed.
"I don't come from a family that had to come to a place like this," says the woman in the white jacket holding an 8-month-boy on her lap. Her husband works for a local water company, she says, and she used to work full time at a Leesburg bank, until her baby was born. She will not give her name because "it's hard to swallow your pride." Says the woman in the sleek black business suit, "Just leave my name out."
The man to Jackson's right suddenly stands and picks up the package of sub sandwich rolls he's held in his lap. He is Scott Roberts, a 45-year-old former server from Red Lobster who just lost his job. He is literally leaping at the chance to exchange those sandwich rolls for a newly delivered loaf of white sliced bread because "you can get further with a loaf of bread," he says.
"I saw that story," announces an agitated 45-year-old Deirdre King. "I even clipped it out because it's not true." She sits up straighter. "This is not true. We moved here from California with my family because we were supposed to be better off." They are not, she says.
Her husband is a mechanic for United Airlines, and when he got a raise -- "a good raise, life was good for like six months" -- they began building a house on her family's property in Waterford. Then his salary was slashed. The Kings found themselves paying $200 a month for health care, an expense that "United used to cover." Her husband, she says, "makes less now than he did when he started 22 years ago."
And though they built their house for not quite $250,000, she says, the county values their house at $600,000, and "our taxes are exorbitant ." It's yet another downside to life here in Loudoun County, where one of the latest developments bears the Ritz-Carlton name and its homes are "priced from just $3 million."
"It makes you a little jealous," King confesses, leaning in and whispering.
Stories of cutbacks and layoffs permeate the room. A 40-year-old woman in an ironed sundress and chic blue purse says she's one of the 500 employees getting laid off Oct. 4 from United's reservation center in Sterling. While she plans to move to Chicago to stay with the company, cutbacks in employee hours have left her without overtime pay, so she visits the food pantry once every month or two. She, too, will not give her name: "I'm embarrassed."
And food pantry employees tell the story, like a cautionary tale, about the high-powered man from Sprint who had finally built his lakeside "dream home" in Ashburn. Then Sprint cut back. Though he had three months' salary saved up, the house payments, car payments and other obligations became too much. He lost the house, says Duffy Sanchez, Interfaith's director of operations. "It was heartbreaking to see him here."
"You can always tell when it's somebody's first time and they never imagined themselves being here," says Wanda Moloney, Interfaith's director of client relations, "because they're right on the edge of busting into tears."
Moloney herself "can't afford" to live in Loudoun, so she commutes from Luray, on the western side of the Shenandoah National Park, driving an hour and 45 minutes each way to work. Working in food pantries for years has spurred her to develop a strategy for her paycheck: "I buy gift certificates to Sheetz . . . and Food Lion. And that way I have gas and food."
Want is spread throughout Loudoun. Homelessness -- especially that of families getting evicted -- remains a growing problem: Loudoun's Volunteers of America runs two shelters for homeless families, and women and children, which together saw an average of 57 people a night last year. In August, the shelters turned away 71 people, a number that doesn't even include homeless single men. Most of the people struggling day to day live in Leesburg and Sterling, where between 50 and 60 percent of the students at three elementary schools are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-cost meals.
Even with two-thirds of their client households having at least one employed adult, Loudoun Interfaith Relief in the fiscal year ending June 30 fed 9,339 households and a total of nearly 35,000 people. The sole qualification: Clients must live in Loudoun County. And be willing to spend hours in a bread line.
"These are not the people that are just laying around the house each day," Moloney says. "They're hardworking people. If you had a cup of coffee in the last month, or stayed in a hotel, there's a chance it's our clientele who served you."
Back in the parking lot, on the other side of a Lexus SUV belonging to a volunteer, a woman pauses before getting into her Honda Civic. Says the bumper sticker next to her left knee: "I am the proud parent of a National Fitness Award Winner."
She is Jennifer Hall, a 43-year-old single mother with four children, ages 12 to 21, all living at home. She no longer works, she says, because "I was in a car accident. I'm trying to find something I can do." She peeks inside the bags that volunteers have packed and spots a can of SpaghettiOs amid the several cans of diced tomatoes, green beans, sweet peas and mushroom soup.
"Oh! Julie'll love that one," she cries. Beside the Rice Krispies and trail bars are a deli-packed pasta salad and three small, plastic tubs of cut-up fresh fruit. "Mango, watermelon," Hall crows. "Oh, wow. They spoiled us!" She pulls out another. "Cantaloupe. Oh, wow! My daughter's gonna think she died and went to heaven."
Driving into the parking spot behind Hall's comes Catherine Beatty, a tall and blond 50-year-old mother of two teenagers, the eldest of whom has leukemia.
She works as a cashier at the Leesburg Safeway and sees, she says, "the rich people, but then you see the poor people with food stamps. You see both ends of it." She sees enough to wonder, exactly, how rich Loudoun could really be?
"I don't believe the census," she says on her way inside. "I don't think that's accurate."
Her husband cares for their son and no longer works -- though in the next breath she says, "he isn't very much for working." But when he did, they got by on $40,000 to $50,000 a year. Now their family income is about $30,000 from the Safeway. She works a lot of overtime -- six days a week and holidays.
But twice a month, she pulls her small, white Chevy Classic, with the Nine Inch Nails and Pink Floyd bumper stickers into the parking lot alongside the Expeditions and Camrys. She fills out her forms, waits in line and loads her trunk with free groceries from the food pantry.