In 2026, that grocery receipt is doing more damage than ever.

Food Prices Are Still Climbing

In our community and for Hoosiers across the state who are living paycheck to paycheck, rising food prices are at a breaking point, forcing tough decisions that only deepen instability.

• According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ June 2026 report, grocery prices rose another 2.7% over the past year, and overall food prices are up 3.1%.
• Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows grocery prices have climbed roughly 25% since 2020, meaning the average household now spends $1,200 to $1,400 more per year on groceries than it did just six years ago.
• Bureau of Labor Statistics data for the Midwest region show that all types of uncooked ground beef averaged a record $7.28 per pound in April 2026 — a 76% increase since January 2020 and the highest price ever recorded in the nearly 30 years the data has been tracked.
• According to the USDA Economic Research Service, fresh vegetables cost 11.9% more than a year ago,  with fresh tomatoes up a staggering 32%.

Prices never went back down after the 2022 spikes. Every year of “moderate” inflation gets stacked on top of already painful prices.

Beef: A Symbol of the Squeeze

Nothing captures the pressure on family food budgets quite like beef. Once the centerpiece of an affordable family dinner, and often ground beef being the most affordable cut of meat, this is no longer the case:

• Ground beef hit a record $6.90 per pound this spring,  up 77% since January 2020, when it cost $3.89.
• USDA Economic Research Service data shows average retail beef prices reached a record $9.64 per pound in April, up 13% in a single year.
• The USDA’s Food Price Outlook projects beef prices will climb another 10.1% in 2026, and the American Farm Bureau Federation reports the U.S. cattle herd is at its smallest in 75 years.
• Agricultural economists interviewed by national outlets this spring warn prices may not meaningfully drop until 2030 or later.

Ground beef was once one of the most economical cuts of beef to feed a family. When a basic protein becomes a luxury, families don’t just change recipes. The rise in meat prices is not unique to beef; we’ve seen Chicken prices rise 36% and pork rise 30% since 2020. They start skipping meals or shortchanging other bills, such as rent, car payments, or utilities, to put food on the table. 

The Safety Net Is Shrinking at the Worst Possible Time

Just as food prices squeeze harder, federal food assistance is pulling back. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed in July 2025, made the largest cuts to SNAP (food stamps) in the program’s history:

• An analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that more than 3.5 million Americans lost SNAP benefits between July 2025 and February 2026, nearly 9% of everyone in the program.
• According to the Congressional Budget Office, the law cuts about $187 billion in federal SNAP funding over the next decade, roughly 20%.
• As reported by the Washington Post in July 2026, work requirements now extend to adults up to age 64, and exemptions were removed for veterans, people experiencing homelessness, and young adults leaving foster care, some of the most vulnerable populations.
• The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities also found that SNAP enrollment has dropped in every state, even though unemployment hasn’t improved.
• The Congressional Budget Office projects that when states must begin paying a share of benefit costs on October 1, 2026, another 300,000 people will lose benefits each month, and 96,000 children will lose automatic free school meals.

Rising Costs and Funding Cuts Mean Hunger Is Worse Now Than During the Pandemic

This is not an exaggeration. This fact is directly from a survey of American households published by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in May 2026:

• The New York Fed’s Survey of Consumer Expectations found that 10% of families reported missing meals because they couldn’t afford food, up from 4% in 2020.
• The same survey found nearly 16% of households relied on food donations.
• Researchers at Purdue University’s Consumer Food Insights survey reported that nationally, food insecurity among SNAP participants surged to 46% in November 2025, a 10-point jump in a single year.
• According to the USDA’s most recent count, 47.9 million people, including 7.3 million children, lived in food-insecure households nationwide.

Americans are having to prioritize rent or food in order to remain housed, and often this happens unsuccessfully, especially for families and older adults, and those who fall under ALICE (asset-limited, income-constrained employed). These are working adults who do not qualify for assistance because they do not fall below the federal poverty line, at which point assistance is available. 

For those who do qualify for assistance, that lifeline has been reduced and is harder to obtain and keep, leaving both groups with impossible choices. 

How a Grocery Bill Becomes an Eviction Notice

When food and rent compete for the same dollars, this can and often is a direct path to becoming unhoused

Housing costs remain the biggest driver of homelessness. But when groceries eat up hundreds of extra dollars a month, and SNAP benefits disappear, something has to give. For a household already spending half its income on rent, rising food costs are the push that sends them over the edge. The national data shows that rising costs have a true impact. In HUD’s most recent Annual Homelessness Assessment Report, they documented a record 771,480 people experiencing homelessness on a single night, an 18% increase in one year, the largest jump ever recorded.

What This Means for Our Community and How You Can Help

At Nest, we see the human side of these statistics every day: the senior choosing between medication and meals, the working parent whose SNAP paperwork got lost in the backlog, the family sleeping in their car with full-time jobs and an empty pantry.

Rising food costs are an unhoused issue. Which means food assistance, prevention services, and emergency shelter are all part of the same solution.

No one in our community should have to choose between dinner tonight and a roof over their head next month.

The post When the Grocery Bill Becomes a Housing Crisis: How Rising Food Costs Are Pushing Hoosiers Toward Homelessness appeared first on Nest Community Shelter.

Back then, our program traveled nightly. Guests slept in church basements, and the shelter moved from one congregation to the next across the city. On the first few nights, two men came through the doors, even though there were many in need. Shelter took time because trust was needed, and relationships with those who needed to utilize our services had to be established. Soon, we became a well-known resource in our community for neighbors in need of a safe nightly shelter.

For more than a decade, Nest existed only because the community kept showing up. We didn’t have a building of our own in those early days. There was no permanent address, just a network of churches, volunteers, and donors who decided that no one in La Porte County should have to sleep outside in the winter.

We did not start as a building. We got our start when we, as a community, decided to act.

From a winter program to a year-round support

A lot has changed in 25 years. In 2020, with help from grants, local businesses, individual donors, and community organizations, Nest finally secured a permanent home. We moved into the former Sacred Heart Church on 8th Street, rehabilitated the building, and brought the men’s and women’s programs together under one roof.

We also grew in who we serve. What began as a men’s winter shelter now welcomes men, women, and women with children. In Michigan City, we no longer close when the cold weather ends; we operate year-round, opening every single night. We do not close on holidays or in bad weather. We never close.

When the City of La Porte called in early 2025 because its unhoused residents needed emergency cold-weather shelter, Nest answered. We opened an emergency shelter for the first four months of the year, because we understood what was at stake. We were privileged to return this past cold-weather season, from the fall of 2025 through the spring of 2026.

More than a bed

A safe place to sleep is the beginning of our work, not the end of it.

Every night, Nest offers a hot meal, a clean, safe place to rest, and breakfast to start the next day. But the deeper goal is to equip our guests with the life skills, guidance, and reconnection to community that help them stay stably housed for good.

That is what it means to be infrastructure. Roads connect people to where they need to go. Schools connect children to a future. We reconnect our neighbors with the community they were separated from.

In 2025 alone, Nest was directly responsible for housing 58 individuals. Each of those numbers is a person who no longer sleeps outside, faces the elements, and carries the isolation that comes with being unhoused. They are neighbors who experienced the power of a community that showed up for them.

The next 25 years

None of this was built by us alone. It was built by faith partners who hosted guests in their basements, by volunteers who served thousands of hours, and by donors who believed that caring for one another is not charity, it is how a community holds itself together.

That is the lesson from 25 years. Nest is one half of the infrastructure that helps people find their way home. The community is the other half. Reconnection happens only when both halves are present.

As we mark this milestone, we are not just looking back. We are asking what the next 25 years could look like if Michigan City keeps showing up for one another. That story is still being written, and there is room for you in it.

The post 25 Years of Building Community as Infrastructure appeared first on Nest Community Shelter.

Public systems are essential, and we do connect our guests to them as well, but they often come with limitations, waiting periods, or eligibility requirements. The spaces between those rules are where guests who are seeking a better life most often hit a roadblock. Community organizations like ours exist to break down these barriers where we can, facilitate the housing process, and provide the support needed for stability. We are close enough to the ground to see a need before it becomes a crisis, and flexible enough to respond before a guest loses the progress they have made.

We do not do this work alone. What makes this work possible is a web of relationships that surrounds every guest who walks through our doors.

Where it started: our faith community

Before Nest had a permanent home, our PADS program ran out of several local churches. For years, congregations opened their doors, set up beds, served warm meals, and stayed overnight so that no one in our community had to sleep outside. That hospitality kept the program alive long enough for us to find the permanent house we operate from today.

That partnership did not end when we moved in. Our faith community still shows up with volunteers, donations, and a steady presence that reminds our guests they are part of something larger than a single shelter.

The civic web around our guests

Getting housed and staying housed is based on dozens of small connections, and most of them live outside our walls. Food pantries make sure a guest is not choosing between rent and groceries. Other nonprofits offer job training, recovery support, childcare, and transportation. Community partners help us reach people we might never have found on our own.

When these organizations work in partnership, a guest who arrives with nothing can leave with a support system and a place to call home. No single agency holds all those pieces. The strength is in the connections between us all.

Why this matters for our community

A web of support only works if there is somewhere to gather it. That is what Nest is: a connection point and temporary shelter for rebuilding lives. You cannot rebuild a life from a sidewalk. It is nearly impossible to hold down a job, keep medical appointments, save money, or fill out housing paperwork when your whole day is spent looking for somewhere safe to sleep and something to eat. Nest and our partners provide an address, a hot meal, a night of real rest, and a stable place to stand while the rest of the network works in partnership.

This is why a recent shift in attitudes worries us. Some have come to see the shelter as a problem rather than a solution, believing that it draws unhoused people into town. It does not. The unhoused are already here, and they are our neighbors. A shelter does not attract them. It is the entry point that moves them off the street and back into housing. Take away that entry point, and the need does not disappear. People simply have nowhere to begin.

Nest is one half of the infrastructure that reconnects our guests to stable lives. The other half is the community itself, the churches, pantries, civic groups, and neighbors who make our work possible. We are the place where those resources come together and where rebuilding begins.

When you support Nest, you are not funding a single program. You are protecting the one entry point that turns being unhoused into being housed and strengthening a web of support that has held our community together for 25 years. With your help, it will hold for the next 25.

The post How Nest Fills an Important Gap in Our Community appeared first on Nest Community Shelter.

Yesterday, we had the opportunity to bring invited elected officials, law enforcement, and local leaders together live on WIMS radio to discuss Indiana’s new Senate Bill 285. Together, we engaged in an honest, civil working conversation among people who do not all agree on causes and solutions, but who are all working to end homelessness.

Nest Executive Director Harrison Holtkamp hosted the discussion on WIMS. The guests included State Representative Jim Pressel, State Representative Randy Novak, State Senator Rodney Pol, La Porte County Sheriff Ron Heeg, and Michigan City Mayor Angie Nelson Deuitch, with longtime community advocate Ed Marion calling in.

What IS SB 285?

The conversation surrounded Indiana Senate Bill 285, signed into law in 2026 and taking effect July 1, which prohibits camping, sleeping, or long-term sheltering on state or local government land that has not been authorized for that use. A law enforcement officer who encounters someone is first directed to determine whether there are grounds for emergency detention and to connect the person to help. If there are no such grounds and the person does not relocate, the conduct can become a Class C misdemeanor. The bill also includes a defense if no shelter bed is available within five miles and adds new reporting requirements to track how many people are affected statewide. SOURCE: SB 285 / Senate Enrolled 

This law has already passed. The purpose of the conversation was to understand what it means for La Porte County and how the community can work within it to help people.

Honest disagreement about the law

Our guests did not pretend to share one view, and that was the strength of the hour.

Representative Pressel framed the bill as a starting point. In his view, it creates a first point of contact where someone in crisis can be informed about available services, and it ultimately requires data collection to help the state understand the scale and causes of the problem. He argued that doing something imperfect is better than doing nothing.

Representative Novak said he did not support the bill. He agreed with the goal of helping people but worried the state was acting downstream, pulling people out of the river without asking why they fell in. His concern was that without adequate facilities and funding already in place, the law risks shifting the problem rather than fixing it.

Senator Pol said he had opposed the bill throughout the process. He pointed to testimony from outreach organizations that the relocation timeline could undo the slow, patient trust-building that their work depends on, and he raised practical questions, including what happens to a person’s belongings when they are moved or arrested.

Different conclusions, but the same underlying question ran beneath all of them: how do we help?

Broad agreement on what is missing

Mental health capacity came up repeatedly. The group noted that every county in Indiana has been federally designated as having a shortage of mental and behavioral health professionals, which makes fast, consistent access to care difficult, regardless of how the law is written. Michigan City Mayor Angie Nelson Deuitch described the strain locally, where a single social worker covers an entire city, and floated the idea of state support to license and retain more clinicians who stay in the community.

Funding was the other constant. Several guests pointed out that the bill arrives without new dollars attached, even as local resources have been cut. Their shared point was blunt: the community will pay either way, whether by investing in housing and services on the front end or by absorbing the cost of jail stays, court processing, and repeat contact on the back end.

The view from law enforcement

Sheriff Heeg was direct about the practical strain on the county. He explained that jails are already crowded, that people brought in often arrive with medical and mental health needs the county then must cover, and that a low-level charge can set off a cycle of missed court dates and further warrants. He also raised a concern that matters deeply to organizations like ours: arrest can erode the trust that outreach workers and shelters spend years building. His position was not opposed to addressing homelessness. It was that a criminal charge at the end of the process can work against the relationship that moves someone forward.

The view from the street

Mayor Angie Nelson Deuitch brought the perspective of the people most affected. She described hosting a lunch where members of the unhoused community spoke for themselves, and she was candid that no two situations are alike. Some people are one paycheck from the edge. Some face a mental health crisis. Some carry eviction or criminal histories that already lock them out of housing, and a new charge becomes one more barrier on a record that keeps them from renting. Listening, she said, is half the battle.

Calling in, Ed Marion added a long-term frame: there is no single cause of homelessness to eliminate, but there is one solution that consistently helps: affordable housing that working people, people on fixed incomes, and people on disability can actually afford.

Where we agreed it begins: the first interaction

If the hour had a center of gravity, it was this. Representative Pressel argued that the first contact between an official and a person in crisis is an opportunity, a moment to connect someone with resources, including Nest, rather than a step toward a charge. Others pushed back usefully, noting that the connection works best when it comes from trained outreach staff and continues over time, not just once. But the underlying agreement held connection and continuity, not enforcement alone, that changed outcomes.

That is what Nest sees every day. Shelter is rarely the whole answer. It is the steady ground a person stands on while the rest of the answer is built services, a mailing address, a path back to work, and someone walking alongside them through systems that are hard to navigate alone, and reconnection to community.

Why this conversation matters

We were encouraged that elected officials from across party lines, law enforcement, city government, advocates, and Nest, a service provider, sat at the same table, openly and respectfully disagreed, and kept returning to the same goal of helping people.

These conversations will continue, and we hope our community stays in them. Ask questions. Listen to the way the people in that studio did.

You can watch the entire show on WIMS’s Facebook page here: Watch Show

The post A Community Conversation on SB 285: What We Heard on-Air Yesterday on The Nest Radio Show appeared first on Nest Community Shelter.

When housing is lost, the relationships built on top of it often slip away too. And the cost of that disconnection ripples far beyond any one person. Housing isn’t only shelter. It’s an address where a friend can find you, a kitchen where someone can host others, a neighborhood where people learn your name. It is the setting where others in a person’s life connect with them and they with others.

The Impact of Loneliness

Being cut off from other people isn’t just a sad feeling. It’s a measurable threat to health. The World Health Organization, in a landmark 2025 report on social connection, found that loneliness and isolation raise the risk of stroke, heart disease, diabetes, and early death. People who are lonely are twice as likely to become depressed, and loneliness can deepen into anxiety and thoughts of self-harm. Importantly, this study was conducted with housed individuals. This matters because we know that being unhoused carries significant mental and physical health risks that compound the World Health Organization’s findings.

For people who are unhoused or housing insecure, this isn’t a rare experience. It’s close to the norm. One 2024 review in BMC Public Health found that social isolation and loneliness affect between a quarter and nine out of ten people with lived experience of being unhoused. When a home is lost, the everyday rhythms that keep relationships alive often go with it: the standing coffee date, the shared commute, the spare room where a friend used to stay. The setting for a person’s social life leaves as well.

Stigma that Builds Walls

There is another force at work here, and it cuts deeper than circumstance. Being unhoused is often seen as falling outside the social norm, carrying a heavy stigma. For many, that stigma becomes its own barrier to connection. Shame keeps people from reaching out to old friends, from showing up at family gatherings, and from introducing themselves to a neighbor. It is hard to build a bridge while believing the other side does not want it built.

This stigma works in both directions. Just as it isolates the unhoused person, it shapes how the rest of the community responds. Neighbors look away. Conversations stop short. People who would gladly help a friend in need hesitate to extend that same warmth to someone they have quietly placed in a different category. The wall, in other words, is built from both sides, and it takes effort from both sides to take it down.

When Belonging Becomes More Difficult

Disconnection feeds on itself. The longer someone is excluded from the ordinary networks the rest of us lean on, the harder it becomes to step back in. It gets harder to hold down a job without a fixed address and no one to call when things go sideways. It gets harder to stay well when no one notices a person has gone quiet.

This isolation quietly pushes people away from civic life, too. When someone feels they have fallen outside the community, they stop showing up to the things that knit a community together. They stop voting, stop volunteering, stop believing their voice counts. A person can be standing right in the middle of town and still feel completely outside of it.

The Cost to Our Community

Social disconnection was never a private problem. The WHO points out that loneliness weakens the bonds that hold communities together and costs billions in lost productivity and health care. The flip side is just as true. Communities with strong social ties tend to be safer, healthier, and more resilient, better able to weather a crisis, a storm, a hard season.

Rebuilding, Reconnecting, and Healing

This is why the work is about so much more than a roof, though the roof matters enormously. Real support means helping people rebuild the ties that come with having a home: a place to belong, people who know your name, a seat at the table of community life. This is where our mission comes into play: to reconnect our guests with the community.

At the end of the day, these are our neighbors. They need human connection to heal, the same as anyone. When we welcome someone back in, we’re not just filling an empty bed. We’re mending a thread in the fabric we all share. And a community that refuses to let anyone fall out of reach is a stronger, kinder, more whole community for everyone in it.

The post The Hidden Cost of Social Disconnection appeared first on Nest Community Shelter.

When we picture being unhoused, we most often picture the absence of a roof. However, ask anyone who has lived through this experience, and you’ll hear about a different loss first: the loss of being known by the community. The loss of the mailman waving as they drop off a birthday card, of fellow community members who look at you and not through you. This is the loss we are speaking about. A home is the quiet infrastructure that holds a person within a web of relationships, and when it disappears, that web frays with it.

This is the first piece in our blog series this month, and it begins with a question worth sitting with: What does it mean to be part of a community when you have no home? The answer reshapes the understanding of Nest’s actual role in our community and beyond.

Belonging Is A Basic Need

Human beings are wired for connection, so much so that our brains evolved to expect the presence of others. Our ancestors depended on one another to meet their most basic needs. That biological need to connect has not gone away, even in an age when technology lets us live in near-total isolation.

The importance of connection for survival is well-supported by evidence. The U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory states that lacking social ties can increase the risk of early death, comparable to smoking up to 15 cigarettes daily. This is the part most people miss when looking at our unhoused population as purely a housing problem. Belonging sits alongside food, water, and shelter on the list of things a human being needs to survive and function. It is not a reward people earn once they are stable. It is part of what makes stability possible in the first place.

What Gets Lost When Home Is Gone

Losing a home strips away far more than walls; it removes the social scaffolding most of us never notice because we have never had to live without it. There is no longer a kitchen to host a friend, no stable address to receive a letter, no reliable place to be reached or visited.

Researchers who study the situation of being unhoused describe it not only as a housing crisis but as a crisis of disconnection. Being unhoused involves the loss of stable housing, social support networks, and a sense of belonging within a community, all at once. The losses compound one another. Relationship breakdown is frequently a precursor to becoming unhoused, and isolation deepens throughout the experience itself.

There is also the weight of being treated as invisible, and the hurt that comes with it. People living unhoused frequently describe feeling abandoned by society, mistrusted, and shunned, which leads many to withdraw further. The longer someone is unseen, the harder it becomes to believe they belong anywhere at all. Isolation can become a trap, making it even harder to find the way back into the community.

How We Build Belonging

Shelter is infrastructure, the foundation that enables reconnection to the community. Sheltering provides a consistent place to return to, with staff who learn your name and notice when a guest is not there. Reintegrating our guests back into the community is our mission.

This is the work we’ve been doing for 25 years. Providing beds, meals, connections to services, and most importantly, providing a place where our guests are treated as part of our community. This is the difference between being alone out on the street and being greeted by name, having somewhere stable enough for relationships to form, and being met with dignity rather than suspicion is a key part of the rehousing journey.

When a guest has a reliable place to be, they can begin rebuilding the routines and relationships that being unhoused disrupted. They have a place where they can be reached, where they are remembered, and most importantly, we demonstrate that they belong in our community. This is our mission in action: to reconnect our guests with their community because belonging is a fundamental human need.

Coming home is also connecting back to the community

The woman at the beginning of our post, with the photo in her wallet, is representative and not an actual person; this story illustrates the loss of belonging. At Nest, helping her home means more than finding her four walls; it means rebuilding her place among others.

Community is not something you receive only after you finally have a home. It is part of how people find their way home. Over the coming weeks, this series will explore what this looks like in practice: the specific ways belonging is rebuilt and the people who are finding their way back to it. We hope you’ll follow along.

The post Belonging Without an Address: What Community Means When You Do Not Have A Home appeared first on Nest Community Shelter.

Hunger is Ageless

A study completed in 2024 by the United States Department of Agriculture, released in December of 2025, and later published by Children’s Watch, found that “18.4% of households with children experienced food insecurity at some point in 2024—meaning 14.1M children didn’t have access to enough food for an active, healthy life sometime in 2024.” These are children experiencing hunger. We know that there is a direct connection between mental and physical well-being and access to healthy foods and a balanced diet. While a balanced diet is important at any age, it is especially true for children. In households where food insecurity is present, often adults and caregivers bear the brunt of this. Parents will often go without, giving the little food available to their children. This situation creates further instability for the adults who are responsible for providing stable housing for children in the home. When the body is properly nourished, things like being functional at work, remaining healthy enough to work, and being mentally healthy become much more difficult for the adults involved.

 Food Resources for Local Children

As times have changed, schools and organizations across the country have realized that summer can be especially dangerous for children without access to regular, healthy meals. Many schools, including those in La Porte County, and partner organizations are working to support those in need by providing food for school-aged children. Below is a list of organizations that offer food assistance to school-aged children.

Programs and services

• Michigan City Area Schools Summer Food Service Program — free meals for all kids 18 and under, no registration; full site list, dates, and times. Questions: MCAS Food Service Operations, (219) 873-2131.
• La Porte Community School Corporation Summer Meals — free breakfast and lunch for all kids 18 and under, eaten on site:
  • Handley (June 2–26): Breakfast 8:30–9:00 AM, Lunch 11:45 AM–12:15 PM
  • Kingsford Heights (June 2–26): Lunch 10:45–11:15 AM
  • LaPark (June 2–26): Lunch 12:00–12:30 PM
  • Kesling (June 15–26 & July 6–17): Breakfast 8:30–9:00 AM, Lunch 11:45 AM–12:15 PM
• USDA Summer Meals Site Finder — find any open site by address; text “Summer Meals” to 914-342-7744 or visit fns.usda.gov/summer/sitefinder.
• Summer EBT — grocery benefits for eligible families with school-age children during the summer; USDA Summer Food info.
• Food 4 Kids Backpack Program (Food Bank of Northern Indiana) — free weekend/break food for eligible K–6 students in LaPorte County; program page.
• Food Bank of Northern Indiana mobile distributions — groceries brought directly into La Porte County neighborhoods; feedindiana.org.
• Center Township Trustee’s Office — emergency assistance for La Porte residents, including help with food. https://centertownshiplaporte.com/

We encourage you to bookmark and share this post widely. Whether a family needs a meal site this week, grocery assistance this month, or a place to turn in a crisis, the resources are here. Let’s make sure every kid in our community knows where the next meal is coming from. Also, if you’d like us to add a resource to this list, please contact us at communications@nestcommunityshelter.org.

Summer should mean worry-free fun for kids, not hunger. Every program listed exists because our neighbors decided no child in La Porte County should go without a meal when school lets out.

Community Support Keeps Families Fed and Housed

Food insecurity does not discriminate by age, race, or gender. When funds become so scarce that food insecurity becomes commonplace, it can indicate that becoming unhoused is a real possibility. While this is not always the case, a report in the Journal of Housing Economics published an article about the connection between being unhoused and food insecurity, stating that, “families straining to stay fed will sometimes forego rent or mortgage payments in order to have enough to eat, which in turn increases the likelihood of eviction.” As a community, let’s share these resources and break the connection where we can, keep bellies full, and families housed.

The post Summer Meal Programs for La Porte County Families: Breaking the Connection between Hungry and Unhoused appeared first on Nest Community Shelter.

Food Insecurity Is a Health Problem

Feeding America defines food insecurity as, “Food insecurity is when people can’t access the food they need to live their fullest lives. There are many causes of food insecurity. But one thing is clear: financial security for everyone is the most effective way to end hunger.” More simply put, food insecurity is a lack of access to enough nutritious food to properly nourish the body. For someone with a chronic condition such as diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, or an autoimmune disorder, food insecurity is especially dangerous. When meals are skipped, low-quality, or unpredictable, blood sugar swings, blood pressure rises, and inflammation increases.

Research shows food insecurity is directly linked to higher A1C levels and is associated with not having enough food and/ or not having access to nutritious foods, according to The National Diabetes Association.

Multiple sources also cite that people who are food insecure are far more likely to skip doses, split pills, or stop filling prescriptions because they must choose between paying for food and paying for medicine. Without enough nutritious food, health issues compound quickly. These health issues compound, leading to the need for medical treatment and resulting in medical bills that stress already tight budgets. Once again, this situation compounds.

Being Unhoused Speeds Up Physical Decline

When you stack being unhoused on top of hunger, the toll on the body accelerates.

In a recent study of adults experiencing homelessness in California, 45% reported fair or poor physical health, 60% had one or more chronic health conditions, and more than a third had difficulty with daily tasks like bathing, dressing, or walking, according to the California Health Care Foundation. We know that being unhoused takes an enormous toll on the body, both physically and mentally.

According to the National Institutes of Health, mortality rates among people experiencing homelessness in the U.S. are 4.5 to 9.6 times higher than those of the general population. A 2025 study published in The Lancet Public Health found that people experiencing homelessness in Denmark lose an average of about 15 years of life compared to the general population, 15.9 years for men and 15.3 years for women.

How the Compounding Continues

When an individual loses stable housing. They lose a kitchen, and therefore they cannot prepare the meals their doctor recommended or maintain proper nutrition. Available food is often prepackaged, not fresh fruits, meats, cheese, or vegetables. This prepackaged food is mostly classified as junk food – chips, crackers, candy, etc. Without a refrigerator, insulin cannot be stored safely, nor can eggs, meat, or dairy be stored for later use. The first domino falls- nutrition.

Without stable housing, sleep becomes difficult, whether couch surfing, sleeping in one’s car, camping, or sleeping in a shelter. Simply put, sleep falls apart, and poor sleep alone raises blood pressure and blood sugar. Stress hormones remain elevated throughout the day. It is also widely known that sleep directly impacts mood and can impact mental health. Another domino falls-

With a lack of adequate food, an underlying health condition, and a lack of sleep, an illness gets worse. The person ends up in the emergency room, which is the most expensive form of care and the least equipped to manage a long-term condition. They are discharged back into the same conditions that landed them there. The cycle repeats, degrading the individual’s health each time.

Why It Affects Employment

The piece of this that gets the least attention is also one of the most important: employment.

It is very hard to interview for a job, hold a shift, or learn a new skill when you are hungry, in pain, sleep-deprived, and managing an uncontrolled chronic illness. The conditions of homelessness are the same conditions that make it hardest to get out of homelessness. That is the spiral. This is where this all compounds and can trap those who do not know how to navigate or have the support to find their way out.

What Actually Breaks the Cycle

A shelter bed alone does not fix this. A visit to a food pantry alone does not fix this. What works is meeting all three needs at once: housing, food, and access to consistent healthcare. Bringing those pieces together, people stabilize, and chronic conditions become manageable. Sleep improves, stress drops, and work becomes possible again.

That is the work we do every day in coordination with our partners in Michigan City and across La Porte County; we stop the spiral and support stability. Food, housing, and healthcare are not separate problems. They are the same problem, and we treat them as such.

If you want to be part of the response in our community, donate food, time, and resources to help those in need find their way out of the spiral and back to stability.

The post Hungry and Unhoused: A Compounding Situation appeared first on Nest Community Shelter.

The Tipping Point

For anyone living paycheck to paycheck, every cent is accounted for. Rent, utilities, the phone bill, and the water bill are all set costs each month. Every dollar earned is allocated to these bills. Now, what happens if the car breaks down, someone in the household needs to visit the doctor, or even worse, there’s a reduction in hours at work or a job loss? What is the first bill that can get cut from that list? Often, none of the ones listed, so the food budget is where things begin to get left off.

Anti-hunger advocates have a phrase for this: “rent eats first.” When a paycheck runs short, families pay the rent, then the lights, then they figure out what’s left for groceries. The Food Research & Action Center (FRAC), a national policy and research organization, reports that about 10.4 million renter households are now spending half or more of their income on housing, which leaves families without adequate resources to pay for food. The Harvard Joint Center research through the FRAC goes on to say that the most severely cost-burdened renters spent 38 percent less on food and 70 percent less on health care than their peers who are not cost-burdened.

How One Issue Becomes Another

A family struggling to pay rent cuts their grocery bill, maybe skipping meals or feeding only the children, living on the bare minimum to keep a roof over their heads. Without proper nutrition, health declines, and work attendance suffers. When work suffers, income drops. When income drops, rent becomes harder to pay, and eviction proceedings begin. Without the funds to fight the eviction or make up past rent plus fees, housing is lost.

A family that has already lost housing faces the same situation in reverse. Without a kitchen, food costs more and offers less nutrition. Without a refrigerator, groceries cannot be stored. Without a stable address, applying for SNAP benefits and other assistance becomes significantly harder. Food insecurity deepens, and with it, the physical and mental health conditions that make returning to stable housing even harder.

In a study published in Preventive Medicine Reports, the link between food insecurity and health outcomes in unhoused adults found that food insecurity is associated with self-rated poor health, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. A separate analysis of national health survey data published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found that adults with food insecurity had more than three times the odds of co-occurring depression and cardiometabolic disease, such as diabetes or heart disease, when compared with food-secure adults.

The American Psychiatric Association summarizes the mental health impact simply: food insecurity is directly linked to depression, anxiety, and other psychiatric disorders, and it exacerbates the physiological and psychological effects of existing mental health conditions.

Hunger changes the body and the brain, and shrinks a person’s capacity to navigate their way out of a crisis. Food is not a nice-to-have; it is a basic human need.

Where To Get Help In Michigan City

If you or someone you know needs help with food assistance, we have many organizations in our community that provide it. The following pantries and soup kitchens serve residents of Michigan City and LaPorte County. Hours may change, so please call ahead. Information was verified against the Food Bank of Northern Indiana directory and a WNDU-compiled regional list published in November 2025.

Sacred Heart Food Pantry at St. Mary 10th and Buffalo Streets, Michigan City Wednesdays: 9:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. Fridays: 4:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. (the only pantry in Michigan City with evening hours). Also offers cleaning supplies, hygiene items, and over-the-counter medications.

Salvation Army Michigan City Food Pantry 1201 S. Franklin Street, Michigan City (219) 874-6885 Tuesdays and Thursdays: 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. Serves residents in the Michigan City School District.

Arise and Shine Food and Outreach Center 1010 W. Garfield Street, Michigan City Food pantry hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. Also offers a weekly free hot breakfast and a community clothing closet.

Trinity Episcopal Church Food Pantry 600 Franklin Square, Michigan City (219) 874-4355 Every other Wednesday: 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Serves residents of LaPorte County.

Citizens Concerned for the Homeless Mobile Food Distribution. Call 1-219-809-9903. To find out when and where the mobile distribution site is happening, you can visit their Facebook page for more information.

Faith City Assembly Food Pantry 1314 S. Woodland Avenue, Michigan City (219) 872-6235 Tuesdays: 9:30 a.m. to noon.

Macedonia Baptist Missionary Church Pantry and Soup Kitchen 3007 Ohio Street, Michigan City (219) 874-2221 Every other Friday: 9 a.m. to noon.

First Presbyterian Church Soup Kitchen, 121 W. 9th Street, Michigan City, (219) 879-4501. Saturdays: 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.

First United Methodist Church Soup Kitchen, 121 E. 7th Street, Michigan City, (219) 872-7200. Mondays and Thursdays: 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.

New Disciple Love Fellowship Soup Kitchen 1411 Pine Street, Michigan City (219) 879-3268 Tuesdays: 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.

For residents elsewhere in LaPorte County, the Pax Center in LaPorte and the Community Food Pantry of Galena, Hudson, Kankakee, and Wills Township in Rolling Prairie are additional resources.

The connection between an empty pantry and an empty apartment is real, and the earlier the intervention, the better the outcome.

The post How Food Insecurity Can Directly Lead to Becoming Unhoused appeared first on Nest Community Shelter.

This is the first piece in a month-long series exploring food insecurity through the lens of our unhoused neighbors in our community. Food insecurity is commonly discussed these days. Homelessness is talked about. But the specific, daily experience of trying to feed yourself when you have no address, no kitchen, and nowhere to store what you can’t eat right now is where the gap in our public understanding tends to live.

The hidden requirement for almost every food resource

Journey through the common food assistance programs in any community, including ours, and you’ll see something many overlook: almost all programs automatically assume the recipient has a home, and this is only if they manage to qualify for assistance.

SNAP benefits load onto a card, but the program is built around the idea that you’ll buy groceries and take them somewhere to prepare. Food pantries hand out boxes of rice, pasta, dried beans, canned vegetables, and frozen meat, staples that require a stove, a pot, a can opener, refrigeration, and time. WIC vouchers, school meal backpack programs, and even many holiday food drives are designed for households that can store, cook, and serve.

For someone sleeping in a car, a tent, or a friend’s garage, or moving between couches, that bag of groceries isn’t a meal. It’s a logistics problem. Where do they keep the milk? How do they cook the chicken? What do they do with the rice and dried beans when you don’t have a pot, a burner, or running water? How do they carry three days’ worth of food when you’re already carrying everything you own?

The result is a strictly limited diet that someone without a kitchen can prepare.

What “accessible food” looks like

When we strip away storage and preparation, the food landscape narrows fast for our unhoused neighbors. What’s left must either be eaten immediately, be shelf-stable, or won’t spoil in a backpack on a hot day.

In practice, that often means gas-station food or dollar-store-type snacks, or fast food from the value menu when someone has a few dollars. Securing food often looks like free coffee and a pastry at a church drop-in or a hot meal at a soup kitchen if the timing and location work out. It can also be whatever a passerby hands over, or what a pantry offers in the form of “grab-and-go” bags. These bags typically consist of granola bars, peanut butter crackers, chips, fruit cups, and bottled water.

The majority of these foods satisfy immediate hunger, but they don’t address the longer-term nutritional problems created by this type of diet. These foods are, almost without exception, high in sodium and sugar, low in fiber and fresh produce, and engineered for shelf life rather than for health.

The harsh reality is that those most reliant on this food are often the least able to afford the health impacts eating this way brings. Conditions like diabetes, hypertension, dental problems, and many others that demand careful dietary management don’t stop when someone loses their housing. A diabetic without access to a refrigerator can’t store insulin properly or make a meal plan to keep sugar levels correct. Similarly, someone with high blood pressure can’t easily avoid sodium, as most available calories come from processed and packaged foods. Think about the last time you were near a grocery store checkout, in a gas station, or at a dollar store. What food choices were there near the till? Chances are, most were snack-type foods that offer little nutritional value.

The dignity that no one talks about

There’s a piece of this that doesn’t show up in statistics, and it matters: eating without a home is almost always public.

There’s no closing the kitchen door. No sitting down at a table with the people you love. No quiet moment to enjoy what you’re eating. Meals happen on benches, in parking lots, in line, or in a shelter like Nest.

For families, the weight is heavier. Parents experiencing homelessness work extraordinarily hard to shield their children from the reality of where their next meal will come from. They give up their own portions, ration, and schedule their day around free meal sites, the way other parents schedule their day around school pickup. The mental load of feeding a family without a kitchen is enormous, and it’s invisible to almost everyone who isn’t carrying it.

Why this series, and why now

Over the next month, we’re going to walk through this topic piece by piece. We’ll look at the specific barriers that prevent people experiencing homelessness from accessing the food assistance that technically exists for them. We’ll talk about the health consequences of long-term reliance on shelf-stable food, and what our community is doing, and could be doing, to close the gap. We’ll share what we see every day at Nest, and what our guests have taught us about this topic. Lastly, we’ll share the resources available in our community for those in need.

We’re beginning with this piece because it sets the landscape of this conversation. When someone has no address, food insecurity isn’t just about a lack of food. It’s about lacking everything needed to eat properly: a place to store it, the means to prepare it, a calm moment to eat, and the stability to plan beyond just the next hour.

Follow along as we highlight the connections, roadblocks, and the impact that food insecurity has on our unhoused community.

The post When Hunger Has No Address: Food Insecurity for Our Unhoused Neighbors appeared first on Nest Community Shelter.