State program names Harvard, Richmond as two McHenry County communities hit hardest by COVID-19

It became clear to Harvard School District 50 Superintendent Corey Tafoya just how many local families were struggling when the district decided to begin distributing breakfast and lunch to students again after the COVID-19 pandemic first closed schools to in-person learning.

About half of District 50 students are considered low income, a high enough percentage that the whole district is afforded free and reduced lunch, according to data aggregated by the Illinois State Board of Education.

Harvard’s poverty rate was one factor that led to the state of Illinois designating it as an area disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 in determining where to target grant funding to businesses. The only other McHenry County community to receive the label is the village of Richmond.

Of the $220 million made available in the second round of the state’s Business Interruption Grant program, $70 million is set aside to help communities like Richmond and Harvard.

The designation, which is assigned by ZIP code, was given to areas with high rates of COVID-19 infection per capita, as well as high rates in at least one of four poverty metrics relative to other nearby ZIP codes, said Lauren Huffman, spokeswoman for the Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, which distributes the grant.

In Harvard, 13.2% of residents were identified as living in poverty with a median income of just more than $53,000, according to 2018 estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. This reveals a heightened level of poverty as compared with McHenry County as a whole, which reported a 5.9% poverty rate and a median income of just less than $85,000.

Richmond’s median household income of $42,000 is less than half of the countywide median, according to U.S. Census Bureau data from 2018. The village has a 28.1% poverty rate, about five times as high as the countywide rate.

As of Sept. 30, the Community Food Pantry for Richmond and Spring Grove was serving 30 more families than normal at 140, up from 110, said the organization’s director, Charlene Kania. More increases in the number being served by the pantry are expected.

“Where we do have the increase is definitely unemployment, and some of them had jobs for a long time and never expected this. Winter is going to be hard on everybody. We’re definitely going to see an increase in families at the food pantry,” Kania said. “We just need some kind of relief.”

District 50 began its meal distribution program in March and extended it into the fall, with more than 220,000 meals delivered so far, Tafoya said. The district also has decided to waive all registration fees for the 2020-21 school year, executive assistant Toni Harmon said.

Struggling to begin with

Harvard’s lack of proximity to a major interstate has made it a less attractive area for big business development, meaning its economy is especially dependent on small, family-owned businesses, said Charles Eldredge, executive director of the Harvard Economic Development Corporation.

Small businesses often don’t have the kind of financial reserves that have allowed big businesses to withstand the economic impacts of the pandemic, Harvard Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Crystal Musgrove said.

In Harvard, small-business owners are also less likely to have the marketing experience necessary to adapt to serving their customers in a new, socially distanced way. Selling products online and offering delivery services requires a level of technological savviness that many mom-and-pop shops just don’t have, Musgrove said.

The Chamber of Commerce itself is struggling to stay afloat at a time when members need its services most, but many cannot afford to pay their dues, she said. As of Thursday, its membership was down by about 25%.

Some of Richmond’s recent economic woes are because of the village’s past ties to an industry in antique merchandising that, like many sectors, has undergone a transition from doing business in brick-and-mortar shops to largely online, according to interviews with village government and business leaders.

Antique stores were once common in Richmond. But in recent years, they have made departures, leaving storefronts empty, as the internet became the marketplace for aged artifacts, said Tom Jiaras, who owns the International House of Wine and Cheese and Hot Slots gaming and who is also a landlord for the Cubby Cafe, a restaurant whose leaders are considering applying for the state grant program.

“It was known as an antique town years ago. When antiques became an internet thing, much of downtown became vacant,” Jiaras said.

With the 2007 arrival of Paisano’s on Broadway in the 2000s, though, and its sister restaurant Seaside Prime, along with the 2017 opening of Richmond BratHaus and the presence of other eateries, downtown Richmond has transitioned into becoming a spot for a meal out, Village Board President Craig Kunz said.

“Ideally, I think from a standpoint of revenue, Richmond is becoming a destination for food. We’re no longer the village of yesteryear,” he said.

But restaurants were hit hard by COVID-19 when the pandemic led to state-ordered closures of indoor dining rooms and other businesses like personal services.

As restrictions have lifted, customers have trickled back into downtown establishments, Kunz said, but local business owners fear another shutdown looms with how the countywide virus caseload has been trending over the past week.

In addition to the pandemic itself slowing restaurant economies to a crawl, the less stringent response to the virus in neighboring Wisconsin, allowed by the state’s Supreme Court striking down Gov. Tony Evers’ stay-at-home order, also put Richmond business owners at a disadvantage, local leaders said.

“When things first started to open up and were much more liberal in Wisconsin, clearly people were tired of being stuck at home and cooped up. Having the chance to go up to Lake Geneva or Genoa City or Twin Lakes gave an opportunity to have a little bit more fun in their life. It clearly had an impact on the business that was lost in the Illinois establishments, in Richmond especially,” Jiaras said.

Over Memorial Day weekend, Kunz said, the difference between each side of the Illinois-Wisconsin border in downtown foot traffic – and, therefore, economic activity – was stark.

“If you went to Lake Geneva into the shopping districts and bars, they were full, where we were not,” Kunz said. “I’m sure there were people from Richmond, who live in Richmond, who went to Lake Geneva to partake in the levity, the less stringent rules.

“Since we moved into the additional [Restore Illinois] phases, business, I think in talking to some of the business people, is really picking back up very nicely,” he continued. “I’m sure there are still some that are hurting or are not back to where they would like to be.”

COVID-19 hits hard

The state also looks at COVID-19 infection rates in determining what places across the state have been hit particularly hard, Huffman said.

In terms of COVID-19 infections, “we’ve always been almost double what a lot of other communities have been and what people here would attribute that to is that we are a working-class community,” Tafoya said.

Harvard’s ZIP code (60033) has seen 561 confirmed cases of COVID-19 as of Saturday, according to the Illinois Department of Public Health. The area is home to just more than 14,100 people, meaning approximately 4% of the population, or one in every 25 people, has contracted COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic.

The 60071 ZIP code, which includes Richmond and nearby unincorporated areas, has had 62 confirmed cases of COVID-19, according to McHenry County Department of Health data as of Thursday. The ZIP code has 3,581 residents, according to the Census Bureau, which would mean about 1.7% of its residents have had the virus, assuming each positive case was associated with a unique resident.

With just more than 1,800 residents in Richmond village limits, per the latest census data, however, the number of infections could be as high as almost 3.3% of the village residents, if all or most of the COVID-19 cases were concentrated in the village.

Many Harvard residents work in the kinds of jobs that were deemed “essential” during COVID-19 shutdowns jobs that cannot be done from home, Tafoya said Thursday.

Harvard also has the largest Hispanic population of any municipal area in McHenry County, with Latinx residents accounting for 49.8% of the population, according to U.S. Census data.

“People of color … have a much higher incidence of unemployment and underemployment due to [COVID-19] and I think that applies in Harvard,” Eldredge said.

Latinx residents make up just less than 50% of Harvard’s population, but 65.5% of the area’s COVID-19 infections, according to IDPH data. Nationally, Hispanic or Latino people are 2.8 times more likely to contract COVID-19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Rene Govea, a member of the Latino Leadership Network for McHenry County, said the impact of COVID-19 on Hispanic families is compounded by certain barriers to accessing support services such as language and immigration status.

Harvard families also are left more vulnerable to the economic stressors of COVID-19 by the lack of affordable childcare and community services in the area, Tafoya said.

While other areas have relied on local park districts or community centers to share the burden of providing childcare during remote learning, Harvard does not have an entity of this sort beyond the city’s parks and recreation department, Executive Director of Brown Bear Daycare Sheila Henson said.

“Unfortunately, we don’t have one space for these kids to go to,” Henson said. “So we do what we can and we serve right now about 195 students.”

Since the onset of the pandemic, ​​​​​​Brown Bear Daycare has expanded its monthly food pantry to serve local residents every Thursday to keep up with the heightened need, she said.

When it comes to supporting one another in this time, Harvard residents “do a good job at it, you know, we’re not afraid to ask for help and people are not afraid to give help,” Henson said.

“The mindset exists of they’re not going to let their families down no matter what we have in front of us should it be a pandemic or should it be a job loss,” Govea said. “We have to get up and continue moving forward.”