HENDERSON, Nev. (AP) — Tera Burbank pulls a frayed robe tighter across her body as she leans into the refrigerator, her eyes canvassing the modest offerings for something to pack in her daughter's lunch box. Burbank stuffs carrot sticks, peanut butter and apple sauce into a backpack and cajoles her son and youngest daughter out the front door and down the street toward the nearby elementary school. The meager lunch box offerings are just one of many painful struggles that the mother of three encounters every day while living under the weight of long-term unemployment and threats of foreclosure, hunger and loss.
Burbank and her husband, John Clark, epitomize the dreadful economic situation these days in Nevada, where a mighty construction boom has given way to a historic recession and a record 14.9 percent unemployment in Las Vegas.
Burbank and Clark are construction workers who have been out of work for more than a year. They live off unemployment and student loans. Bills go unpaid and minor spats escalate into tense threats of divorce. Their daughters are performing poorly at school, and guidance counselors and teachers blame stress. For Burbank, surviving means ensuring her children's success and protecting the one place they could ever call home. "It's our everything," said Burbank, 34, of the family dwelling. "They can take the car and we will eat cat or dog food. Come what may I'll keep that house."
All around her, Nevada seems to be falling apart. The Silver State that once plucked its wealth from deep mines and then glittering casinos has lost its swagger. The jobs crisis shows no signs of improvement. Plots of arid land reserved years ago for towering hotel projects remain untilled. Nearly half of the unemployed worked in construction.
A chunk of federal dollars — $39.6 million in November alone — provides much-needed stimulus in the form of food assistance. Roughly 322,950 Nevadans, or 11 percent of the state, received federal funds to buy food in November.
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