Today, the pronouns have changed.

"I remember when I came, we had the conversation of 'What are we going to do for "them," for those in need?' " she said. "But with the way the economic status is now, it's no longer them - it's us.

"There are people in our congregation that need the help of our food cupboard, and they're embarrassed to ask," said Jones, who directs the Germantown Avenue Crisis Ministry from her church.

Prices for everything from food to fuel have hit record highs. And although some economists hesitate to use the word "recession," many area residents have been forced to take a recess from their cars, their nonessential groceries and, for some, their rent or utilities.

Soaring gas prices and weaker job prospects have made Americans gloomier about the economy, sending the Consumer Confidence Index in April to its lowest point in five years, it was reported yesterday.

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve faces a difficult juggling act of trying to shore up the faltering economy while also trying to keep inflation from taking off.

The Fed is poised to deliver another interest-rate cut to millions of people and businesses this week, although that could be the last break they get for a while.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and his colleagues opened a two-day meeting yesterday to take a fresh pulse on the economy and decide their next move on interest rates.

One area economist is optimistic about the situation, and some area vendors say they've braved worse. But for the average low-to-middle-income resident, life is costing more and more while paying out less and less.

Today, the Daily News examines how the rising costs of food, fuel and rent are affecting folks in the Philadelphia area. (Click to jump ahead to sections on: food, fuel or rent.)

We're also looking for your stories of how rising prices have changed your life. E-mail them to us at feedback@phillynews.com.

FOOD: 'Everybody deserves to eat'

"Your car can't run on chocolate mousse," Carmella Surachi said, as she unloaded cranberry-pistachio biscotti from a cookie sheet at Termini Bros. Bakery in the Reading Terminal Market.

"For some people, it has come down to buying a cake or buying gas for your car," she said. "People are hesitant to shop when they have to pay four dollars a gallon."

Food merchants all over the city are feeling the pinch of an economy in which consumers are being forced to redefine some goods as luxury items - goods that once may have been considered necessities.

And consumers are faced with rising food prices, a result of an increase in the cost of production and the cost of transporting food and goods.

"Believe me, I'm the coupon-cutting kind of person," Dale Gonzalez said, after she finished a recent trip to a Superfresh grocery in the Northeast to feed her family of six. "But it's bad, because sometimes I travel further to get better prices but then there's the gas prices.

"It's like, where do I really save, you know?"

Vendors, who are paying more for every kind of product from flour to dairy to raw coffee beans, don't know where to save either. With business stagnant or declining, many vendors are forced to raise prices with little financial success.

"The net cost is going up," said Jack Treatman, owner of Old City Coffee. "I had to raise retail prices by ten percent to cover my cost, and I'm still making a lower profit margin."

While most people don't consider coffee as a commodity, the market "as a whole" views it as such, Treatman said.

"With the stock market and real estate tanking, those who have money to invest are buying coffee futures," he said. "Combined with some poor crops, that made for a slight shortage of beans."

Harold G. Ochs, of Harry G. Ochs & Sons meat market, in the Reading Terminal, has worked 60 years at the family business. He is one of the few who can still smile while speaking about the economy.

Ochs acknowledged that all of his prices have increased and that business has slowed. But he said he's also been seeing supermarkets - which took some customers away from his store after World War II - start to go out of business.

"But we're still here," he said. "I never get nervous. I've seen the good, I've seen the bad. If you do the right thing and give every customer what they want, you'll stay in business."

Harry Patel, owner of Cook's Liquors in Westmont, Camden County, said that he's seen customers switching from high-end name brands to cheaper brands of liquor. Thus, he's had to switch what he carries in stock to stay in his business, he said.

With Italian and California wine prices on the rise, Patel said, he's looking to Chilean, New Zealand and South African wines, which are "holding their prices."

"Before, most of our wine retailed for $20," he said. "Now, I'm switching down to bottles that retail for $15 because they're easier to sell than a high-end bottle of wine."

Liquor is not on the agenda of Eileen Jones, director of the Germantown Avenue Crisis Ministry, housed in the First Presbyterian Church of Germantown. She said she "grieves" because she's not able to offer another kind of drink to those who come to the ministry's food cupboard - milk.

"The cost of milk has so impacted families with children," she said. "I don't have fresh milk here and we haven't had dried milk in a long time. I don't have the liberty to buy milk or a discounted way to get it. This is a need families are telling you. Milk is a big issue."

Jones said that the need at the ministry's food cupboard has been "tremendous" recently, and that many of her clients, who are renters, are dealing with a choice between paying the rent or eating.

"Every week, more and more people need food," she said. "You can pay all your bills and have food for a week, but that next week is still there, waiting."

Jones mentioned one client, a senior citizen in subsidized housing, who has nothing left after paying her bills.

"What do you do when there's a negative number left at the end of the month?" she said. "This is not a person on drugs, this is not a person who smokes. In the real world we all have our little habits - candy, cigarettes, etcetera. She doesn't have those indulgences.

"There's just not enough," she said. "There are tons of barriers around as people are just trying to live in this economy."

As the ministry's need for food has increased, donations have decreased, Jones said.

She now worries that those who should be speaking out against rising prices are losing the energy to do so.

"My friends are so tired trying to live that they don't have the will for advocacy, and that's the only way we're going to make any changes," she said.

"Everybody deserves to eat."

FUEL: 'A lot of people in dire need now'

Dennis Hempsey, who owns Front Street Auto Sales in Kensington, is used to seeing more customers on the lot around tax-refund time.

This spring is different. "There wasn't much of a boost this year," he said.

The slowdown at Front Street Auto is one of many signs that escalating gas and home-energy prices are hurting families and affecting decisions. People are driving less, buying less, and some, like cab drivers and truckers, say their livelihoods are at stake.

"It's just horrible," said Bill DiDomenicis, a veteran trucker who's now a dispatcher at Philadelphia-based Road Runner Transportation. "The prices are so high that it's almost at the point where drivers are going to have to park the truck."

The average price for gasoline now is about $3.51 per gallon. Diesel, which truckers rely on, is $4.20 a gallon.

Soaring prices prompted a truckers' protest Monday in Washington, D.C., and DiDomenicis said that posters are up and Web sites are buzzing with talk of an independent-truckers' strike.

It's tough on cabbies, too. Steve Chervenka said that most drivers are struggling with reduced business and paying between $45 and $55 per shift on gasoline.

"It's changed my driving habits," Chervenka said. "I don't ride around looking for fares much. I try to find a place were I can sit with the car off."

Meanwhile, home-energy bills are straining budgets among working families.

Community Legal Services lawyer Thu Tran said that she's seen an increase in clients facing utility shut-off notices. She said that it didn't help that the state LIHEAP program, which aids the poor with energy bills, closed down early this year.

But apart from that, she said, higher energy bills have her clients scrambling. One woman asked her adult son to move in to help her with utilities. Several clients are charging utility bills on relatives' credit cards.

"There are a lot of people in dire need now," the lawyer said.

Philadelphia Gas Works vice president Steve Hershey said that he hasn't seen a dramatic increase in delinquencies or shut-offs in recent months, but he attributes that to a relatively mild winter and to PGW's aggressive efforts to get low-income customers on its discount-payment program.

"That's not to say people aren't hurting," he said. "The real people in trouble are the working poor . . . because there are fewer programs available to help them."

It also appears that people are finding alternatives to driving, including public transportation.

SEPTA's buses, trolleys and subways have had about a 3 percent increase in daily ridership in the last year. The agency's regional rail service is up more - about 16 percent.

SEPTA spokesman Felipe Suarez said that commuters with longer drives seem to be finding major savings by taking SEPTA trains, and more are making the leap and leaving their SUVs at home.

Stella Richards said that she still owns a car, but no longer drives it to her job at Independence Blue Cross.

"I started taking public transportation into the city because of gas and parking," Richards said. "Over the course of a month, that's almost a third of my paycheck."

While SEPTA's numbers suggest that more than 20,000 people a day have switched to public transit, veteran Shadow Traffic reporter Sam Clover said that he hasn't noticed any effect on rush-hour traffic.

"I think, overall, people are more carefully planning and consolidating non-work-related chore and leisure driving," Clover said. "Short of going to ten dollars a gallon, I think the shift is towards more fuel-efficient vehicles when it comes time for a new car, rather than cutting back so much on driving. It's the American way, right?"

But Jeremy Nowak, president of the Reinvestment Fund, said that it's clear that the rise in fuel costs is changing behavior, at least among some.

"So maybe this is a good time to start thinking about some long-term changes in policy," Nowak said. "Like really investing in public infrastructure."

SHELTER: Rent increases 'the number-one concern'

At 55, James Anderson finds himself at a crossroads, but it's far from the intersection where he had planned to be at his age.

Down one road is his Southwest Philadelphia apartment, where his rent has been raised $95 in eight years and $45 in the last six months.

Anderson can see what's down the other road, a road he doesn't want to take. It's lined with the homes of relatives, who will put him up when his rent gets too unbearable. But it's also a dead-end road, a road that Anderson fears will lead him to a homeless shelter.

"I barely got last month's rent paid," he said. "I don't even know what I'm going to do about this month coming up. In the long run, I'm going to have to move out. I'm probably going to have to move in with a relative, which I don't want to do.

"I may even have to go to a shelter," he said. "It's not that [relatives] wouldn't take me in, but they are behind, too."

Affordable housing has become an oxymoron for many area low-to-moderate-income renters. As real-estate prices rise, renters are being asked to pay more and more. Those not worrying about rent increases are worrying about everything from foreclosures and utility bills to changing neighborhoods.

"Rent increases are the number-one concern and the number-one challenge for working-class renters," said Phil Lord, executive director of the Tenant Union Representative Network. "Rent increases have always been an issue as real-estate prices have gone up but rents tend to lag the prices in home sales."

Lord said that typical rent increases are usually within a few percentage points but, recently, he's begun to see 10-to-15-percent increases.

Rising utility costs have also placed a heavy burden on renters, he said. Today, many are even being forced to pay their own water bills on top of gas and electric, something that wasn't the standard a decade ago.

"It's pretty clear people are suffering out there," he said. "They are really insecure in their housing right now," he said. "The need is tremendous and with rising prices it's only going to get worse."

What compounds the problem, Lord said, is the "foreclosure twist," where some landlords are forced to raise rents to stave off foreclosure, while others have no choice but to fold, leaving renters out in the cold.

"We've heard horror stories where the landlords have lost the property in foreclosure and tenants have to move out with little to no notice," he said. "That can be a scary situation because the mortgage foreclosure wipes out the tenant's lease."

Liz Hersh, executive director of the Housing Alliance of Pennsylvania, said that the problem is not necessarily the number of available rentals but the quality of life that is assumed once one moves in.

"There are certainly places to rent," she said. "The question is: Would you want to live there? When people are cold, or living in any type of poor condition, it has an impact on everyone else.

"The kids don't do as well in school, and if there are unhealthy conditions, that has an impact on emergency-room visits," Hersh said. "The fact that people are living in substandard places really has an impact on everybody."

One of the issues is a "supply-side problem," Hersh said. The housing market is a function of government policy, and in the last several years federal policy has been overly weighted toward high-end home ownership as opposed to a balanced market, she said.

"When you go to the grocery store you expect to be able to afford something to eat," Hersh said. "It may be mac-and-cheese, but you expect that the basic necessities will by provided by the market. What's happened is, it's a steak-and-caviar market. A lot of growth in the high-end stock but not in the low-end stock."

In the same vein, Lord said, many new homeowners are trying to fix up their properties to rent to people who have more money, decreasing the available, quality options for low-income residents.

"We're seeing neighborhood by neighborhood changing in terms of the average income level - we think it's going up," he said. "When you're a homeowner, that's great, but the counter side of that is it makes it less affordable for the people who live there." *