Tae Soon Lee’s Mini Market has managed to stay open 30 years in a neighborhood where markets tend to close.

The West Baltimore corner store is one of hundreds of independently owned shops throughout the city helping to fill a void in food access. Now Lee doesn’t know if she’ll still be running the business next year.

Lee and her husband, Kevin, are bracing for the worst as changes to the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, threaten to kick 33,000 people off their benefits within Maryland’s 7th Congressional District, which covers most of Baltimore. About 21% of residents in the district lean on food stamps to purchase groceries — an amount local markets depend on to stay in business.

As with many shop owners, most of the Lees’ customers use SNAP. The money from the program has buoyed the couple through burglaries and economic challenges. It’s allowed them to keep staples like milk, eggs and potatoes on the shelves, as well as stockpiles of colorful packaged foods.

Across town in East Baltimore, Tanzeel Rehman’s Chha Chha Food Market is already hurting from rising food costs. If SNAP customers are forced to cut down on spending, he said, his small shop‘s finances will bleed even more.

Nearly half the sales at his corner store are from customers using SNAP. It’s kept the business alive for 40 years in a neighborhood where household incomes are low and few have transportation.

“What benefit will this bring?” he asked of cutting SNAP. “I get the government’s trying to cut spending, but you’re cutting peanuts.”

Over the next decade, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed into law by President Donald Trump on July 1 will cut funding for the food stamp program by an estimated $186 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Many Republicans have criticized the SNAP program for being poorly managed, and say the cuts will reduce dependence on the program and preserve it for those most in need. But many of the costs will pass to the states. Maryland will be responsible for an added $57.5 million to administer food stamps, and could also end up paying for 15% of the disbursed benefits — an estimated $240 million per year — starting in October, according to the Maryland Department of Human Services.

“My reaction [to the budget cuts] was great dread and anxiety for the really vulnerable, food-insecure people and families that reside in our market communities,” said Lesly Scott, food equity manager for the Baltimore Public Markets Corporation. “They’re already on the edge or over the edge.”

It is unclear when Marylanders will start seeing reduced or removed benefits.

But come October, more people will need to meet SNAP’s work requirements because a waiver expired in Baltimore in July that let adults struggling to find work still receive benefits. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act will alter what those work requirements are, but the timeline of when the changes will take effect is murky.

Under the new law, veterans and unhoused people must work at least 20 hours per week, as well as adults up to 64 years old — a decade older than the previous age requirement. Children over 14 years old will no longer be classified as dependents, so their guardians are no longer exempt and may see reductions in benefits, which are $180 per month on average for Maryland households.

Many residents in the Southwest Baltimore neighborhoods surrounding the recently renovated Hollins Market rely on SNAP. The market’s small grocery stall is the only place to get fresh produce in the neighborhood, but since its opening, the store has struggled financially and is nowhere near a profit.

Randi Norris, chief operating officer of the Baltimore Public Markets Corporation, doubts the coming cuts will put the grocery store out of business, since only 10% of its sales are from SNAP, but is concerned for vendors at the city’s other food halls.

Alicia Mozina-Sidhu choked up thinking of the people who were turned away from Faidley’s Seafood in Lexington Market after the business was one of several temporarily unable to take customers’ SNAP payments in 2020.

In Seton Hill, a neighborhood just two blocks from Lexington Market, the poverty rate is close to 40% and about half of residents rely on SNAP.

“It was devastating to not serve families who took five buses to get here,” said Mozina-Sidhu, their sales director.

Lexington Market is expecting at least $600,000 in SNAP sales from the six vendors that accept the benefits by the end of the fiscal year.

“In large parts of Baltimore, [SNAP cuts are] going to impact people’s decisions. That was money you can count on that was going to be in those areas,” said Bif Browning, a business consultant who helped bring a JumboFresh grocery store to Mount Clare Junction, a corridor in SOWEBO that was formerly a food desert.

“If we were in this [current] situation then, it would have made the job of bringing a grocer in more difficult than it already was,” he said.

Councilwoman Phylicia Porter, who has worked on attracting grocers to West Baltimore, said she will leverage state and philanthropic resources to help the retailers.

LA Market manager David Woo, whom Porter helped recruit to Edmondson Village, spent months waiting for the store to get SNAP-certified in hopes it would boost traffic in the former food desert. He started taking benefits in July but fears he’ll lose the customers he gained.

JumboFresh manager Jonathan Tejada said customers already complained that groceries at the store were too expensive for the neighborhood. He worries that SNAP cuts will only further isolate the store from the community.

Sandtown-Winchester native Deborah Wilson opened D&B Deli at The Mill on North, a new food hall in West Baltimore, with a mission: “If I have to put a piece of bread in everybody’s hand, that’s what I’ll do.”

She applied to SNAP in April with a menu of cold cuts, smoothies and salads, anticipating that 60% of sales would come from the benefits. But months later, Wilson is still waiting for SNAP approval as many of the customers she’s trying to reach fear getting kicked off the program.

Wilson said that word of changes to the food stamp program circulated in the last month. Some customers feared they’d soon lose benefits and told Wilson they were putting off buying food to save up money. She described the hall the other week as a “ghost town”; only six people came to her shop last Monday.

“They’ve taken away so much funding for the program, and its impacting our business, my entire business model, so significantly,” Wilson said.

“It was how we were going to make sure our community could eat.”

Banner reporter Alissa Zhu contributed to this report.

This article has been updated to correct the location of the Seton Hill neighborhood in relation to Lexington Market.