Washington Heights food pantries coping

by Emma Silvers
October 1, 2009

There is still an hour to go before Wednesday grocery distribution at the Washington Heights Ecumenical Food Pantry, but there are already 15 people in line. A group of middle-aged women chat in Spanish as they wait for the doors to open, their brightly colored push-carts ready to be filled with groceries. An older man sits on the sidewalk with his eyes closed, his back against the wrought-iron gate of the Broadway Temple United Methodist Church, where the pantry sets up twice a week.

A woman named Elaine, who declined to give her last name for this story, is in line with her six-year-old son, José. She’s wearing a bright yellow sundress and, at 26, is noticeably younger than the average visitor to this food pantry. She says she is three months pregnant, and she just moved back to this area to be near her parents, who she says are on assistance for the first time in their lives, since the Hoboken factory they both worked at for 30 years shut down. They applied for food stamps and were denied twice, she says, before reporting false information to get them. “They had to go through hell,” says Elaine. “So eventually, they didn’t do it the honest way. If people feel like the system fails them…” she trails off, finding a toy airplane in her purse to occupy José.

By 1 p.m., when a food pantry volunteer waves in the first client, the line stretches down Broadway and around the corner of West 174th street. “We call them clients,” explains Sharon Wong, the project manager of emergency food services for Catholic Charities of New York City, which operates the pantry. “Some places call them community members…it’s a tricky thing.” Wong pauses to sign and date an elderly woman’s yellow pantry card, marking that she’s been here today––under this pantry’s rules, she can’t receive food here for another three weeks.

“If we didn’t have a system in place, we would wind up at the end of the month with not enough for everyone,” says Wong. “But when someone is coming in and they’re hungry, they don’t want to hear that. We have had people get angry, start yelling.”

José Colon, a case manager with Catholic Charities who is sharing the cramped office at the church today, turns around in his chair to chime in. “I’ve had little old ladies ask me if I want to take it outside. Like, threaten to beat me up with their cane,” he says. “I think people definitely have a shorter fuse because of the economy.”

The effects of the recession on upper- and middle-class families in New York have, arguably, been well documented: people are cutting costs at the grocery stores, eliminating luxury purchases. Perhaps less understood in the current economic situation is the well-being of those who were already living below the poverty line––or balancing precariously just above it.

In Washington Heights, 31 percent of residents are living at or below the poverty level––a substantially higher percentage than in Manhattan and New York City overall (20 percent and 21 percent, respectively, according to Washington Heights’ community board.) The unemployment rate is currently 14.5 percent, while Manhattan’s is 8.7 percent and New York City’s is 9.7 percent.

While the Human Resources Administration (HRA) does not keep borough-specific food stamp records, its citywide figures show clearly that the number of people in New York City applying for and receiving food is on the rise. According to HRA data, over 1,500,000 people were documented receiving food stamps in July of this year––almost 35,000 more than in June. In July 2008, that number was 1,261,100. At his small grocery store on Broadway, a block away from the Ecumenical Food Pantry, owner Ricardo Abinader says the number of customers paying in food stamps has “probably doubled” from a year ago.

According to some experts, however, the food stamp trends don’t begin to do justice to the actual percentage of people who are having trouble feeding their families, in part because many of the working poor do not qualify for food stamps. For a family of three, the cutoff for monthly income is $1,907. If the single parent of a two-child household has a “good” month and brings home $2,000, he or she may very well become part of a startling statistic: according to the Food Bank for New York City, less than one-third (31 percent) of employed households receiving emergency food services are enrolled in the federal food stamp program.

Staff at the Ecumenical Food Pantry say most people who do receive stamps––employed or not––say the stamps, which usually amount to $200 per month, aren’t nearly enough to make ends meet. Staff also say they don’t need statistics to know that more people are in need of food assistance right now than a few years ago. In addition to increasing numbers of new clients showing up at each bag distribution––Wong estimates she sees 10 to 20 new clients at the pantry at each distribution––the appearance of people coming in to ask for help can be a tip-off as to whether or not someone has recently lost their job.

“I had a woman in here last week, dressed nicely, fancy bag,” recalls Colon, who helps clients get cash assistance to pay their utility bills. “She and her husband both lost their jobs in the past few months, and they just can’t find anything else. Things get bad quick.”

Another indicator of the economy’s turn for the worse––and, says Wong, a new challenge for Catholic Charities in serving the needs of this community––is the fact that Washington Heights households are growing. “We’ll see people who, okay, maybe a son in this thirties loses his job and moves in with his mom, and he’s got three kids. Maybe she was doing okay on public assistance before, and now it’s a household of five with no one working,” says Wong. “We have to keep track of households for some of our grant money, and just doing that has gotten much more difficult.”

Catholic Charities, which works in partnership with City Harvest and a handful of other nonprofit food rescue groups, is funded by both private donations and a “nice” grant agreement that brings in both state and federal money, says Wong. She says her biggest concern in managing emergency food services is finding spaces to accommodate their growing operations at more than 40 different sites throughout the city, and that there is not too much anxiety about their resources drying up. “We’re pretty secure right now,” she says, then touches her desk. “I say that knocking on wood.”

On the street outside the pantry, Elaine is removing and examining the contents of the plastic bag she has just received for herself and her son: a box of cornflakes and a bag of dry beans, cans of tomatoes, corn, and peas, a package of dry milk, three bananas. Replacing the cans, she says she has been looking for work since she got here two weeks ago, but she’s not finding anything, which is depressing, because she doesn’t like being on assistance. She says she knows people who need food who won’t come to the pantries because they’re embarrassed.

“That’s stupid, it’s free food!” she says, laughing, gathering her bag on one arm and reaching for her son’s hand with the other for the walk home. “It does help,” she says. “Not by much. Trust me, not by much. But it does help.”