Food banks much busier, despite better economy
Seattle
Times business reporter
March
14, 2015
But several months after graduating with a
master’s degree in library and information science and looking without success
for a full-time job using that degree, Dillon turned to the Rainier Valley Food
Bank to supplement the groceries she buys.
Having access to the food bank, she said,
“allows me to eat a lot better than I could on my own.”
Like Dillon, large numbers of people have
found themselves turning to food banks in recent years, with usage of food
banks surging during the Great Recession.
But even as the economy recovers and the
number of jobs continues to rise, more Americans are relying on food banks and
other forms of assistance because of ongoing challenges including long-term
unemployment, underemployment and wage stagnation.
In the Seattle area, some food banks are
getting more visits now than they did during the recession. At the 27 food
pantries in the Seattle Food Committee coalition, the number of visits
(including delivery of food to homes) went up from 928,656 in 2007 to 1.1 million
in 2009 and to nearly 1.4 million last year.
Food bank workers say their clients tell them
they’re working fewer hours or making less than before, while costs for
everything from rent to food have gone up. Rising housing and food costs have
hit those on low or fixed incomes, such as seniors, particularly hard.
At the Rainier Valley Food Bank, where Dillon
goes each Saturday morning, the number of visits to the food bank increased
from 93,659 in 2010 — the earliest year for which the food bank has that data —
to 130,713 in 2013 and 181,290 last year.
Staff there started noticing more people
lining up around the middle of 2013, “and it just didn’t let up,” said Sam
Osborne, executive director. “It kept getting higher and higher. We said:
‘Whoa, this is just getting crazy. All through 2014, it just kept climbing.’”
These days, more than 600 people — each
representing, on average, a household of four, according to Osborne — go
through his food bank each Saturday morning. That’s a number he used to see
only around Thanksgiving each year.
Yet donations haven’t kept pace.
Food donations — from nonprofit food
distributors Northwest Harvest and Food Lifeline, as well as grocery stores,
food processors and individuals — have remained largely flat. Cash donations,
however, declined 7 percent from 2013 to last year.
“I think it’s largely due to the perception
that because the economy is healthy, food banks don’t need the support of
donors as much as a few years ago,” Osborne said.
The food bank had to reduce the amount of
food it could give out per person last year.
Feeding America, a nationwide network of food
banks, determined that food pantries and soup kitchens last year fed about 46
million people, or about 1 in 7 Americans. That’s about the same number who
participate in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — what used
to be called food stamps.
The 46.5 million Americans who received SNAP
benefits last year represented a drop from 47.6 million in 2013, but each year
before that had seen a rise from the 26.3 million in pre-recession 2007.
Washington state followed a similar pattern,
rising each year from 2007, when about 536,000 people received SNAP benefits,
to 1.1 million in 2013, before dipping slightly to 1.095 million last year.
“Structural changes in the labor market over
the past decade have made it harder for people at the lower ends of the wage
distribution to make ends meet,” said Scott Allard, a professor at the
University of Washington’s Evans School of Public Affairs who studies poverty and
social policy. “Families are increasingly relying on food assistance to get by
in a way they didn’t 10 years ago. At food pantries, you’ll find more families
that are middle class or thought of themselves as middle class.”
While the number of people served by food
banks both locally and nationally may show year-to-year fluctuations, “one
thing you can be really certain of is that (food assistance) caseloads and food
pantry levels haven’t returned to pre-recession levels,” Allard said. “And
people who work in that space don’t expect a return to that level. They talk
about ‘a new normal.’ ”
Dillon knows all about the “new normal.”
By around 6:30 a.m. on Saturdays, Dillon, 30,
is in line at Rainier Valley Food Bank to get her number in order to get into
the food bank, which doesn’t open until 9:30.
Dillon, who came to Seattle in 2011 to study
for her second master’s degree, now earns $1,200 a month after taking a
part-time job as program coordinator at a nonprofit with which she had been
volunteering. She also moved from her $1,100-a-month apartment in Lake City to
an apartment in Columbia City that she now shares with a roommate, with each
paying $740.
“I’d really like a lot of that stigma (of
using a food bank) to go away,” said Dillon, who used to volunteer at a food
bank when she lived in Lake City. “To be poor enough to need to use a food
bank, especially as a person born to privilege in this country, is to be the
ultimate dirty secret of the new economy. You can make the ‘right choices’ —
for instance, ‘stay in school to prevent a life of burger flipping’ — and still
not reap all of the benefits that such choices might have brought 20 years
ago.”
The Rainier Valley Food Bank, along with
others serving South Seattle and South King County, where poverty in the region
has shifted, have seen big increases in clients over the past few years. Many
are working, but poor.
“We’re paycheck to paycheck,” said Van Pham,
39, who lives with her two daughters, ages 7 and 14, and her boyfriend in
Rainier Valley.
They’re currently relying solely on the
income of her boyfriend, who works at an auto-parts store from which Pham was
laid off in 2007.
What Pham gets from the Rainier Valley Food
Bank, where she also volunteers, “helps bring in food to our table,” she said.
In the South Park neighborhood, Providence
Regina House Food and Clothing Bank had to decrease the amount of food it
allotted each client in the past year, said Jack Wagstaff, program manager.
This month the food bank began limiting its services to only residents of four
ZIP codes in the South Park to Des Moines area, allowing it to increase the
amount of food each client receives.
On the Eastside, though food bank usage
remains higher than pre-recession levels, the numbers have fluctuated more.
Recent numbers perhaps reflect an economy that’s recovering.
Hopelink, which has eight food banks in East
and North King County, saw the number of visits to its food banks increase from
116,525 in 2007 to 172,322 in 2009, and then drop to 136,293 in 2013. Last
year, the food bank logged 148,271 visits.
The organization is in the middle of doing an
analysis of its data to better understand those fluctuations, and which clients
come in regularly versus those who are “dipping in and out,” said Meghan
Atimore, vice president of community services.
The total number of seniors using the food
banks has risen over those years — though the agency hasn’t analyzed whether
that’s because the population of seniors has gone up over the years or other
factors.
Anecdotally, Atimore said, “We’re probably
seeing that people who were coming steadily are now coming less frequently.”
Issaquah Food & Clothing Bank — “people
are always shocked to hear there’s a food bank here,” said Cori Walters,
executive director — has also seen some fluctuations, with a jump of 23 percent
in visits from 2012 to 2013, and then a 14 percent drop from 2013 to 2014.
Yet, she added, “we’re still hearing from
people who say that when they were able to get into jobs, they weren’t paid as
much as they were before or they weren’t working as many hours.”
Janet
I. Tu: 206-464-2272 or jtu@seattletimes.com.
On Twitter @janettu.