Last week, stunning video of an extremely long food line in Corona, Queens began circulating on Twitter. According to Reuben A. Torres, a Univision reporter, the line stretched for twenty blocks, with many hopeful families going home empty-handed.
Bread lines, evoking iconic images of the Great Depression, have formed outside food pantries across the country as the COVID-19 crisis continues. In New York City, they are partly due to skyrocketing unemployment, forcing far more working class residents to turn to city services. But the longer wait times have also been exacerbated by a collapse in the city’s longstanding food assistance infrastructure.
According to city officials, since the COVID-19 crisis began, approximately 35 percent of the city’s roughly one thousand food pantries, soup kitchens, and mobile pantries have closed. That’s pushed needy residents to take trains across the city to find help wherever they can.
Coney Island resident Rican Vargas travelled to downtown Brooklyn in search of food.
Rican Vargas is one of those New Yorkers scouring the city for food. On a gray Thursday morning, the fifty-eight year old is standing outside CHiPS, a food pantry on the outskirts of downtown Brooklyn.
“I ran out of food. So that’s the only reason I came out,” Vargas said, holding a plastic bag with a bacon, egg and cheese inside.
Listen to George Joseph’s report on WNYC:
In normal times, the spry street vendor is a community fixture in Coney Island, where he organizes summer dance parties on the boardwalk. But business is hard when no one is outside, and he says he couldn’t find any help locally. So despite the health risks, the life-long New Yorker took the train from Coney Island.
“I came all the way down here because up in my neighborhood the pantries are dry,” he said. “They’re all like, ‘Not today, no food.’ They’re waiting on trucks”.
Josiah Haken, an outreach leader with the non-profit homeless assistance organization New York City Relief, says many of the city’s small neighborhood pantries were particularly ill-equipped to handle a pandemic.
“Many food pantries that are smaller are run by elderly folks, retirees. They’re volunteer-driven,” he said. “So when the stay at home order shifted from groups of fifty down to groups of ten, and then essential personnel only, a lot of volunteers just stopped going.”
Haken’s organization has paid staff, large food reserves, and an established distribution network--all of which have helped keep the operation running during the shutdown. But with many smaller organizations shuttered amidst an escalating food crisis, he said they have seen longer lines in recent weeks.
“It’s like someone hit a switch and all of a sudden all of these people who were in desperate need had nowhere to go,” he said. “So we’re one of the only resources that was available.”
A pop-up tent New York City Relief set up to hand out pre-packaged meals outside the Bowery Mission in lower Manhattan.
To help small pantries get back up on their feet, Katherine Garcia, the city’s emergency food czar, said the city has begun marshalling city workers and millions in aid dollars to help with staffing shortages. In the meantime, she said, the city has worked with the larger remaining service providers to make sure that enough food is available citywide.
“You are seeing people travel to food pantries who have never been food insecure before,” she said. “We are seeing widespread need in locations that may not even traditionally have had food pantries in them.”
At pantries in Manhattan and Brooklyn, food recipients say that despite the efforts of major charity organizations, there has not been enough to satisfy the long lines.
“They wait till the people are already on line and say, ‘Sorry we don’t have enough to go around,” said David Lopez, a shelter resident in Tribeca. “You have people standing there two, three hours, expecting to get something, then they get to the front, ‘oh sorry, we’ve ran out.’
Keisha, a longtime pantry user from the Atlantic Barclays area, said that she and her husband have also seen many shortages at pantries recently.
“Now I even see working class coming to get food from here. All walks of life coming now,” she said, adding that the influx has led pantry volunteers to ration out available supplies. “They look sad because they know they can’t give everyone everything that’s there. They have to split it down. Break it down. The bags get smaller. People start to get less and less.”
Keisha and her husband have noticed more working class residents coming to pantries in downtown Brooklyn.
With so many working people now relying on assistance, Rican Vargas, the Coney Island resident, says their attitudes towards the poor are changing. Nowadays, he even meets city workers waiting in line. “They’re trying to stay on top of paying their bills, and there ain’t no food,” he said. “You got to put the pride down, and now a lot of people understand what it is.”
He guesses this new understanding has fostered moments of solidarity on the street. “Everybody’s at that level now, and there’s a lot of kindness going on,” he said. “I walk by a lot of people and I’ve been noticing, people are acknowledging themselves, like “Hi.” I’m on the subway car, there’s one person in there, we acknowledge each other, we talk. Something I never did.”
If you are in need of food assistance, call the NYC Emergency Food Assistance Program at 866-888-8777 or go to their website. Service organizations mentioned in this article include CHiPS and New York City Relief.
