Food Stamp Sign-Ups Low in N.Y.
Shortfall Exists Despite a Rising Demand for Provisions

By Michael Powell
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 15, 2006

NEW YORK -- Amid cans of kidney beans and bags of white rice, Denise Conyers sits in her wheelchair at a Manhattan food pantry, plotting to keep the hunger at bay for one more day.

Her food stamp allotment just got cut. She is really not sure why -- she has not been able to work for 20 years.

"It was hard getting food stamps in the first place; they kept asking for more and more paperwork," said Conyers, a fine-cheekboned 53-year-old who was long ago disabled by multiple sclerosis. "Then they said that I make too much on SSI [Supplemental Security Income], so they're cutting my monthly food stamp dollars."

Snarls of red tape, bureaucratic resistance to a "welfare program" and the fact that many New Yorkers are not aware of food stamps have depressed participation here in the federal program. Overall, about 700,000 poor New York residents, more than the entire population of the District, are eligible for food stamps but not enrolled.

New York state ranks 36th in the nation in the percentage of eligible people participating in the program, a low-performing tier that includes some of the nation's most populous states, from Texas and Florida to California and Massachusetts.

The shortfall occurs against a backdrop of rising demand for emergency food in New York and across the nation. Food pantries such as that run by the Westside Campaign Against Hunger -- where Conyers was interviewed -- report a 40 percent spike in demand in the past five years.

This speaks to the paradox of New York. This largest of cities has the densest concentration of millionaires in the nation -- yet 21 percent of the residents live below the poverty line, and some walk the razor edge of hunger.

"Working poor people and immigrants are the fastest-growing groups in New York, and we're failing them," said Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger. "It's a daily shame."

It also costs New York a small fortune in federal aid. Several recent studies estimate that if 500,000 more New Yorkers signed up for food stamps, it would, in effect, pour $650 million in federal dollars into local supermarkets and bodegas.

"Hundreds of thousands of low-income New Yorkers miss out on nutrition . . . and the City loses out on hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid," noted a recent study by the Urban Justice Center, a New York-based advocacy group that studied the program for a year.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (R) has vowed to boost food stamp participation. And the number of New Yorkers enrolled for food stamps has increased 30 percent since he took office in 2002.

But the mayor has come late to his embrace of food stamps. Many innovations touted by his administration -- such as allowing applicants to file by computer and fax, and streamlining the application -- are common practice elsewhere, even in more conservative states such as Oklahoma, Alaska and Tennessee.

Former mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani (R) was fond of describing food stamps as a strand in the web of welfare dependency. And the number of New Yorkers receiving food stamps fell by 700,000 during the former mayor's tenure, the sharpest drop in city history.

But federal judges and U.S. Department of Agriculture investigators found that Giuliani-era caseworkers routinely and illegally denied food stamps to tens of thousands of poor people.

Giuliani's critique still echoes in national conservative circles. Analyst Jeffrey M. Jones wrote in the most recent issue of the Hoover Institution's in-house magazine that food stamps contribute to overeating, and he argued for "retaining a stigma [about food stamps] historically associated with welfare."

"When Rudy was mayor . . . the ultimate goal was to get people off of any welfare benefit," said Patricia M. Smith, a deputy commissioner at the city's Human Resources Administration. "Mayor Bloomberg has gone out of his way to say that food stamps are not welfare."

In fact, Bloomberg, who was endorsed by Giuliani, has been cautious about reversing his predecessor's policies. His administration has declined to seek a state waiver that would allow jobless single adults to receive food stamps for more than three months in any three-year period.

And New York state, with support from Bloomberg, is one of just four states in the nation that fingerprints food stamp applicants.

"Rudy chose to apply his policies of intimidation to food stamps," said Harvey Robins, a former top welfare official under former mayor Edward I. Koch (D). "If Bloomberg is truly serious about hunger, he should stop fingerprinting and see what happens."

To talk with working-poor New Yorkers in food pantries is to hear of people snared in a bureaucratic maze of waiting lines, lost applications and improper denials. (New York still has one of the highest rates of mistaken denial of food stamp claims in the nation.)

Julia Guillen cleans out airplanes at La Guardia Airport. She earns $7 an hour and lives with two sons and an 8-year-old grandson. In October 2004, she applied for food stamps.

She missed an appointment, and a caseworker closed her case. Then she could not find a bank statement. Then they wanted paperwork proof of child support. (Guillen moved twice in the year she applied for stamps, sometimes sleeping on her mother's floor -- 42 percent of food stamp recipients spend more than half their income on rent.)

On and on it went. Today she receives food stamps, but she is feeling none too secure about it. "It seemed like they made everything impossible."

Advocates agree with city officials that a public benefit cannot be given away willy-nilly. But they add that a city such as New York, with its social democratic traditions, should not make it so arduous for the poor to find food.

"We are hurting the very people who are choosing work as their lifestyle," said Robins, the former welfare official. "New York created the social safety net, and we should be leading the way in re-stitching it."