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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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December 16, 2013 at 1:00 am
Hunger spreading in Detroit suburbs
Dearborn Heights pantry founder, others blame recession
Charles E. Ramirez
The Detroit News
At a time of year when Metro Detroiters are preparing for the holidays, a large number of people are struggling just to put meals on the table or keep a roof over their head.
Food banks say while the problem isn’t new, they’re seeing more hunger and hardship in the suburbs.
“There’s been more demand (for food) overall, but it has also increased in suburban areas where you might not traditionally think you’d have an issue with poverty,” said Anne Schenk, vice president of marketing and communications for Gleaners Community Food Bank.
Based in Detroit, Gleaners has been helping feed the hungry in Wayne, Oakland, Macomb, Livingston and Monroe counties for more than 36 years. Last year, the group distributed more than 46 million pounds of emergency food to more than 550 schools, soup kitchens, shelters and pantries.
“We’ve seen tremendous increases in the need for emergency food in places like Macomb and Oakland counties.”
Garnet Houser, 61, of Roseville said the Hope Center in Macomb food pantry in Fraser has been a big help to her and her husband. The couple is getting by on a single income — her husband works in a warehouse — and her monthly Social Security disability check. Her check covers their rent, his pay covers the utility bills and there isn’t a lot left over, she said.
“I go to the Hope Center once every couple of months to get some canned goods and pasta to try to stretch out our meals,” Houser said. “It’s a big help.”
Jim Schmitt, president and one of the three co-founders of Help’s on the Way food pantry on South Beech Daly in Dearborn Heights, said he’s definitely seen an increase in demand. “It shot up after the recession and it’s never come down since,” he said.
A family of four with an annual income below $23,550 and a single person earning $11,490 is considered to be living in poverty, according to the federal government’s 2013 poverty guidelines.
About 48.8 million people in the United States — or 15.9 percent of the population — lived below the poverty level last year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Slipping into povertyIn Michigan in 2010, about 1.6 million people lived below the poverty level, according to the most recent census. That’s up 58.4 percent from a little more than 1 million at the start of the decade.
According to the Brookings Institution, nearly one-third of all Americans are poor or nearly poor and 1 in 3 poor Americans live in suburban areas. Metro Detroit is among the areas that has seen the highest increases in suburban poverty, the private Washington, D.C., nonprofit says.
Each of Metro Detroit’s three largest counties saw the population of people living in poverty rise between 2000 and 2010.
Macomb County had the largest spike of all three — the population in poverty jumped 89 percent from slightly more than 44,000 in 2000 to about 83,000 in 2010, according to Data Driven Detroit, a nonprofit demographics research organization. The number of people in poverty in Oakland County jumped nearly 60 percent over the same period. Excluding Detroit, people in poverty in Wayne County rose more than 52 percent over the same 10 years.
At the same time, the number of people getting help from Michigan’s Food Assistance Program also has increased over the past decade.
In December 2003, as many as 906,354 Michiganians received food assistance, according to the Michigan Department of Human Services. In Macomb County, there were 39,922 cases; Oakland County had 45,999, and Wayne County had 295,703.
A decade later, 1.7 million people are getting food assistance in the state as of October, according to the most recent DHS data. There are 124,353 recipients in Macomb, 121,125 in Oakland and 518,035 in Wayne, the agency said.
The area’s suburban poor face many challenges, including the need for more transportation, services and financial resources, according to the Brookings Institution. A major challenge, however, is the suburbs haven’t kept up with demand from residents who are increasingly low-income for services such as food pantries, it said.
Help neededMetro Detroit’s growth in suburban poor is fallout from the last recession and the loss of jobs left in its wake, said John Ziraldo, Lighthouse of Oakland County’s president and CEO.
Lighthouse, a nonprofit, has provided emergency food and housing services for more than 41 years. Its two offices in Pontiac and Clarkston help feed about 800 families a month.
“Lots of families that were working in manufacturing or other middle-income, labor, now find themselves working in the service industry for minimum wage and struggling to make ends meet,” Ziraldo said. “And there’s this unusual mismatch of people in need and safety net resources to provide support to families facing these challenges.”
Michigan’s auto industry lost about 55,000 production jobs between 2000 and August 2013, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Chet Decker, executive director of the Hope Center in Macomb, gets a close look at the problem. Started in 2010, the Hope Center is affiliated with The Woods church in Warren where Decker serves as a pastor.
Its 5,600-square-foot food pantry is set up like a grocery store where clients can choose perishable and nonperishable foods. It serves about 100 families a day at its facility on Groesbeck Highway north of 14 Mile. Clients are required to make appointments to pick up items at the food pantry.
Before the government cut food stamp benefits in October, the nonprofit was scheduling appointments six weeks or seven weeks out. But the demand for food is so high, it’s scheduling appointments into February, Decker said.
Funds shrinkingAs demand for food pantry services climb, the groups who run them say they’re grappling with dwindling funding sources and rising food costs.
Funding from the federal government for food pantries is evaporating, Decker said. In 2011, Macomb County received about $2.1 million from the federal government’s Emergency Food and Shelter Program, he said. In 2012, it was reduced by 75 percent and it was cut another 13 percent this year, he said.
On top of that, charitable foundations have less money to give out, most businesses don’t have a lot of extra cash for contributions and most people have had to cut back on making donations, he said.
“Our challenge is we’re trying to meet this great demand and funding has dried up,” Decker said.
Hope Center recently hired a full-time person to find new donation sources among community businesses, Decker said.
Schmitt of Help’s on the Way in Dearborn Heights said the steady stream of donations his food pantry counted on in the early 2000s has vanished.
“When everyone was making money, people were giving us money because they needed the write-offs,” he said. “That went away as people started to make less.”
The group has never been able to find a large corporate sponsor and has relied primarily on support from Ward Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Northville and private donors, Schmitt said.
Michael Moore, 40, of Inkster said the pantry is a big help for him and his family. He stops in at Help’s on the Way when it opens once a month, he said. During his last visit, he picked up canned foods as well as some clothing.
If the pantry wasn’t there, he said, he’d have to try to find food elsewhere for his family. “I’d have to. I’d have to get food somewhere,” he said.
There are some encouraging signs on the horizon, Ziraldo said.
“We’re starting to see some corporate support — which disappeared at the beginning of the recession — starting to return,” he said.
“And some kinds of individual giving is up for us, partly because people are sensitive to this problem,” he said. “They know the basics of life are a challenge for their neighbors. They know people in their own lives who are struggling.”
cramirez@detroitnews.com
(313) 222-2058 |
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Mon Dec 16, 2013 7:07 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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If the media bothered to investigate, they would find the same situation here. Since Right to Work, many big box stores and others have cut salaries as well as hours. People are having to work as many jobs as they can to survive and that means cutting back on items like food and medicine. Even part-time employees promised at least 29 hours per week are now only getting 13 hours a week and that is scattered I 4 hour daily shifts.
If people can barely survive they can't afford the product you are selling. |
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Mon Dec 16, 2013 7:12 am |
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