(photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)
As New York City continues its struggle as the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic and its socioeconomic fallout, food insecurity continues to plague an increasing number of New Yorkers. Mayor Bill de Blasio has named a “food czar” and instituted a number of initiatives and added spending to attempt to address the problem, with the city giving out more than 10 million free meals in April and expecting to provide even more in May.
The mayor recently said the city’s new goal is to be able to soon distribute 1 million meals per day through both delivering to the most vulnerable and hundreds of pick-up sites across the five boroughs. Such work of course comes with many challenges that the city must overcome to meet New Yorkers’ needs.
On Tuesday, the Hunter College NYC Food Policy Center hosted its second digital discussion about the state of the city’s food system and anti-hunger efforts amid the coronavirus outbreak and the unemployment and food access crises it provoked.
Home meal delivery, especially for seniors, the state of the food supply chain, and the healthfulness of food being provided by the city were among the focus topics for the panel, which included Joel Berg of Hunger Free America; Commissioner Grace Bonilla of the city’s Human Resources Administration; Ruth Finkelstein of Brookdale Center on Aging and Hunter College; Tony Hillery of Harlem Grown; Michael Hurwitz of GrowNYC Food Access and Agriculture; and Kate MacKenzie of the Mayor's Office of Food Policy.
Finkelstein spoke about how seniors are in a “different kind of hunger” situation that is causing many to fall through the cracks.
“There were already 1 in 10 older adults who were hungry in New York. Then with a really very strong recommendation that people over 70 not leave the house, you have this whole new difficulty obtaining food,” she said. A very high percentage of the more than 19,000 confirmed or probable COVID-19 deaths in New York City are among those over 65 years of age.
New York City has launched the GetFoodNYC program that is delivering 500,000 meals per day, according to MacKenzie, with that goal to reach 1 million meals per day over the course of the month of May.
Earlier this week, Manhattan City Council Member Margaret Chin, who chairs the Council’s committee focused on older New Yorkers, along with 29 other Council members penned a letter to push the city’s Department for the Aging (DFTA) to urgently request $26.2 million in additional funding to support the city’s home delivered meals (HDM) program.
“With COVID-19 protocols instructing the HDM to continue operating as usual, this program provides a powerful model for the types of community partnerships and attention to cultural preferences that now more than ever our City must support and expand,” the letter reads. “As the COVID-19 pandemic intensifies and more seniors sheltering-at-home face food insecurity, the home delivered meals program has experienced an onslaught of new demand, concurrent with significant staffing challenges resulting from the spread of the disease. Programs initially reported increases of 20-30% since the start of March for HDM clients, and those numbers continue to grow as more older adults express need for food and social support, with some programs now expressing increases of approximately 50%.”
Finkelstein said the city’s program comprises “a very complicated and patched together system, through whose cracks many, many, many people fall.” She detailed that the majority of those who are falling through the cracks are those who are not already known to the system in any way, “because until now they were independent,” not enrolled in any food assistance program or senior center.
For home delivered meals, seniors and others in need -- or their caretakers -- can call the city’s 311 helpline, the mayor and other city leaders have stressed. But some New Yorkers have experienced problems with the service, as evidenced by anecdotes from panel discussions and radio show callers, and media reports.
MacKenzie said people are now getting through to a 311 dispatcher much more easily than a few weeks ago. The city has added workers to reduce wait times, and the mayor has said it is hiring more dispatchers still, and senior center staff is being trained to help seniors enroll in the food delivery program.
“We can’t solve for the future while we’re still in the midst of solving for the crisis that we’re in,” MacKenzie said. “And particularly for seniors, this is going to be a very long crisis where the guidance is really to remain at home.” (Other measures are being taken or advocated to help reduce isolation among so many homebound seniors, many of whom live alone.)
In terms of the meals being provided by the city, both through home delivery and hundreds of pick-up sites, questions about nutritional value have been raised -- by people like Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, who has long had a public health focus, and at Tuesday’s panel discussion.
MacKenzie said the city is regularly updating nutrition standards and that the team is working closely with food czar Kathryn Garcia, and that they are adhering to existing nutrition standards. The problem, according to MacKenzie, is food supply — the city is operating in terms of emergency meals.
“The things that are in the food boxes, they are emergency food boxes. The contents of those boxes still adhere to the city’s nutrition standards, but they might be cans of tuna, yes there are granola bars, yes there are raisins and mixed nuts, these are intended to be emergency meal kits,” she said. “It goes into that conversation about what is the future, what is the steady state here. But currently we are still feeding people emergency provisions.”
MacKenzie also mentioned the city’s newly increasing efforts to contract with nonprofits and restaurants that can provide meals, especially culturally relevant and ethnic food. She explained that if “individual organizations can provide upwards of 1,000 meals per day, we’ll talk about doing business with them.”
Tara Klein, policy analyst at United Neighborhood Houses, told Gotham Gazette that her organization is in a unique position to meet the needs of the community and it’s good the city is starting to lean on the nonprofit network more.
“One of the benefits of having small community-based organizations run some of these meal programs, as they have been for many years, is the individual needs. I see that it’s specialized types of food, culturally sensitive meals, some seniors need food that’s easy to chew or sensitive to people who have diabetes,” Klein said in a phone interview. “There’s a whole range of different types of food and those small, nimble organizations are able to adapt because they know their clients, and they’re able to make individual distinctions.”
There’s also partnerships with the private for-profit sector. State Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie announced on Tuesday a deal with Uber Eats whereby the for-hire vehicle company will donate “8,000 free meals to nonprofits and institutions serving New Yorkers impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.”
On the overall status of the food supply coming into the city and New Yorkers being able to go out and find it, Hurwitz of GrowNYC Food Access and Agriculture explained that at his organization many local and regional farmers are trying to find alternative platforms to sell through, while others are doing well. He explained that farmers’ markets have been quite busy, and that Garcia has been great at helping facilitate social distancing in these open air settings.
“It's because we have prioritized our employees’ health, we’ve prioritized our customers’ health, and we’ve prioritized the health and wellness of our farmers and their employees,” Hurwitz said. “I think being outside with extra staff, with guidelines, people feel a little safer shopping at those types of outlets. And we’ve done that at our farm stands and our food boxes as well.”
MacKenzie said the city is also trying to help local farmers and distributors and created a platform that helps match growers and sellers. “We’re doing everything to try and find outlets for these great suppliers of food,” she said.
Also on Wednesday, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand announced that she is introducing legislation to create a direct supply chain from farmers to food banks.
“As restaurants, hotels, schools, and other food service entities cease operations to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, reports have emerged that millions of pounds of produce have been left to rot in fields. Meanwhile, food banks across the country are facing unprecedented demand, as millions of newly unemployed Americans now face food insecurity. The Food Bank Access to Farm Fresh Produce Act will provide needed support to food banks as they continue to serve the surge of jobless Americans, while also supporting struggling farmers who lack buyers for their produce,” her press release said.
Roughly 30-40% of food pantries and soup kitchens in the city are closed, according to the panelists at Tuesday’s Hunter College NYC Food Policy Center event.
MacKenzie of the Mayor’s Office of Food Policy argued that this problem requires some nuanced discussion.
“While the information is factually true, the bigger question is of the pantries that are open, how has their reach expanded,” she said. “Because many, many feeding operations have actually in some cases doubled work and meals they're providing, food they’re serving. I just want to recognize, to reframe the pantries that are closed and those that are doing more.” She added that the city has been working to place volunteers to re-staff many food pantries in the city, keeping them open, given that the absence of the usual volunteers, many of them typically older, has been essential to why they have closed.
Berg of Hunger Free America stressed that the charitable food network was stretched before this crisis, and understanding that is important. He said even at the best of times every dollar worth of food provided by a food pantry or soup kitchen is one-eleventh of what federal nutrition assistance programs do. Many pantries are run by unpaid volunteers, and there is no logic to the system, he said. Berg added that of the nearly 1,000 different food pantries and soup kitchens in the city, 100 of them provide half the food.
“There is very little ‘middle class,’ so to speak, in the emergency feeding system. There’s some bigger agencies with multimillion-dollar budgets, with professional staff serving a lot of people, then there’s hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of microscopically small agencies. And so I suspect, the 30-40% of agencies that are shut down are the ones that are very small to begin with,” Berg said. “And it may or may not make sense to use resources, national guard troops, volunteers, grants to open them, or it might make sense to provide more resources in under-resourced neighborhoods.”
Long-term, Berg believes for the food pantry system, there needs to be a “comprehensive strategic look that combines our heart and also our head.” He said there is “no logic to the system” and all soup kitchens are licensed by the health department, but food pantries only interact with the state or city government if they receive funding from those entities, making them somewhat hard to track.
“We need a fundamental look at where the food needs are,” he said. “It does mean really looking at census data, where immigrants are, and people who are unable to access these other programs, where the train lines run.” He also believes there should be coordinated applications to get funding and monitoring of the agencies.
MacKenzie said this is the right time to be thinking about “what an evolved system looks like,” she emphasized that it’s not a clear picture yet.
“I think it's really important we do really try to think really creatively and out of the box about what systems should exist and not try necessarily to try and rebuild a system that wasn’t working to begin with,” she said.
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by Katie Kirker, Gotham Gazette
@GothamGazette
A new report looks at coronavirus and voter turnout correlations (photo: Edwin J. Torres/Mayor's Office)
Neighborhoods with historically low voter participation are among the areas hit hardest by the novel coronavirus, according to a new analysis by the New York City Campaign Finance Board (CFB), a factor that threatens to compound the crisis' fallout in low-income communities of color.
Four of the five zip codes with the highest rates of COVID-19 infection out of those tested also had voter turnout below the citywide average in the 2019 general election, which included a small number of electoral races and a series of ballot referenda. Many of the neighborhoods overlap regions of the city with large populations of naturalized citizens and low rates of educational attainment, areas that have been disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 outbreak, physically and economically.
In Corona, Queens, where 79 percent of people tested have had the virus, only 12 percent of registered voters went to the polls in 2019, compared with a citywide turnout rate of 17 percent, according to the CFB analysis. Queens Community District 4, which includes Corona, is 50 percent Latino, and nearly two-thirds of residents are foreign born, according to another CFB report. Seventy-one percent of the population has graduated high school, compared with 81 percent borough- and city-wide. The annual median household income in the community district is about $11,000 less than the citywide median.
In New York City and State, where voter turnout is already among the lowest in the country, groups that are historically underrepresented are now in the greatest need of aid.
Zip codes covering East Elmhurst, Elmhurst, Jackson Height, and Cambria Heights -- all in Queens -- saw the next highest rates of coronavirus infection. All but Jackson Heights had below average voter turnout in 2019 and large populations of naturalized citizens.
"Our analyses have indicated that the same neighborhoods that have historically seen lower turnout in elections, are also amongst those hit hardest by the pandemic, raising significant concerns about the impact on important upcoming elections," reads the analysis from NYC Votes, the Campaign Finance Board's voter engagement arm.
“It’s shocking, but not surprising, to see that our most disenfranchised communities—immigrant communities and communities of color, who are disproportionately on the front lines as essential workers in the COVID-19 pandemic—are the least protected from harm,” said Perry Grossman, a senior voting rights attorney with the New York Civil Liberties Union.
"We must ensure that all New Yorkers, but especially those in the most impacted neighborhoods, have clear information on how to vote safely during coronavirus," reads an email sent Monday from NYC Votes to its general mailing list.
"We're partnering with Democracy NYC and a variety of nonprofit organizations on plans to get out the vote this June and November using texting, peer-to-peer calling, and other digital and decentralized approaches to organizing," the email says, referring to the civic engagement office within the Mayor's Office. A spokesperson for the CFB said those plans are still in formation but will be announced soon.
2019 was an off-year for elections in New York and though it boasted some notable features, including the state’s first-ever early voting period and referenda to amend the New York City Charter, it had few contests drawing people to the polls. Turnout in the general election was less than half the 39 percent of the year before, according to the CFB, a historic election that saw turnout skyrocket as New Yorkers cast ballots in high-profile contests at the state and national levels.
The data accompanies (but is not part of) the CFB's 2019 Voter Analysis Report, the latest in its required annual examination of the prior year’s election cycle and, this year, including a look at the past ten-year period as the decade concluded. The findings may shine a light on the common factors in coronavirus spread and voter turnout.
The ten-year analysis found that, among other things, age, high school graduation, and status as a naturalized citizen strongly correlated with rates of voter turnout. A high percentage of voters over 50 in a census tract tended to correlate to higher turnout over the study period, as did high school education. Status as a naturalized citizen correlated with lower turnout.
Of those other neighborhoods with the highest COVID-19 infection rates based on who’s been tested, Elmhurst is also in Community District 4, along with Corona. Cambria Heights, which is in Eastern Queens, is part Community District 13, which is over two-fifths foreign-born, according to data from the New York City Department of City Planning (the CFB report did not cover Community District 13). Only 29 percent of Community District 13 residents over the age of 25 have earned a bachelor's degree, compared with almost 37 percent citywide.
While older age has long correlated with higher turnout, it now poses new challenges for eligible voters wishing to cast ballots at poll sites, where social distancing is notoriously difficult. For seniors, the group most likely to be killed by COVID-19, going to the polls has become an unviable choice of civic life and the risk of death.
New York has already postponed and cancelled some elections, and Governor Andrew Cuomo recently signed an executive order requiring all eligible voters to receive an absentee ballot application for the upcoming June party primary elections, which are mostly for congressional and state legislative seats. Voters can also request an absentee ballot online.
But without much of the infrastructure of voter engagement -- from community-based service providers to peer-to-peer interaction -- on top of the public health impacts of the coronavirus, experts fear the city's most marginalized groups will again vote at lower rates, perhaps more so, and be left with even less influence among elected officials, who are known to pay greater attention to those who put them into office.
“We must ensure these marginalized groups have better access to the ballot box—including more and more convenient early voting sites; more voter education and outreach, especially around absentee ballots; and better language assistance—so they can hold government accountable for meeting their health, safety, and other critical needs,” Grossman said.
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by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
@GeringerSameth @GothamGazette
Considering an inclusive recovery in New York City (photo: William Alatriste/City Council)
As the COVID-19 public health and economic crises continue, so does the conversation about recovery. This past week, the Center for an Urban Future (CUF), a nonprofit think tank focused on economic opportunity and equitable growth, hosted a digital discussion, “Ensuring an Inclusive Economic Recovery in NYC,” featuring several public policy experts.
Jonathon Bowles, the executive director of CUF, opened the discussion saying “the immediate priorities are clear: keep people safe, get people back to work, and help our small businesses survive.” He then posed the question to the panelists to kick start the conversation, asking if there is an opportunity in this crisis to build a more inclusive economy.
The panelists were Maria Torres-Springer, Vice President for US programs at the Ford Foundation and formerly Commissioner of three different New York City government agencies for housing, economic development, and small businesses; Maya Wiley, professor at the New School and former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio; Harry Holzer of the Brookings Institution and Georgetown University; David Jones, President and CEO of the Community Service Society of New York; and Joey Ortiz, Jr., executive director of the New York City Employment and Training Coalition.
One of the broad themes in the panelists’ responses was that this situation offers an opportunity to do things differently and fundamentally change how New York thinks about economic recovery. On tangible ways to spur economic growth and improve equitable access for all New Yorkers going forward, two focus areas emerged: the roles of education and job training.
Torres-Springer said New Yorkers must first identify and be real about who has suffered the most and the fact that the community-level impacts of a disaster, like food insecurity, afflict marginalized populations on a daily basis.
She added that everyone must “resist the temptation to make false choices. False choices between equity and growth, between public health and individual civil liberties, between fiscal prudence and strengthening, for instance, the not-for-profit sector, and instead take this opportunity and turn this crisis into a time when we can identify the types of strategies that strike a better balance and bend towards better outcomes.”
Panelists agreed that economic growth should not be considered in a siloed way, but must be embedded into a conversation that encompasses public transportation, affordable housing, food security, workforce development, and how each impacts the economy. The pandemic disproportionately affects black and Hispanic communities and low-wage workers, Torres-Springer said. Holzer agreed, and said, “first we learn, do no harm. But there is a lot of harm out there, and Maria is right, it falls, and especially in New York City, very heavily on people of color, disadvantaged workers, low-wage workers.”
Jones, who is also on the MTA Board that oversees the city’s massive public transit system, pointed out that black and Hispanic populations are suffering a higher COVID-19 death rate and that the hospitals serving communities of color in the city lack resources.
“The pandemic has really exposed entrenched inequalities but it has laid bare the interdependence and interconnectedness,” Torres-Springer said. “And really shown us we are only as safe as the least protected among us.”
To do recovery the right way, Ortiz said the city needs to bring people in from the most impacted communities, and ensure that they are part of the planning.
“I think what often happens in any of these discussions is we bring incredible people together to talk about the challenges without the perspective of who may be living it on a day-to-day basis,” he said. “It’s important for us to be empathetic, it’s important for us to understand and care very deeply about the communities we serve, but we need to invite them into this discussion in a very active way.”
Jones described the interruption of education, especially for those who were only marginally involved in the system an “unmitigated disaster,” adding that “we already knew we were having trouble in terms of retaining kids of color from poor communities in K-12, but we’ve done reports that show that the community college system in the State of New York can’t be considered a great provider of job skills yet, and the assumptions that the community college system would be a feeder to the four-year system doesn't happen in New York.”
Wiley agreed, pointing to how essential educational opportunity is for people of color and low-income communities and saying that, historically, city investment has been lacking. Limited funding for education, along with public transportation, technology, and job training -- which impact an individual’s ability to access education -- are “historic failures we keep reinforcing,” Wiley said.
“It’s a combination of multiple pieces here,” Ortiz said. “The pieces that were raised before, in terms of K-12, and certainly the higher education CUNY system is essential here, but I think there is also meeting folks in between, the workforce development system, and smaller community-based organizations have done an incredible job of supporting people here in New York City.”
Jones likened the CUNY system to apartheid, saying New York has an overwhelming number of black and Latino students concentrated in two-year schools. “It’s resource allocation, we’re not really adequately resourcing our community college system. I do think it’s a potential springboard.” But we have to be serious, he said. “We have to think more holistically and make community college perhaps a centrepiece.”
Holzer agreed that community colleges are a key piece. “I do think there is lots of good training at the community college level that does lead to good-paying jobs, some of them involve associate’s degrees, especially associate’s in science,” he said. “Some of them are good certificate programs and people have a greater likelihood of completing, but again it’s hard to build up capacity in these programs without money.”
Education is directly related to access to the job market, of course, and over the last decade, there was huge growth in both low-wage industries and jobs for college educated individuals. Holzer said that jobs that used to only require a high school diploma now often require some kind of post-secondary education, and employers have a harder time filling certain gaps. To address this problem and increase access to the labor market, all the panelists agreed there are two main strategies: building the skill-building sector, and working with employers to create better quality jobs that can lead to a career.
Wiley cited “three legs of a stool,” with the need for a stronger education pipeline, better quality jobs, and especially more affordable housing, saying “unless we’re addressing the affordability problem then we are not going to be doing enough just to be doing jobs or just to be doing education, we need the three legs of that stool.”
“It requires a vision that says a New York that we all want to live in, a diverse New York that has all of us in it. We can become San Francisco and watch people of color get pushed out and still be unaffordable for a white middle class, that doesn't help any of us,” Wiley said.
The city’s plan for addressing recovery is also dependent on the level of funding support that might be offered from the federal government. “The point of this particular crisis is, is the federal government going to step in and provide more resources or not those two scenarios create different opportunities,” Wiley said.
New York State and City face many billions in lower-than-expected tax revenue given the economic shutdown and recession brought on by the coronavirus outbreak, and are seeking bailouts from the federal level.
“The services they end up cutting back on most severely are those that are trying to help those at the bottom who don’t have political clout, who aren’t considered economically viable,” Jones said of likely city budget cuts, some of which the mayor has already outlined for the next fiscal year, which begins July 1. “And if we persist in that kind of behavior we are going to have the inequality system that we have now just explode.”
One program that the mayor has put on the chopping block is the Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP), which seeks to connect “NYC youth between the ages of 14 and 24 with career exploration opportunities and paid work experience each summer,” according to the SYEP website.
“Summer youth is a good example of when something is hard, let’s just scrap it rather than say let’s try to find the best possible plan to keep our young people safe,” Ortiz argued. “This was an incredible opportunity for them to develop the technological infrastructure that was required to learning or investing in the system from a distance. And now we have a situation where, during a health crisis, 100,000 young people won’t have anything to do. These types of moments are when we need to take our big ideas and apply them so we can move forward in a really positive way.”
“We can’t have young people who are already marginally connected to the economy with no summer plan, no school,” Jones said. “You can’t do that. You can reconfigure it to have social distancing but we’ve got to get young people in these communities engaged and some income coming in for them and their family and some hope they can participate in the economy going forward.”
Holzer added that a program like SYEP “has strong evidence it actually helps students graduate from high school, it reduces engagement in crime, it reduces incarceration, violence and homicides and things of that nature, as an example. It’s such a short-term mistake to not fund those types of things.”
Torres-Springer pointed out that how New York recovers is uncertain because the city is still very much in the midst of the crisis. She added that there are a number of policies that are emergency measures, such as direct cash and paid sick leave, that months ago would have been unthinkable, but a key question is the transition from the short-term triage to the long-term policies.
“We need to make sure people’s lives are secure and people have good wages, have a dignified and rising standards of living,” Torres-Springer said. “We can’t fool ourselves that this is the job only of local and state policy-makers. We cannot let Washington walk away from their obligations.”
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by Katie Kirker, Gotham Gazette
@GothamGazette