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1.2 Million ‘Food Insecure’ New Yorkers and Added Strains on Emergency Providers Trying to Keep Up


brannan cm food

(photo: New York City Council)


Food insecurity and hunger, which impact more than one million New Yorkers, don’t exist in a silo; instead, they are often connected to other challenges, like housing, health care, immigration status, domestic violence, and more.

A new report from the Food Bank For New York City released at the end of last week outlines those intersecting challenges, detailing how the city’s widening wealth gap and rising costs of living, among other trends and hardships many experience, are putting an enormous strain on millions of city residents, and also on the vast network of emergency food providers attempting to help them.

The report also draws a clear distinction between broader trends, nationally and locally, of lower unemployment and poverty rates on one hand and increased demand for emergency food in New York City on the other. And it points to unhelpful federal policies that undermine the work of emergency food providers and other social service organizations working with the city’s and country’s most vulnerable people.

Currently, more than 1.2 million New York City residents, or 14.4%, are food insecure, making up half of all food insecure people in the entire state, according to the Food Bank. That is 21% higher than the state rate of 11.9% and 12% higher than the national rate of 12.9%.

At its annual conference on hunger and poverty in Manhattan, the Food Bank released “New Yorkers Don’t Live Single-Issue Lives: The Intersections of Hunger,” and brought together a large network of charities, nonprofits, and public programs focused on food, immigration, and health-related issues. Food Bank For New York City President and CEO Margarette Purvis began the conference, along with leaders of other organizations such as BronxWorks, New York Common Pantry, and Cabrini Immigrant Services of NYC, discussing the new report and those intersecting issues affecting New York’s most vulnerable communities.

“When expenses like housing, healthcare, transportation, and childcare pile up, food is often the first thing that’s sacrificed, driving families and individuals to the emergency food network,” Purvis said in her opening remarks.

Facing Greater Challenges with Fewer Resources
Despite a booming economy on the national and local levels, millions of vulnerable New Yorkers have found themselves struggling against expenses, debts, and the constant threat of homelessness. According to the report, nearly three quarters (74%) of food pantries and soup kitchens throughout the city have seen increases in the number of visitors over the past year (2019).

Specifically, 76% of emergency food providers reported an increase in families with children, 60% reported an increase in seniors, 58% reported an increase in immigrants, and 16% reported an increase in college students seeking emergency food.

Across every category, the most-cited barrier to food security was how the rising costs of living and other competing costs have outpaced income (65% of providers reported this for families with children, 68% for working individuals, 52% with regard to seniors and 32% with regard to college students). Other barriers reported by providers included 61% of providers reporting households with children being led by a single-income caregiver and 63% of providers reporting working individuals earning too low a wage. For seniors, it was reported that 62% of providers indicated low fixed income or 53% indicated little-to-no retirement savings.

The general lack of available money for food inevitably translates into a lack of healthy options for vulnerable New Yorkers, leading to increased reports of severe health problems. More than 70% of emergency food providers reported their clients have some nutrition-related preventable diseases, most commonly diabetes (86%), followed by high blood pressure (84%), obesity (83%), high cholesterol (75%), and heart disease (70%).

“We know there is a direct link between poor nutrition and these medical conditions,” said Andre Thompson, Director of Food Programs at New York Common Pantry. “When New Yorkers cannot afford to purchase nutritious food, their health suffers as a result.” Cost, unsurprisingly, is the most common barrier to healthy food choices cited by the report, followed by access/availability and education.

Poor health and living conditions of New Yorkers has also forced many of these organizations to provide additional services. Nearly 60% of emergency food providers also run health services or health clinics, around 30% provide clothing and transportation, and about 20% provide subsidized housing assistance and furniture, for example.

Federal Policies Add Questions
With these challenges in mind, one in two organizations reported that in the past year, they provided more food to more clients and plan to do so again in the upcoming years.

Currently, 54% of emergency food providers are confident in their ability to meet demand, while 28% are unsure, and 18% know that they cannot. Their greatest operational challenges cited in the report are developing cash reserves (57% reported), raising unrestricted revenue (38%), and managing or pursuing growth (30%). If a larger budget were provided, 78% said that they could immediately plan much needed expansions to their programs and services, 39% could cover costs while waiting for grants and 36% could expand or renovate their facilities.

Instead, these issues have been exacerbated by the fact that 80% of providers consider policy changes by the federal government as a major or moderate threat to their operations; the report went so far as to describe the Trump administration’s latest policies as “harmful if not punitive to those struggling the most.”

Some of these federal plans and proposals include stripping public assistance from many unemployed people, changing the federal definition of poverty, eliminating SNAP eligibility for millions of people including over 200,000 New York residents, and removing regional price variations in utility cost calculations for benefits. Rather than provide additional support to these overburdened organizations, these policies are designed to restrict or deny participation in public assistance programs, potentially driving more individuals and families, at loss of public benefits, to turn to an already overburdened network of private services for food assistance.

Immigrant Communities
Under Trump, the Food Bank points out, immigrants are being identified and targeted by immigration enforcement through their involvement in public programs such as SNAP. 

Immigrant families are discontinuing participation in these programs out of fear of deportation, fear that it will affect their immigration status, or more general privacy concerns. According to the Food Bank’s November Research Report, nearly 9% of emergency food providers reported that their visitors asked to remove their names from the contact list or database, compared to only 2% the prior year. Another study from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that nearly half of community health centers reported more immigrant patients declining to enroll themselves in Medicaid in the past year.

In order to protect their clients’ identities and ensure that immigrant communities feel safe using their services, 73% of emergency food providers in New York City have made changes to their operations, according to the Food Bank report. The most commonly reported change throughout this network was to provide home delivery for those not willing to show up to distribution centers (36%). They also provided immigrant communities new and specific services (25%) as well as distribution hours that were not publicly listed in order to protect the privacy of those seeking meals (22%).

Another possible threat to immigrants will go into effect on February 24. Under the U.S Citizenship and Immigration Services’ new definition for “public charges,” programs such as SNAP, Medicaid, and housing assistance will become a determining factor in an immigrant’s application for permanent residence or a green card. This highly controversial move means the federal government is attempting to move toward disallowing immigrants to come to or stay in the country if they are deemed too burdensome.

Javier Ramirez Baron, the Executive Director of Cabrini Immigrant Services of NYC, expressed strong concern that the new rule has “created an incredible amount of fear in our community. Even those who would not be impacted are afraid they will be penalized for accessing vital services.” His fears echoed that of the New York City’s Human Resources Administration (HRA), which estimated that 304,000 New York City residents, including U.S. citizens and green card holders who would not be subject to a public charge test, could be discouraged from participation in crucial public benefits.

'The Charitable Network Cannot Replace Government Public Assistance'
The report concludes: “Though New York City’s network of emergency food providers is already operating under tremendous strain, it is striving to meet the increased need by focusing on the intersectionality of hunger with the other issues their clients face. However, the charitable network cannot replace government public assistance. Public and private efforts must together focus investments on the intersections of hunger and poverty that follow vulnerable New Yorkers through every aspect and phase of their lives.”

Notably, the Food Bank's annual report and conference came just after the New York City Council passed several pieces of legislation aimed at fighting hunger and food insecurity, among other related problems, including codifying the city's Office of Food Policy and requiring it to develop a ten-year food plan, as well as requiring city agencies to make efforts to enroll more eligible seniors in SNAP.

***
by Zachary Kourgialis
@GothamGazette

A Spike in Cyclist Deaths, A Call to the Mayor, and The Slow City Adoption of ‘The Dutch Reach’


dot taxi bike lane

Image via NYC TLC training video


Cyclist deaths plagued New York City last year; 2019 had the highest recorded number of such deaths in the last 20 years, and many street safety and cycling advocates have made an effort to raise awareness about the problem and what the city could do to help protect those who ride bicycles in the five boroughs.

This past July, nearly 1,000 people laid on the ground in Washington Square Park in a “die in” to demonstrate the dangers associated with cycling in the city and demand more protection. Mayor Bill de Blasio, a second-term Democrat, has announced several measures to enhance his signature Vision Zero program that seeks to eliminate traffic fatalities by lowering speed limits, redesigning streets, adding bike lanes, and other measures. But 2019 showed that progress is not moving quickly enough, which de Blasio and Department of Transportation Commissioner Polly Trottenberg have acknowledged, leading to a variety of calls for additional action.

Twenty-eight people were killed while riding a bike in New York City last year, an almost 21% increase in such fatalities from 2018, according to data from the city’s Vision Zero portal. The same data set shows that reported cyclist injuries dropped to 4,221 in 2019 from 4,306 the previous year.

Based on media reports, at least three of the 28 cyclist deaths in 2019 (11%) were the result of “dooring” incidents, which occur when someone opens a car door either into a cyclist or into an approaching cyclist’s path leading to a collision, usually resulting in injury if not death. Sometimes that collision is between the cyclist and the car door, sometimes between a swerving cyclist and an adjacent moving motor vehicle, and sometimes both.

Hugo Garcia, while riding an electric bike, was hit by a car door, then run over after being thrown into traffic in January 2019; 16-year-old Yisroel Schwartz, and 30-year-old Em Samolewicz both swerved to avoid doors before being run over by trucks in May and July 2019, respectively. All three incidents occurred in Brooklyn.

According to Michael Charney, a cycling advocate focused on safety for those who ride bikes, like each of the cyclists who died as a result of dooring in New York City last year, for such incidents “it’s a one-two punch.” The most common way dooring results in a fatal injury is by “being hit by the door or swerving to avoid the door, then run over by another vehicle,” he explained.

Data on doorings is often hard to come by. For example, the National Highway Safety and Transportation Administration (NHSTA) doesn’t count doorings as a type of crash. A 2015 study out of the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver found that doorings are the most common kind of bike crash in Vancouver, accounting for 15% of cyclist crashes. The second most common were collisions involving a left-turning vehicle, third was collisions involving right-turning vehicles, and fourth was conflict zones, such as driveways and parking lots. 

Charney, a lifelong cyclist who has been “car-free for 30 years,” started the Dutch Reach Project in 2016 after 27-year-old Amanda Phillips was killed by a dooring incident in his Massachusetts neighborhood in June of that year.

The Dutch Reach is a method for opening a car door whereby the person in the car -- whether driver or passenger -- uses their hand furthest from the door to open it. This movement forces one’s upper body to swivel and puts the person in best position to see oncoming traffic. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents says that the Dutch Reach creates a chain reaction of five events: reach, swivel, look back, open slowly, exit facing traffic.

According to Charney, the first known use of the Dutch Reach method was in Holland, thus the name, although it didn’t have a name there, it was just how they learned to open car doors. Charney named the method Dutch Reach because he knew it needed to be catchy, simple, and wanted to honor the roots of the method, he said in an interview with Gotham Gazette.

The goal of Charney’s campaign is to have the Dutch Reach technique institutionalized into increasingly more driver’s manuals and other educational materials.

The term itself has gained some popularity in the U.S. Outside Magazine did a video feature on the method after Charney began his awareness campaign, which now has over 3 million views. Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Washington State use the term in their driver’s handbooks, according to Charney. Internationally, the term is catching on as well, including in the United Kingdom, and has been translated in French, Spanish and German, Charney said.

The first study of the efficacy of the Dutch Reach -- which is sometimes called ‘Far Hand Reach’ or ‘Reach Across’-- was done in Nottingham, England, and published in October 2018. The study noted “an observable difference between near and far-hand associated with the level of awareness of rear approaching hazards can be observed when participants were seated in the driver’s seat.” While this study remains the only one to evaluate the Dutch Reach, it is a step toward empirically determining the effect on public safety by using the approach.

Jon Orcutt, director of communications at advocacy group Bike NYC and an avid cyclist in the city, said that he is skeptical that the method will be significant enough to reduce cyclist deaths, but also said anything is worth a try.

“The reason Dutch Reach works is because they’re Dutch. They are taught the method at such a young age, and we’re a far cry from that here,” Orcutt said.

During one of his weekly appearances on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show, Mayor Bill de Blasio was asked in June 2019 about the city’s lack of promotion of the Dutch Reach as a method to reduce spiking cyclist deaths. The caller, who identified himself as Pat from Staten Island and said he had a friend who had died in a dooring incident, described the technique and asked the mayor to promote it on the city’s social media accounts.

“I have never heard of it before either and obviously, you know, this city, I’ve been entirely devoted to Vision Zero,” de Blasio said. “I think that sounds like a really good technique. As someone who was a driver myself for many years I can see what you’re saying that it would make you think differently. So I will tell our team to put that out on social media because I think it’s something that would help people to think.”

Just a few hours after the interview, de Blasio’s government account tweeted about the method, saying, “The Dutch Reach’ is a small move that can make big difference in keeping our streets safe for cyclists. Thank you to Pat on Staten Island (by way of Miami) for calling in to @BrianLehrer for this critical reminder. #VisionZero.” The tweet also included the link to a New York Times article from 2018 titled “The Dutch Reach: A No-Tech Way to Save Bicyclists’ Lives,” which featured Charney.

Less than a week later, the city’s Department of Transportation also tweeted about the method, writing, “Getting “doored” is a leading cause of #bikenyc injury. Whether you are a driver or passenger, always look over your shoulder before opening the door. Reach across, using your opposite hand to open your door (i.e. drivers use right hand). Always watch for cyclists. #VisionZero.”

Since then, there has been some movement by the city on integrating the Dutch Reach into its Vision Zero messaging, but it is limited (and the city opts not to use “Dutch Reach” labeling, rather calling it “Reach Across,” in order to give it a more practical label it seems).

Published to YouTube in November of last year, a Department of Transportation training video for drivers of city vehicles, especially trucks, stresses the importance of being aware of pedestrians and bike-riders and shows the use of the Dutch Reach. The video was created in cooperation with the Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS) Fleet and the Vision Zero Fleet Working Group.

“After parking make it a routine to check for cyclists, and let them pass before opening the door. Reach across your body and use your far hand to open the door, this will help shift your body to see cyclists coming from behind you,” the video says. “Turns pose the greatest risk for fatalities and injuries. Scan the intersection ahead for potential hazards, on the approach reduce your speed by two to three miles per hour, cover the break and be prepared to stop.”

That is just one scene in a video that covers a lot of ground in attempting to stress to drivers of city trucks especially that the city is trying to be more pedestrian and bike-friendly and that they have a responsibility to drive safely.

dutch reach promo“This video is specific to drivers of trucks and other large equipment addressing particular issues common to urban environments,” a spokesperson for the city DOT told Gotham Gazette by email. “The “Dutch Reach” or reaching across the body to open the door with the far hand is included in this video,” the spokesperson added, also saying that the DOT is working with DCAS to create “agency-customized materials to accompany the video.”

The DOT has also made efforts to begin broader public education on the Dutch Reach “in light of recent crashes involving dooring,” according to the same spokesperson, who said that “in 2019, NYC DOT developed an infographic used on our social media channels. This infographic was also produced as a palm card that highlights a reach across image on one side and instruction on keeping bike lanes clear on the other.” (The spokesperson did not say how many of the palm cards have been distributed.)

Beyond these efforts, the DOT did not identify any other ways in which the Dutch Reach is being institutionalized among city fleet drivers and passengers or the broader public. The city messages the larger Vision Zero initiative in a wide variety of ways, including bumper stickers and advertisements.

According to the City Planning Department, New York City is home to over 200 different spoken languages. Charney said that given its multicultural nature, it is important to make sure any efforts to inform drivers and cyclists about the Dutch Reach are translated into a variety of languages or wordless descriptions that are universally understandable.

Other states have implemented versions of the Dutch Reach in legislation. Charney’s goal to get the Dutch Reach into legislation was first realized in his home state of Massachusetts. The Massachusetts Department of Transportation included the Dutch Reach in its driver’s manual as of May 2017, less than a year after Charney started the campaign. This was closely followed by Illinois and Washington State in 2018 and 2019, respectively. Nationally, the American Association of Automobiles (AAA) has included it in its How To Drive student manual.

Advocacy groups are pushing for the promotion of the Dutch Reach on more facets of the transportation system. The bike community in Boston, including 14 advocacy groups, wrote a letter to app-based taxi companies Lyft and Uber to urge them to include some sort of training or information about cyclist safety in their platforms, Charney said. Uber is now piloting push notifications for passengers in New York City, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Toronto to look for bikes if their drop-off location is on a bike route, encouraging passengers to look out for cyclists and cars before exiting.

As for New York City’s larger Vision Zero initiative, implemented beginning in de Blasio’s first year, 2014, it is aimed at achieving zero traffic deaths by 2024, including among those in cars, on bikes, on foot, or in other modes of street transit. According to the five-year report released by the city in March 2019, “overall traffic deaths have fallen by one-third” since 2013, the year before Vision Zero began.There were 299 traffic deaths in 2013 and 2018 saw 202 traffic deaths.

Orcutt said that Vision Zero “often gets misconstrued as targeted zero, but it’s supposed to be more of a philosophical approach where you start making fewer trade-offs with safety, and I don’t think the city’s been nearly aggressive enough in explaining Vision Zero and then executing on the fewer trade-offs.”

In response to the rise in cyclist deaths last year specifically, the city announced “Green Wave: A Plan for Cycling in New York City” in July 2019. It has six main components including expanding protected bike lanes, updating design where fatalities have occurred, expanding NYPD enforcement of traffic violations, promoting legislation/implementing policy, targeting trucks in safety initiatives, and expanding helmet safety awareness. 

“We are ramping up enforcement at crash-prone intersections, and targeting enforcement on high risk activities such as speeding, failing to yield and blocking bike lanes which directly affects bicyclist safety,” said NYPD Transportation Chief Thomas Chan in the press release.

Orcutt said expanding the network of protected bike lanes is one thing that the city is doing a good job with, and is helping improve safety for cyclists on city streets. 

None of the city’s ongoing efforts are specific to dooring, and neither Vision Zero nor Green Wave specifically mention dooring as an issue. Charney and others have suggested that individuals can take charge and begin implementing the Dutch Reach themselves. People can attach a ribbon to their car doors, Charney suggested, to remind themselves to reach with their far hand and helping to create a learned behavior.

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by Katie Kirker, Gotham Gazette

Read more by this writer.

Note: this article has been updated to reflect that Massachusetts does indeed name the Dutch Reach in its driver's manuel.

Report Shows Poverty in New York Far Worse Than Official Measures Say


wes moore robin hood poverty

Wes Moore of Robin Hood Foundation (photo: Robin Hood)


Not nearly every New Yorker has benefited from the unprecedented economic expansion that the city has experienced in the last decade since the Great Recession. While official city and federal measures show that employment is high and the poverty rate has continued to decline over the years, a new report from the Robin Hood Foundation and its partners shows that the reality is far more insidious than other numbers may indicate.

According to the report, half of city residents observed during a yearslong study had lived below the poverty line in at least one of the last four years, and black and Hispanic New Yorkers were more likely to have experienced poverty.

In October, Mayor Bill de Blasio took a victory lap over new American Community Survey data that showed the city’s poverty rate had fallen to an all-time low of 17.3% in 2018, down from 20.9% in 2013. Over the same time, median household income increased by 13%.

“I was elected on a promise to end the Tale of Two Cities and that’s exactly what we’ve spent every day of the last five years working to do,” de Blasio said at the time. “Poverty in New York City is at historic lows. From fighting for a $15 minimum wage to guaranteeing Pre-K for every child to Paid Safe and Sick Leave, we are putting more money in the hands of working families and creating a fairer city for all.”

New York City has its own annual measure to calculate poverty, which takes into account additional metrics that are particularly pertinent in the city – the cost of housing and healthcare, and government benefits such as food stamps and tax credits. It usually shows poverty at a higher level than the federal measure (which is based on pre-tax cash income and doesn’t take into account local factors, like cost of living) and the last time the city’s measure was released, in June of 2019, it showed 19% of New Yorkers living in poverty and 43.1% living near poverty in 2017, down from 20.7% and 45.9%, respectively, in 2013, the year before de Blasio took office.

The mayor boasted of having raised 230,000 New Yorkers out of poverty or near poverty in his first term and said his administration was on track of meeting a ten-year goal of helping 800,000 New Yorkers. The city’s next report is meant to be released this spring. 

Robin Hood’s Poverty Tracker, a collaboration with Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy (CPSP) now in its second year, examined 4,000 New Yorkers about every three months between 2012 to 2018 to more holistically gauge the city’s sustained challenges with tackling poverty. The report judges poverty based on the U.S. Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, which includes factors such as spending on food, clothing, shelter, and utilities, and housing costs - it differs for homeowners and renters. It is slightly different from New York City’s poverty measure. The Tracker also collects data on not just income but “core measures of disadvantage, material hardships and health problems,” as well as assets and debts, consumption patterns and social service program utilization, according to the report.

The report, released at a day-long Manhattan conference on Thursday, found that between 2015 and 2018, half of adults in New York experienced poverty in at least one of the previous four years.

“There are many single-year datasets that measure the poverty rate and show how many New Yorkers live below the poverty line, but these studies don’t provide information on the other forms of economic insecurity that people face, or how their circumstances may have changed over the past year,” said Sophie Collyer, a research director at CPSP, who co-authored the report, in a statement. “By collecting longitudinal data on several measures of economic disadvantage and well-being, the Poverty Tracker reveals that standard snapshots of poverty and disadvantage fail to capture the magnitude of challenges New Yorkers face.”

Individuals were driven into poverty by common, life-changing events, the report found. “What this report pinpoints is that things that pretty much every New Yorker will experience for the most part – losing a job, having a child, ending a relationship – are driving basically one out of every two New Yorkers into poverty,” said Jason Cone, chief public policy officer at Robin Hood, in a phone interview. He said the Poverty Tracker is “complementary” to the city’s poverty measure and its data is regularly shared with city officials.

Among the stark findings of the report is that poverty and hardship have a “strong racial and ethnic dimension,” Cone pointed out. About 59% of black and 68% of Hispanic New Yorkers were living in poverty in at least one year between 2015 and 2018. What’s worse is that 35% of those escaped poverty returned to it the next year.

“This Poverty Tracker underscores the urgent need for meaningful and sustainable economic mobility,” said Wes Moore, CEO of Robin Hood, in a statement. “We can clearly see how effective policies reduce the poverty rate and how pervasive poverty is over time. With this data, grantmakers, policymakers, and community members have the tools and information necessary to better understand the problem we’re working together to combat.”

Education, or lack thereof, was the most significant determining factor for individuals who fall into poverty after having a child. Those with only a high school degree or less were almost five times more likely to experience poverty than someone with a bachelor’s degree.

“Our public policies need to account for that,” Cone said, noting the high cost of everything from housing to childcare in New York City.

Cone did praise the mayor’s efforts to tackle poverty, which are mostly limited by virtue of the policies he can enact. Case in point, the increase in minimum wage to $15 per hour, which the city has touted as a significant factor in lifting people out of poverty, was an issue on which the mayor and his allies were advocated but was a matter of state law.

De Blasio has successfully enacted universal pre-kindergarten and is ramping up early childhood education for three-year-olds. He launched and repeatedly modified an ambitious housing program meant to build and preserve rent-restricted apartments with set asides for the poorest New Yorkers. The city is now funding free legal assistance to help tenants avoid eviction. De Blasio implemented and expanded paid sick leave. Just this week, the mayor was in Albany, urging state lawmakers to protect the city from proposed state cuts to Medicaid and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program.

But short of greater state and federal assistance, the mayor has little power to affect the overall state of the economy and the inequality rampant in the city.

“The poverty tracker study just sort of paints just an even more dire picture of the need to invest in those kinds of public policies,” Cone said.

“Most New Yorkers ride the subway on a given day and the person sitting across from you, if not yourself or a family member, has experienced poverty in the last four years,” Cone added, “and in the largest city in the United States that is a striking and startling statistic.”

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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

Read more by this writer.



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