One In Ten Ohioans Receive Food Stamps
March 22, 2008
A new Columbus Dispatch article reports that the number of Ohio families receiving food stamps is the highest in the state’s history.
Advocates estimate another 500,000 Ohioans are eligible but not enrolled in the food-stamp program.
Individuals in households with incomes up to 130 percent of the federal poverty level and with assets no greater than $2,000 in most cases are eligible for food stamps. That’s earnings of no more than $22,880 a year for a family of three.
Recipients receive $100 a month. The federal government pays for the benefits while the state covers administrative costs.
But as the price of milk, fruits and other groceries climb, advocates say, recipients can buy less and less with that $100.
“Food stamps provide only about $1 per person, per meal. Who in the world is buying groceries with that?” asked Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, executive director of the Ohio Association of Second Harvest Food Bank.
On average, food stamps are now providing less than two weeks of groceries.
“There’s the presumption that folks have the cash to make up the rest. Well, they don’t,” Frech said.
Not surprisingly, food pantries and soup kitchens across the state have been reporting record demands. Like the families they serve, they, too, cannot keep pace.
In central Ohio, demand at the Mid-Ohio Food Bank in January was up 14 percent over the same period a year ago, with 120,000 requests for food.
The increased demand coupled with rising food costs and fewer donations have forced the food bank to reduce the five-day supply of food it had been giving out to a three-day supply.
I’m sure that some will say it is just the lazy people that won’t get a job. But I say it is more important than ever that the people of this state look out for those that are less fortunate. It is unconscionable that in the world today that a citizen of this country cannot have the following basic needs met: food, shelter, and health care. These kids growing up in poverty are our future. Let’s all help!
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That is a pretty stunning number. I never ever would have guessed it was so high.
We have made poverty a trap that is getting harder and harder to escape. Most folks, including me, say ‘get a job.’ After all, there are now tens of thousands of immigrants in central Ohio who have found jobs. Why didn’t the poor folks already here go after those jobs?
There are a couple of reasons. One is that many of the immigrants are working as cash day laborers without any benefits. They work here cheap, but it’s much better than they could do in their home country.
But a suprising component is transportation. We may have this stereotype of ten Mexicans in a pickup truck, but the truth is that by and large the immigrant populations take care of their own transportation problems. Therefore, it is possible to live in cheap urban housing and have a job in the suburbs.
However, few of the families in chronic poverty have decent transportation, and our public transportation does a poor job of connecting the inner city to the suburban places of where decent jobs are. Who wants to spend hours/day on a bus for a job that pays minimum wage? Some do certainly - most don’t.
This transportation issue rears it head in regard to food stamps as well. There are few decent supermarkets in urban areas, so these folks with no transportation end up spending their food stamps on bologna and potato chips at the local convenience store - businesses which was created primarily to capture food stamp money.
I don’t know if you remember reading the stories in the Dispatch years about about how Honda came to choose Marysville for their plant instead of something closer to Columbus. The assertion was that Honda wanted to be close enough so that its management could enjoy the benefits of a decent-sized city, but no so close to attract job applicants from the inner city (can’t get burned for discrimination if no minorities apply after all). As I understand it, they had a rule that all workers had to live within something like 20 miles of the plant, which conveniently ruled out anyplace east of 315.
When there were complaints of purposefully excluding the black community, Honda said that the rule for their new plant would be that all workers had to live in the county were the plant was going to be built, or any adjancent county. The complaints died out. However, that plant was built in Logan County, which is two counties away from Franklin County - again excluding the inner city population.
Most people are surprised (I was) to learn that in absolute numbers, there are more white people below the poverty level in Franklin County than there are African-Americans. A greater pecentage of African-Americans are in poverty, but this is by no means a ‘black problem.’
If you really want to make difference, connect with Jim and KJ Swearingen at http://city-vision.org/ Start by signing up for the CCD classes, then dig in with one of the Community Partners. It’s been a lot of heart-wrenching work for them, but they’re starting to gain traction. I heard Jim say the other day that every single young man he had in his first youth group in South Linden is either dead. But he also had with him a kid from a later youth group who decided to marry the mother of his four kids, found a way to get a decent job he could reach via public transportation, and is now living with his wife and kids in Dublin. It can be done.
PL
Immigration is a major reason, you right Paul
I’d love to see some studies that indicate that illegal immigration causes a loss in jobs for citizens. Its an interesting argument but not one that I’ve ever seen any evidence to support.
Paul - I’ll check into that organization. Thanks for the info.
And thanks for your comments Ben and Paul.
Paul - Was that an old rule with Honda? My wife and I know of some people in Franklin County that work at Honda.
I think so - at least I haven’t heard anything about it for a while. Could be that their source of labor has become sufficiently stabile so that this kind of restriction is no longer necessary. All you have to do is get on US33 at about 7am to understand how many folks from Franklin County work out there these days.
Ben: I didn’t mean to imply that I feel immigration is a cause of diminished opportunity for those in chronic poverty, but I did believe that the fact that ten of thousands of immigrants found jobs here was proof that there were always jobs to be had. I thought the poor folks just felt welfare and unemployment was a better gig than a low paying job (and there are indeed some of those kinds of disincentives).
It was only when I came to understand the transportation issue that I realized that the immigrants are not displacing inner city workers (although I believe they have displaced some of the working poor, especially in the construction industry).
The problem of poverty is solvable. But you have to start with the right questions, which for many of us - me especially - means replacing long-held assumptions with accurate facts and observations.
One place we might have to start is with the way school systems are organized. The result of court-ordered busing in the 1970s drove the middle class to the suburban schools, and the Win-Win Agreement preserved the suburban borders. It was all the doing of the developers and homebuilders, and it created a suburban housing boom that lasted for 25 years - right up to the current mortgage crisis. Gregory Jacobs describes this beautifully in his book Getting Around Brown
One consequence of this ‘white flight’ is an urban district which is more segregated than ever (from a regional perspective) and suburban districts lacking sufficient commercial revenue sources to create a sound economic foundation for the schools.
My preferred solution is to eliminate all the school districts and go to a 100% charter school system with every kid getting a voucher. I’ve written several blog posts about this if you would like a longer explanation.
Next best would be to consolidate all the suburban districts, and give the kids both the choice and the transportation to attend any school they want.
That’s when we find out how bigoted we really are. Suburban folks would rather pay through the nose to support their own schools and subsidize the urban schools than to risk having poor (and Black) kids show up in their suburban schools. Read some of these comments if you want evidence of that sentiment.
Thanks for the forum.
PL