HHH designated as Silver Anniversary Partner by NW Children’s Fund
NY Times: Living on Nothing but Food Stamps
An incredibly shocking article from the NY Times about the huge percentage of Americans that are living on food stamps alone.
The link is below, as is the full text of the article – if you go to the page, be sure to check out the interactive maps on the left side of the article. Just click on the maps for larger views and more info. The first one shows that the increase since 2007 in the number of people living solely on food stamps in WA was 56%. The second map shows usage across the country. If you hover your mouse on WA you get popup boxes for each county with stats on usage. You can also zoom in – control is on the right side of the map or you can double-click. In Pierce County 13% of people use food stamps and 21% of the children are in households using food stamps. Usage is up 63%.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/us/03foodstamps.html?emc=eta1
January 3, 2010
CAPE CORAL, Fla. — After an improbable rise from the Bronx projects to a job selling Gulf Coast homes, Isabel Bermudez lost it all to an epic housing bust — the six-figure income, the house with the pool and the investment property.
Now, as she papers the county with résumés and girds herself for rejection, she is supporting two daughters on an income that inspires a double take: zero dollars in monthly cash and a few hundred dollars in food stamps.
With food-stamp use at a record high and surging by the day, Ms. Bermudez belongs to an overlooked subgroup that is growing especially fast: recipients with no cash income.
About six million Americans receiving food stamps report they have no other income, according to an analysis of state data collected by The New York Times. In declarations that states verify and the federal government audits, they described themselves as unemployed and receiving no cash aid — no welfare, no unemployment insurance, and no pensions, child support or disability pay.
Their numbers were rising before the recession as tougher welfare laws made it harder for poor people to get cash aid, but they have soared by about 50 percent over the past two years. About one in 50 Americans now lives in a household with a reported income that consists of nothing but a food-stamp card.
“It’s the one thing I can count on every month — I know the children are going to have food,” Ms. Bermudez, 42, said with the forced good cheer she mastered selling rows of new stucco homes.
Members of this straitened group range from displaced strivers like Ms. Bermudez to weathered men who sleep in shelters and barter cigarettes. Some draw on savings or sporadic under-the-table jobs. Some move in with relatives. Some get noncash help, like subsidized apartments. While some go without cash incomes only briefly before securing jobs or aid, others rely on food stamps alone for many months.
The surge in this precarious way of life has been so swift that few policy makers have noticed. But it attests to the growing role of food stamps within the safety net. One in eight Americans now receives food stamps, including one in four children.
Here in Florida, the number of people with no income beyond food stamps has doubled in two years and has more than tripled along once-thriving parts of the southwest coast. The building frenzy that lured Ms. Bermudez to Fort Myers and neighboring Cape Coral has left a wasteland of foreclosed homes and written new tales of descent into star-crossed indigence.
A skinny fellow in saggy clothes who spent his childhood in foster care, Rex Britton, 22, hopped a bus from Syracuse two years ago for a job painting parking lots. Now, with unemployment at nearly 14 percent and paving work scarce, he receives $200 a month in food stamps and stays with a girlfriend who survives on a rent subsidy and a government check to help her care for her disabled toddler.
“Without food stamps we’d probably be starving,” Mr. Britton said.
A strapping man who once made a living throwing fastballs, William Trapani, 53, left his dreams on the minor league mound and his front teeth in prison, where he spent nine years for selling cocaine. Now he sleeps at a rescue mission, repairs bicycles for small change, and counts $200 in food stamps as his only secure support.
“I’ve been out looking for work every day — there’s absolutely nothing,” he said.
A grandmother whose voice mail message urges callers to “have a blessed good day,” Wanda Debnam, 53, once drove 18-wheelers and dreamed of selling real estate. But she lost her job at Starbucks this year and moved in with her son in nearby Lehigh Acres. Now she sleeps with her 8-year-old granddaughter under a poster of the Jonas Brothers and uses her food stamps to avoid her daughter-in-law’s cooking.
“I’m climbing the walls,” Ms. Debnam said.
Florida officials have done a better job than most in monitoring the rise of people with no cash income. They say the access to food stamps shows the safety net is working.
“The program is doing what it was designed to do: help very needy people get through a very difficult time,” said Don Winstead, deputy secretary for the Department of Children and Families. “But for this program they would be in even more dire straits.”
But others say the lack of cash support shows the safety net is torn. The main cash welfare program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, has scarcely expanded during the recession; the rolls are still down about 75 percent from their 1990s peak. A different program, unemployment insurance, has rapidly grown, but still omits nearly half the unemployed. Food stamps, easier to get, have become the safety net of last resort.
“The food-stamp program is being asked to do too much,” said James Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center, a Washington advocacy group. “People need income support.”
Food stamps, officially the called Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, have taken on a greater role in the safety net for several reasons. Since the benefit buys only food, it draws less suspicion of abuse than cash aid and more political support. And the federal government pays for the whole benefit, giving states reason to maximize enrollment. States typically share in other programs’ costs.
The Times collected income data on food-stamp recipients in 31 states, which account for about 60 percent of the national caseload. On average, 18 percent listed cash income of zero in their most recent monthly filings. Projected over the entire caseload, that suggests six million people in households with no income. About 1.2 million are children.
The numbers have nearly tripled in Nevada over the past two years, doubled in Florida and New York, and grown nearly 90 percent in Minnesota and Utah. In Wayne County, Mich., which includes Detroit, one of every 25 residents reports an income of only food stamps. In Yakima County, Wash., the figure is about one of every 17.
Experts caution that these numbers are estimates. Recipients typically report a small rise in earnings just once every six months, so some people listed as jobless may have recently found some work. New York officials say their numbers include some households with earnings from illegal immigrants, who cannot get food stamps but sometimes live with relatives who do.
Still, there is little doubt that millions of people are relying on incomes of food stamps alone, and their numbers are rapidly growing. “This is a reflection of the hardship that a lot of people in our state are facing; I think that is without question,” said Mr. Winstead, the Florida official.
With their condition mostly overlooked, there is little data on how long these households go without cash incomes or what other resources they have. But they appear an eclectic lot. Florida data shows the population about evenly split between families with children and households with just adults, with the latter group growing fastest during the recession. They are racially mixed as well — about 42 percent white, 32 percent black, and 22 percent Latino — with the growth fastest among whites during the recession.
The expansion of the food-stamp program, which will spend more than $60 billion this year, has so far enjoyed bipartisan support. But it does have conservative critics who worry about the costs and the rise in dependency.
“This is craziness,” said Representative John Linder, a Georgia Republican who is the ranking minority member of a House panel on welfare policy. “We’re at risk of creating an entire class of people, a subset of people, just comfortable getting by living off the government.”
Mr. Linder added: “You don’t improve the economy by paying people to sit around and not work. You improve the economy by lowering taxes” so small businesses will create more jobs.
With nearly 15,000 people in Lee County, Fla., reporting no income but food stamps, the Fort Myers area is a laboratory of inventive survival. When Rhonda Navarro, a cancer patient with a young son, lost running water, she ran a hose from an outdoor spigot that was still working into the shower stall. Mr. Britton, the jobless parking lot painter, sold his blood.
Kevin Zirulo and Diane Marshall, brother and sister, have more unlikely stories than a reality television show. With a third sibling paying their rent, they are living on a food-stamp benefit of $300 a month. A gun collector covered in patriotic tattoos, Mr. Zirulo, 31, has sold off two semiautomatic rifles and a revolver. Ms. Marshall, who has a 7-year-old daughter, scavenges discarded furniture to sell on the Internet.
They said they dropped out of community college and diverted student aid to household expenses. They received $150 from the Nielsen Company, which monitors their television. They grew so desperate this month, they put the breeding services of the family Chihuahua up for bid on Craigslist.
“We look at each other all the time and say we don’t know how we get through,” Ms. Marshall said.
Ms. Bermudez, by contrast, tells what until the recession seemed a storybook tale. Raised in the Bronx by a drug-addicted mother, she landed a clerical job at a Manhattan real estate firm and heard that Fort Myers was booming. On a quick scouting trip in 2002, she got a mortgage on easy terms for a $120,000 home with three bedrooms and a two-car garage. The developer called the floor plan Camelot.
“I screamed, I cried,” she said. “I took so much pride in that house.”
Jobs were as plentiful as credit. Working for two large builders, she quickly moved from clerical jobs to sales and bought an investment home. Her income soared to $180,000, and she kept the pay stubs to prove it. By the time the glut set in and she lost her job, the teaser rates on her mortgages had expired and her monthly payments soared.
She landed a few short-lived jobs as the industry imploded, exhausted her unemployment insurance and spent all her savings. But without steady work in nearly three years, she could not stay afloat. In January, the bank foreclosed on Camelot.
One morning as the eviction deadline approached, Ms. Bermudez woke up without enough food to get through the day. She got emergency supplies at a food pantry for her daughters, Tiffany, now 17, and Ashley, 4, and signed up for food stamps. “My mother lived off the government,” she said. “It wasn’t something as a proud working woman I wanted to do.”
For most of the year, she did have a $600 government check to help her care for Ashley, who has a developmental disability. But she lost it after she was hospitalized and missed an appointment to verify the child’s continued eligibility. While she is trying to get it restored, her sole income now is $320 in food stamps.
Ms. Bermudez recently answered the door in her best business clothes and handed a reporter her résumé, which she distributes by the ream. It notes she was once a “million-dollar producer” and “deals well with the unexpected.”
“I went from making $180,000 to relying on food stamps,” she said. “Without that government program, I wouldn’t be able to feed my children.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/us/03foodstamps.html?emc=eta1
Incredible “No Place Like Home” Breakfast raises $122,000 for work with homeless families
Wow. What an incredible morning that was. Friends and family from across the community, together to make an impact at a time of real crisis in our country. 2 incredible families shared their stories, with tears flowing freely – victory emerging from times of real pain, vulnerably shared with a room mostly unknown. The common thread was an ache for the wrong things to be made right – for little children to have a bed for their bedtime story. For the courageous ones who flee in the middle of the night for the sake of their children to be taken in and cared for.
Generous hearts in that room contributed over $122,000 in gifts and pledges for the day to day operations of our work with homeless families – and we couldn’t be more grateful. We know the lives that this will change – good on you, folks. A true class act, you are. We are honored to be a part of a community like this!
Thank you from the families and staff of Helping Hand House!
Fall Newsletter highlights our amazing volunteers
Click here to check out the Fall 2009 HHH Newsletter. Thanks for all of you who do so much – including Jane Hartman (our highlighted volunteer this month) and Chris Bivins, who volunteers his design skills on our newsletter!
Family Picnic
Well, this is the weekend of our family picnic. We couldn’t be more excited! It’s a time when the families in our programs, as well as our own families and friends from the community, come together to BBQ, have water balloon tosses, the 3 legged race and generally have a blast in the sun (and it should be a COOKER!). If you’re interested, please call our office, and we can give you the details – we’d love to introduce you to the staff and give you a look at what we’re involved with.
Happy summer!
News Tribune article highlights 25 years at Helping Hand House
Wanted to point you a great article in the Tacoma News Tribune highlighting the lessons learned in 25 years of working to end homelessness in Pierce County. Attached below, check it out at the TNT here.
For 25 years, these helping hands have worked to end homelessness, a family at a time
KATHLEEN MERRYMAN; THE NEWS TRIBUNE
Last updated: June 3rd, 2009 12:15 AM (PDT)In a perfect world, 4,618 families would show up for this month’s 25th anniversary of Helping Hand House.A total of 12,554 moms, dads and kids would be there to tell how the Puyallup nonprofit helped them rebuild their lives after homelessness.
When Margie Addington founded Helping Hand House to serve families in East Pierce County, in 1984, she worked on her own with the backing of service clubs and grants.
The original idea was basic: Get families into housing. Expect them to find a job.
When Addington retired in 1997, Helping Hand House operated 11 homes on an annual budget of $165,000.
The annual budget is $1.9 million now. They operate 60 units, and every family has a case manager.
“They were one of the first organizations to shift their mission from ‘serving’ to ending and preventing homelessness,” said Troy Christensen, chairman of The Road Home leadership team. “They were the first organization to provide Housing First to the families in Pierce County.”
Kathy Doubikin knows about it first-hand. After a move and a divorce, she and her three sons ended up without a home, friends or family. In early 2008, Helping Hands had an opening.
“Having a place to go was a blessing,” the Puyallup resident said. “Having someone to listen to, care for and encourage me to take the steps necessary to start saving and rebuilding was a blessing.”
She began taking classes on budgeting, home and car repairs, job searches, cooking, canning. She got her sons enrolled in school. She opened a savings account. She found three part-time jobs, one of which developed into a full-time managerial position.
“I’m at the point of graduating out this Christmas,” she said.
“They back you up,” Doubikin said. “They listen to you.”
Empathy for the homeless goes right to the top of the Helping Hands hierarchy – all the way to Nola Renz, the executive director who replaced Addington 12 years ago.
Renz grew up in a family that bounced in and out of housing from state to state in the Northern Plains.
“The earliest recollection I have of it was when I was about 4,” she said. “We were sleeping in our car. I didn’t know we were homeless. We were camping.”
There were no shelters then, no food banks. The family had burned through the kindness of relatives. Renz attended nearly two dozen schools, none of which had help for homeless students.
“The schools wouldn’t let you take books home,” she said. “You couldn’t check out library books.”
Renz once took 50 cents from the family’s money jar to buy school supplies. Her father met her at the door with a switch.
“That’s why it is so important to me that our children are fully equipped for school,” she said. “That is huge.”
“We see ourselves ending homelessness, not just for grown-ups, but for the next generation,” said Marion Hogan, Helping Hand House’s deputy development director.
Renz graduated from high school, married, had three children and fled a dangerous relationship. She struggled, found a decent job, then another, and put herself through college.
Today Renz tells her clients that if she could work and go to school at the same time, they can, too.
And they do.
“If our parents are in school, they have to work 20 hours a week, too.” Hogan said.
They know they are the lucky ones.
Last month, more than 300 families called for help that would keep them from losing their homes.
“We could serve 18,” Renz said.
Another 400 people called needing homes.
“That’s up from 50 a month” last year, she said. “We can serve four, or five, tops. Pretty depressing, huh?”
You bet it is, especially since Helping Hand House has shown us how to do better.
Kathleen Merryman: 253-597-8677
kathleen.merryman@thenewstribune.com
What: 25th anniversary celebration for Helping Hand House
When: June 11, 3 to 7 p.m.
Where: Pioneer Park pavilion, downtown Puyallup
Originally published: June 3rd, 2009 12:15 AM (PDT)
To the Puyallup Herald…
Newsflash to the Puyallup Herald:
“Helping Hand House celebrates 25 years of sheltering the homeless in Puyallup and East Pierce County”
That’s thousands of families assisted over the last quarter century through our homeless prevention programs, hundreds hosted in our emergency and transitional housing – each one treated with dignity and respect. Each family member got a handmade quilt, donated by faithful friends in one of several churches or the Puyallup Valley Quilters.
Do we put people in dorms? Nope – we’d prefer to give people a home, and the help they need to make a life-long change. Help in budgeting, getting a job, a car, improving a credit score. A new start that when it looks hope’s gone forever.
So we’re a little different than your average homeless shelter…does that mean we don’t exist?
How do people become homeless?
A few years ago I was having lunch at a spa and a woman asked to join me. Steamed and soaked into blissful states and wrapped in soft terry robes, we chatted while we ate. She was a physician and I worked for a non-profit. As I shared what my work was like, she asked me a question that shocked me, “How do people become homeless?” When I explained, of course she caught on quickly and I reminded myself how normal it is to be blind to issues that do not confront us directly and how difficult it is to imagine life situations so different from those we experience. Neither she nor anyone close to her had ever been homeless.
Even in this prolonged recession when job losses and foreclosures dominate the news, the facts of life for low income Americans are probably still not clear to most of us. Nationwide, many people in the workforce regularly spend more than 50% of their income on their housing, making them extremely vulnerable and ‘just a paycheck’ away from homelessness. For example, in Pierce County, Washington where Helping Hand House is located, rental vacancies fell to 4.3 percent in February, nearly 2 percentage points lower than the historical average of 6 percent. In the summer quarter of 2008 the cost of rentals rose 2.3 percent and is expected to rise another 6 or 7 points by this summer. (source: Central Puget Sound Real Estate Research Committee, v.59 n.2, p.46-47) When you pair higher rental costs and fewer units available with current unemployment figures, the chief reason for family homelessness becomes vividly clear.
Even when the economy is flush, workers at minimum wage still have to work 81 hours a week to afford the standard two-bedroom unit in Pierce County ($845) and 117 hours for a three-bedroom ($1231). The average income for renters is $11.70 an hour, making decent, safe housing still out of reach for so many families.
There was a time in our country when anyone who worked was pretty much guaranteed a safe, decent place to live. Let’s take a good look at the situation in our communities and do all we can to make that true once again.
