$672 a month gets little help from food stamps

Mike Stuckey Senior news editor • Profile • E-mail

From the living room of her tiny apartment on the 10th floor of the Minnie Riperton building for senior citizens on Chicago’s South Side, Adell Davis can see all the way to Lake Michigan. For that, she is truly grateful.

But she can also see the clock. And that inspires darker emotions as she uses it to space two daily meals, often just rice and toast.

“I get up in the morning at 5 o’clock. I fix coffee and watch the news,” said Davis. “Around 9 or 10, I’ll start fixing something to eat. About 12 o’clock, that’s lunch, but I can’t eat at 12. If I eat at 12 o’clock, I’m going to be hungry at 3 or 4 again anyway. So I’ll wait until 3, and I’ll just be hungry for three hours. Then I can have a little something. Nine, 10 o’clock at night, I have nothing to eat so I drink some water. And I always make sure I have coffee and sugar because that helps a lot.”

Until recently, Davis, 63, hobbled by a pair of bum knees that she got from years as a letter carrier, had a little more food around the house because she was eligible for a monthly allotment of $168 in food stamps. But when she moved into subsidized housing and her rent dropped dramatically, she lost virtually all of those benefits.

Feeding America Adell Davis: 'barely surviving'

To many Americans, the food-stamp program is often little more than part of the entitlement debate between social-justice advocates and foes of big government. But to a record number of Americans — 29.5 million at last count and growing with the unemployment and foreclosure rates — the nation’s largest domestic food assistance program is the difference between the misery of hunger and a manageable life.

Adell Davis is a living, breathing example of how poor one must be in these United States to receive help through the program run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service: With her Social Security income of just $672 a month, Davis now qualifies for less than $20 a month in food stamps, which she declines as more trouble than it’s worth and because “I thought somebody else could use it better than me.”

In turning down the benefits, Davis joined many other older Americans who also are eligible for some assistance from the food-stamp program but simply don’t apply for it. That’s a segment of the population especially targeted for assistance in these hard times by groups like Feeding America, the nation’s largest network of food banks.

Barriers to benefits
Maura Daly, Feeding America’s vice president for government relations and advocacy, said that as vital as the food-stamp program is to combating hunger, it has many barriers. Overall, just 67 percent of eligible recipients get food stamps, according to the USDA. Most who don’t simply aren’t aware that they are eligible, Daly said. Others “don’t feel like the benefit is worth going through the process.”

Still more are plagued by “inaccessible offices,” Daly said, and a trend in some states to push more of the application process online, which is unhelpful to poor people without computer access. USDA spokeswoman Adriana Zorrilla added that “some people may also face transportation or language barriers.”

And then there is the stigma often attached to receiving food-stamps, Daly and Zorrilla said, some of which comes from the public’s misperceptions about who is eligible to receive the benefits and who actually gets them.

The 44-year-old food-stamp program, which was revised Oct. 1 and renamed the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, in part to fight the stigma, has strict eligibility criteria. Benefits are intended to go only to households with net incomes at or below the federal poverty level, which ranges from $10,404 a year for single person to $35,604 for a family of eight. Income limits are higher in Alaska and Hawaii.

A household generally cannot have more than $2,000 in “countable resources,” which includes cash and investments but excludes residences and some vehicles.

USDA statistics paint a stark picture of the financial status of food stamp recipients. Thirty-nine percent of households in the program have income of half or less of the poverty figure, while 15 percent have no cash income at all. Nearly half of recipients are children. Just 15 percent are working-age men. Only 5 percent receive general state welfare benefits. Seventy percent of households in the program have no “countable resources” and the average has just $143.

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