New Face in Line at Soup Kitchen: Working Poor

Jenny Feck waited in plenty of lines back when she was on welfare. But the welfare check stopped coming about a year ago when she got married, and in these boom times, Feck is again a working woman. The days of waiting in line for life’s necessities were over, she thought.

They’re not.

In the weeks leading up to Christmas, Feck frequently gathered up her three children and got in line for a free meal or a bagful of donated groceries at one of several food pantries in the Chicago suburb of Maywood.

Sure she works, Feck said as she waited to down a hearty meal served up at the Church of the Holy Communion. But without the money she saves by patronizing the pantries and the soup kitchen, “the electricity would be turned off.”

As 1997 draws to a close, unemployment rates have sunk to a 25-year low and the nation’s economy is humming along nicely. But Feck, who also has pawned the wedding ring from her now-dissolved marriage, knows that in spite of all that, her misery has plenty of company: At a pantry nearby, just a handful of people trickled in a few months ago, she said. Today there are close to 60 each time she goes in to collect a bag of free food.

Across the nation, the lines outside soup kitchens and food pantries are growing, driven in large measure by those, such as Feck, who are working but still poor, according to those in the field.

And in a period of near-record prosperity, the surge in need has confounded and frightened those on the front lines of the war against hunger--as well as sparking a lively, but ultimately inconclusive, debate over its cause.

A survey by the Los Angeles Coalition to End Hunger and Homelessness offers a sign of the trend: Of nearly 300 people who visited local food pantries from September through November, the group found that 42% reported it was their first visit in six months.

Nationally, 86% of cities surveyed recently by the U.S. Conference of Mayors reported an increase in demand for emergency food assistance. On average, requests for food at soup kitchens and food pantries have risen by 16%. And 38% of those seeking emergency food aid are employed, according to the Conference of Mayors, up from 23% in 1994.

Even as food pantries and soup kitchens are experiencing a significant jump in demand, the demand for emergency shelter has risen by a far more modest 3%, according to the conference.

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At soup kitchens across the country, there remain plenty of chronically homeless single men and women, the dirty and frayed who come in from doorways and heating grates for a hot meal. But increasingly, those soup kitchen regulars are being joined in line by families whose finances are drawn so tightly that any unforeseen expense can send them teetering to the brink of disaster.

“These are people who are working, playing by the rules, trying to hold their families together,” said Doug O’Brien, a public-policy specialist for Second Harvest, a national feeding network run out of Chicago. “And a small crisis is a major crisis to people living paycheck to paycheck. They get a flat tire on the primary vehicle and they’ve got to buy a new tire. And the first thing they skimp on is the grocery budget.”

The most dramatic growth in emergency food demand is in the suburbs, according to O’Brien. Ironically, the trend is on display in cities where the economy appears to be at its most robust, prompting many to worry about a future in which economic trends sag and the demands of the 1996 welfare reform law are even more strenuous.

In Phoenix, the unemployment rate is 3%, a level economists define as virtually full employment. But in Phoenix’s food pantries and soup kitchens, the city’s rosy economic picture looks considerably more gray: Four out of five of those seeking emergency food aid report that they are working--and poor.

“These people we’re seeing have . . . low pay and [a] lack of benefits to go along,” said Barbara Rockow, the Phoenix representative of Bread for the World, a national advocacy group for feeding and nutrition programs. “If there is a husband and wife, both are working. And after the rent and whatever shelter payment, if there is a health crisis, oftentimes it puts them over the edge.”

In Maywood, sisters Jeanne and Mary Gammon since 1983 have run the soup kitchen that offers about six dinners a month and at which Jenny Feck dines. They find the sudden surge in need a mystery. Last year, their dinners drew between 600 and 700 hungry people each month. This year, the monthly tally has spiked to more than 800 four times, including a record-shattering 1,200 in October.

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Mary Gammon, a real estate manager, would like to look on the bright side. It could be that the food bank where they get their groceries now offers yogurt, fresh fruit, vegetables and the occasional gourmet delicacy along with the traditional government beans and donated canned corn.

Other experts blame reform.

But even as they do so, they acknowledge that because much of the impact of the landmark 1996 law has not yet been felt, welfare reform cannot entirely account for the increased demand at pantries and soup kitchens.

Nationally, almost a million legal noncitizens have had their food stamps cut, including 73,000 legal immigrant families in Los Angeles. There are millions more Americans who ultimately stand to lose their food stamps under welfare reform but have not lost them yet.

“We are not crying wolf,” said O’Brien of Second Harvest. “There are people who have lost their benefits. But they’re outnumbered by people who are playing by the rules but just not making it.”

O’Brien opined that many people, anticipating drastic changes in welfare, may have jumped off the rolls quickly, taking any job they could get.

In many such cases, O’Brien reasoned, those who have anticipated welfare’s demise are finding a hard truth about the new American economy: It has become dangerously reliant on workers whose labor does not command a living wage.

The result is a potentially combustible mix.

“We’re all frightened,” said Lynnette Engelhardt, domestic policy analyst at Bread for the World. “We know what this welfare reform means. After all, $27.7 billion was cut from food stamps over six years, and we know that over the next several years it’s only going to get worse. We all knew it was going to be bad, but I don’t think anyone believed it was going to be so bad so quickly.”

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Healy reported from Washington, Pasternak from Chicago. Times staff writer Carla Rivera contributed to this story from Los Angeles.