Eric Hargraves can’t get enough to eat.
Hargraves, who lives in Greenpoint, came to New York from Lincoln, Nebraska, where he was working as a home health aide and part-time mechanic. During that time, he struggled with an addiction to heroin. Finally, 18 months ago, he and his family made the decision for him to come to New York for treatment so that he could return home a changed man.
His wife is supporting herself and their children back home, but there isn’t much left over for Hargraves himself. He lives in a halfway house and depends on food assistance.
Despite the hardship, he plans to stay in New York as a patient of King’s County Hospital until the beginning of next year—long enough to be sure he won’t backslide. “If I’m no good to myself, I’m no good to anyone else,” he said.
Hargraves is one of dozens of hungry residents of Greenpoint, Brooklyn who depend on the food pantry and soup kitchen run by Greenpoint Reformed Church at 136 Milton St. In 2010, more than $200,000 worth of food and other necessities were distributed by the church.
That assistance is now in danger. Most of its food funding has traditionally come from The Emergency Food Assistance Program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, but in recent months TEFAP supplies have dried up, forcing Ann Kansfield, the pastor who runs the outreach, to turn people away or send them home with very little food.
What’s happening here is happening all over the country, as the number of impoverished Americans climbs and federal budgets are stretched to the breaking point.
A square-jawed woman with short, spiked hair and a no-nonsense attitude, Kansfield seems well-suited to tackle the social problems of a neighborhood that, although in the early stages of gentrification, still has plenty of industrial grit. Homelessness is an enduring issue, and the poverty rate in Greenpoint is well above the Brooklyn average.
Until recently, the numbers at both the Wednesday night dinner and the Thursday food giveaway had doubled every year since the pantry and soup kitchen opened in fall 2007, Kansfield said. Yet her invoices show that TEFAP supplies have dropped off precipitously since June.
In her hot, airless office above the church’s kitchen, Kansfield laid out folders containing careful records for the past three years. She is clearly worked up, indignation masking frustration at her inability to resolve a crisis whose root cause lies far beyond her corner of New York.
Throughout the first half of 2011, TEFAP deliveries to Greenpoint Reformed Church routinely totaled $1,000 to $2,000 each and contained a healthy variety of food. The delivery on June 15, by contrast, was less than $500 of mostly canned goods.
In July and August, the quantity and variety of food continued to decline. Even so, the delivery on September 1 was startling—eight cases of tomato juice totaling $91. That was all.
“I wanted to cry I was so angry,” Kansfield said.
Kansfield is struggling to make up the deficit with other sources of funding, including the Emergency Food Assistance Program, run by the New York City Human Resources Administration, and New York State’s Hunger Prevention Nutrition Assistance Program. But these are minor compared to what TEFAP had provided.
Kansfield, who holds a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University, says with some dark humor that keeping the food pantry and soup kitchen open takes every bit of her Ivy League education.
In September, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that the percentage of Americans living below the federal poverty line rose to 15.1 percent in 2010, from 14.3 percent in 2009, and that more people are now impoverished than at any time in the nation’s history. New York fares even worse: 16 percent of New Yorkers are below the poverty line, defined as a yearly income of $22,350 for a family of four. Food assistance programs such as Greenpoint Reformed’s are becoming ever more necessary.
Though TEFAP is a federal program funded by Congressional appropriations, its funds are managed and distributed on a state and local level. Each state administers TEFAP for the USDA through regional food banks. According to Heather Groll, the public information officer at the New York State Office of General Services, there are eight such food banks in New York. Of those eight, the Food Bank for New York City receives the lion’s share—approximately 62 percent of all USDA food and administrative funds allocated to the state. Funding and food entitlement, she says, is pegged to the food stamp participation in the counties the food banks serve.
In 2009, New York State received about $45 million in TEFAP funds. In 2010, the state received a little more than $39 million. In 2011, funds were down to about $28 million.
Hans Billger, a public affairs official at the Food and Nutrition Service, the agency within the USDA that manages TEFAP, says a funding shortfall is affecting not only New York but the entire country. The TEFAP budget has been slashed even as the American poverty rate has continued to climb.
On a Monday in late September, Hargraves stood in the gathering dusk outside the house he shares with several other men on Clay Street near Manhattan Avenue. His large frame was wrapped in a spongy orange coat. He and his housemates “pretty much counted on” the church for sustenance, he said. Formerly, the men—seven to 10 in all—would gather as a group and walk the ten blocks to the church every Wednesday and Thursday. The groceries they received would last them for days. Now many of them skip it because it isn’t worth the walk.
It’s hard to survive on nothing but a few canned goods, he said, “especially when you’re used to getting bread and milk and meat, you know, things that you can cook—make a meal out of. It’s not like that anymore.”
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