why food stamps matter

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http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/currency/2013/09/why-food-stamps-matter.html



On Saturday mornings in North Philadelphia, hundreds of people can be found lining up along the sidewalks of West LeHigh Avenue and Sixth Street, near the basement entrance of a local public library. They aren’t looking for books, they are looking to be fed, by a large community food center housed in the library’s basement. Until recently, the fire-gutted, stone-and-brick shell of a huge high school down the street from the center dominated the landscape, looking more like a ruined medieval monastery than a modern-day American urban academy. The school ruins have now been torn down, but the side streets are still lined with boarded-up houses.

North Philadelphia is one of America’s poorest urban neighborhoods. In 2011, researchers with Pew Charitable Trusts estimated that Philadelphia’s poverty rate stood at twenty-five per cent. But that number hid huge disparities. Some suburbs were as leafy and affluent as Westchester, New York. Meanwhile, in the eastern part of North Philadelphia, the city’s poorest district, the poverty rate stood at about fifty-six per cent. In 2010, the median home price for a house in the area was ten thousand dollars.

I met Vicenta Delgado in the fall of 2011, while she was sitting on the curb waiting for the pantry on LeHigh Avenue to open. It was a chilly morning, and she was bundled up against the cold, her walker resting on the sidewalk beside her, wearing a dark headscarf over her bald head.

Delgado, a sixty-one-year-old immigrant from Puerto Rico, told me that she had been undergoing chemotherapy to treat a brain tumor. She also had diabetes and high blood pressure, and had suffered from depression ever since her oldest son was killed. The health problems had taken a financial toll on her: she paid a three-dollar co-pay each time she filled a prescription; Medicaid didn’t cover the nutritional supplement shakes that she needed because of her cancer, so she bought them herself; she had to pay a neighbor to drive her to the hospital for her treatments. And it was out of the question to stop paying her electricity bill: if her electricity got cut off, the machine that helped her breathe at night—she suffered from sleep apnea—wouldn’t work.