Hunger Capital of America: 10 Cities Where an Appalling Number of Americans Don't Have Enough Food

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/hunger-capital-america-10-cities-where-appalling-number-americans-dont-have-enough

1. Memphis

In 2010, a study by the Food Research Action Center declared Memphis to be the hunger capital of the U.S. and found that 26% of its residents had suffered from food insecurity at some point during the previous 12 months. And four years later, Memphis had the worst hunger problem of the 25 cities examined in the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ new report: 46% of the requests for emergency food assistance in Tennessee’s largest city—almost half—were being unmet. Food pantries in Memphis are overwhelmed with requests, and according to the report, they are having a hard time “securing funds to purchase the food needed to meet the need.” Unemployment, low wages and poverty were cited as the main causes of hunger in Memphis, where the official unemployment rate is 7.5% and 26.2% of its residents are living below the poverty line. And the Conference of Mayors noted that in 2015, “city officials expect requests for food assistance to increase moderately and resources to provide food assistance to decrease moderately.”

2. San Antonio

In the Conference of Mayors’ report, there is both good news and bad news where San Antonio is concerned. The good news is that requests for emergency food assistance in San Antonio have “decreased over the past year by 18%.” But the bad news is that 38% of the requests for emergency food assistance are still going unmet in that Texas city, where the Conference said that the number of homeless families “increased by 19 percent” over the past year. For 2015, city officials expect a “moderate” increase in food requests combined with a “moderate” decrease in the resources to meet them—and almost half of the San Antonio residents facing food insecurity next year are likely to be the working poor. The Conference found that 46% of the people requesting emergency food assistance there were employed.

3. San Francisco

San Francisco has long been one of the most expensive cities in the U.S. Extreme gentrification in the Northern California city has gone from bad to worse in recent years, making it even more difficult to stay afloat without at least an upper middle class income. And the U.S. Conference of Mayors reported that of the 25 cities analyzed, San Francisco is among the worst for hunger: 37% of the requests for emergency food assistance in San Francisco went unmet in the last year (compared to 15% in Denver or 10% in Charlotte, NC). Nonetheless, food pantries in the Bay Area are working hard to meet the heavy demand for food assistance: the Mayors Conference reported that the San Francisco/Marin Food Bank Pantry Program feeds, on average, 30,000 households every week and distributed an impressive 30 million pounds of food through its pantry network in 2013. And it also fights hunger in San Francisco with an aggressive food stamp outreach that includes special “SNAP in a day” events in which the poor can receive EBT cards the same day they apply for them. But in a city with such a high cost of living, the San Francisco/Marin Food Bank Pantry Program needs a lot more funding. And the Conference of Mayors predicts that in 2015, the need for emergency food assistance in San Francisco “will increase substantially”

while funding for the city’s anti-hunger programs “will decrease substantially.”

4. Washington, DC

The U.S. capitol is a city with glaring income inequality: houses that sell for half a million dollars and up are the norm in many parts of town, yet 18.5% of Washington, DC’s population lives below the poverty line. Officials in DC, according to Conference of Mayors, estimate that requests for emergency food assistance “increased by 56 percent over the past year”—and 30% of those requests (almost one-third) went unmet. The three top reasons cited for hunger in Washington, DC were poverty, high housing costs and high health care costs. In other words, the high cost of living is contributing to food insecurity in the nation’s capitol. And the problem is likely to worsen in 2015: DC city officials, according to the Conference, “expect requests for food assistance to increase moderately and resources to provide food assistance to decrease moderately.” The report also pointed out the link between poverty and a poor diet, noting that “the Washington metro area is seeing growing numbers of low-income individuals suffering from diet-related illnesses such as diabetes and hypertension.”

[Trillo]

1. The property values seem really useful to bankers.

Loan folks money to buy an unaffordable house of hundreds of thousands of dollars, high rents are related to this, then when they can't pay, buy it back for 100 dollars at auction. It's the ultimate buy low sell high scam.

So you go to school to try to get your future career going, and learn you have to live in the city to have such a job. So you do that, and when done and living that dream, you can't pay back your student loans because the cost of living there is so high. No matter how much you earn, the cost of living means disposable income stays low.

There is a huge inefficiency here in the economic system, it is failing to serve people that need places to live. Capitalism always likes to talk about how efficient it is.

It is an efficient money transfer system to the few. Poverty for many is the clear result, so it's inefficient for them. There's got to be a better way of life.

[LiberalLoner]

2. +1