A new wave of food stamp applicants washes across Oregon
by David Sarasohn, The Oregonian
Sunday March 15, 2009
Kathryn Phillips has never asked for assistance before.
But a few months ago, her husband's job went away; he was a systems installer for a company that did a lot of work for the now-departed Circuit City.
So with her maternity leave still having a couple of months to go, and after cashing out all her vacation time, she brought her 2-month-old son down to the state office here to try to get her family of five some help.
"It's a matter of time," she explains matter-of-factly, her eyes switching between the official activity on the other side of the counter and the sleeping bundle at her feet, "and we've kind of run out of time."
She's part of a massive wave of new recession-era applicants sweeping into Department of Human Services offices around the state --many of whom have never seen the inside of those buildings before. In February, food stamp demand around the state increased 21 percent over February 2008, and in some areas the numbers teeter even higher.
Demand in the Bend area, which has led the state in increases for each of the past 14 months, rose 34.2 percent over the past year, and in the suburban counties of Washington and Clackamas, the increase topped 25 percent. Jefferson County (Madras) has just become the first Oregon county ever where almost a quarter of the population is receiving food stamps.
Food stamps have been a constantly criticized --and by certain political groups, targeted --program. But they have been a first line of defense against American hunger, and in a time when need is soaring almost beyond recognition, they're a bulwark that will need strengthening.
The federal government pays for food stamps, including a huge chunk in last month's stimulus bill, reflecting the program's particular power to pump money into the economy almost immediately. But the state's resources to administer the program are quivering in the new economic storm.
"We have declared an emergency," says Bruce Goldberg, the state's Human Services director, redirecting staff from other duties to process food stamp applications, sending workers from around the state to shore up the Bend office, and moving to quicken the procedures. When the lobby here fills up, staff members drop other duties to run what they call an intake blitz.
"My question is, how long does that strategy hold up in the face of that growth?" warns Goldberg. "If it gets to 30, 40, 50 percent, the process won't hold."
It's the identity of the new applicants, as much as their exploding numbers, that redraws the world of hunger as we've known it.
"Just within the last six months, I've seen some clients come in who used to be in the six-figure range," says Candy Mills, a line manager at the North Clackamas office. "You tell them they qualify for nothing, or maybe $24 a month, and they say, 'What's the point?' "
People who have always heard about, and maybe believed, the excesses of the food stamp life can be startled to come face-to-face with the numbers.
A couple who are both collecting unemployment generally have too much income to qualify. As Mills points out, the details of a suddenly downsized existence --mortgage payments, Visa debts and car insurance bills --don't affect the formula.
As one applicant complained last week, finding that with her unemployment and child support she qualified for $14 in food stamps in a month, "When you're trying to pay your PGE bill on unemployment, it's ridiculous."
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Staff members are generally confident in the truth of the information applicants provide; in fact, says Hunter, "They do tell us sometimes things we don't want to know."
It's a world of rules you might not imagine until you find yourself in the middle of them. If your parents pay your rent, that doesn't count as income; if they give you the money to pay your rent, it does, and will affect any benefits.
Kathryn Phillips wasn't at the six-figure level and hasn't sold blood plasma. But she's done everything the financial advisers say to do, including getting stock in her company --which has now reached a level, she says wryly, where if she sold it she might have to give the company money.
Now, the for-rent signs are speckling her neighborhood, and her family is out of income. She tried cutting her Internet connection to save money, but found that her 10-year-old needed it to do his homework, and it's another two months until she returns to her job.
"Once I'm working again, I won't need this assistance," she says. "I'm not here to get anything I don't need."
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Phillips qualifies, and in the new expedited system that now extends to about half the DHS offices, gets her card immediately. "It's cool that I get to walk out of here and go to the grocery store," she says, "because my bank account is zero."
It's cool in another sense that Phillips gets her card at 3:30 p.m. and is in the supermarket at 5:30. Hardly any federal program gets its money into the economy so quickly.
A study last year from Moody's Economy.com found that each dollar in food stamps generated $1.73 in economic activity, the highest payoff of any federal spending --which helped the program to a $20 billion place in last month's stimulus package.
There's another advantage, a calculation that's getting steadily more prominent in the design of all nutrition programs.
"It's hard when your income is so low to feed (your kids) healthy," Phillips says. "Peanut butter and jelly is a staple. We do a lot of spaghetti and hamburgers."
Or as DHS director Goldberg puts it, "A dollar buys you three days' worth of pasta, or one meal's worth of vegetables."
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The Women, Infants and Children's Nutrition program has already set a direction, with vouchers to be used at farmers markets and now specific coupons for fruits and vegetables.
He's also concerned about the program's limitations on assets, a particular stumbling block for some of its new clients.
"That's the problem with a lot of social service programs," Schrader says. "You basically have to spend yourself into poverty, meaning you might have trouble getting out of poverty. In times like these, especially in a program like food stamps, I don't want people to jump through too many hoops."
Over the last three decades, food stamps have been denounced on principle and cut back as part of welfare reform, and conservatives have repeatedly tried to roll them into block grants to the states, whose creativity would presumably let them do ever more with ever less.
Oregon's creativity consisted of outreach that signed more and more qualified Oregonians up for the federal program, giving it one of the highest participation rates of any state and making serious progress against hunger for the first half of this decade.
Now, says Mark Edwards, an Oregon State University sociology professor studying hunger, "We seem to have pulled that lever as far as we can pull it."
But the demand still rises, as the first wall against hunger tries to hold throughout the state. To see us through the next years, the food stamp program will need more support and creativity, new strategies and even new targets.
The new applicants to the program, finding something considerably different from urban legend, are getting what Edwards calls "a crash course in policy."
A new wave of food stamp applicants washes across Oregon OregonLive.com
