Stuck Outside the Poor Door

More than 88,000 people have applied to enter the “poor door” at a new luxury condominium tower on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Only one in 1,600 will win the lottery to live there. Some months ago a New York developer made headlines with the plans for this building, which takes advantage of zoning rules encouraging affordable housing by including some low-priced rental units along with the luxury condos for sale. A separate entrance for the people living in the low-income apartments continues with segregated living inside. Low-income tenants won’t be allowed to use the pool, gym, private theater, or any of the other amenities reserved for the wealthy owners. Critics immediately pounced on this design as a modern-day form of Jim Crow. But the need for affordable housing is so overwhelming that when the deadline came this month to participate in a lottery for the spots behind the “poor door” tens of thousands applied. Meanwhile, The New York Times reports that most of the 219 luxury condos on the other side of the building have sold, some for more than $25 million.

The contrast between the haves and have-nots might be especially stark at that New York building, but millions of families across the country are finding themselves on the wrong side of the poor door. Housing is the single largest expense for most families and for far too many is growing increasingly out of reach. The number of families with worst-case housing needs increased from 6 million in 2007 to 8.5 million in 2011, including 3.2 million families with children, and the number of homeless public school students was 85 percent higher in 2012-2013 than before the recession.

Watch Ayriq's Story

Ayriq Sims has been one of those students. He and his siblings spent their childhood bouncing between unstable living arrangements, extended stays at relatives’ homes, and homeless shelters. Even when Ayriq’s family had somewhere to stay, he remembers all the times their lights and water were turned off, or when he went hungry because he’d made his younger siblings something to eat but there wasn’t enough food left for him to eat too. Through it all Ayriq stayed committed to excelling in school and winning an academic scholarship to The Ohio State University. But even this year, his senior year in high school and on his way to college, he found himself homeless again. Ayriq says: “I don’t want to be homeless again. I don’t want that to be who I am.”

The Children’s Defense Fund honored Ayriq with a scholarship for overcoming tremendous odds. Homelessness and housing instability can have serious, negative consequences on children’s emotional, cognitive, and physical development, academic achievement, and success as adults. Federal rental assistance, including public housing and vouchers for private rentals, helps about 5 million of the neediest low-income households afford a place to live. But because of funding limitations only about 1 in 4 needy families with children receives assistance. To add insult to injury, the Republican House and Senate budgets are proposing severe cuts to already inadequate and desperately needed housing subsidies. The White House estimates that compared to the President’s budget proposal, the Republican House budget would cut housing vouchers for 133,000 families and housing assistance for 20,000 rural families. This is on top of the 2013 sequestration cuts that led to 100,000 fewer families receiving assistance by June 2014.
 
In our Children’s Defense Fund report Ending Child Poverty Now we asked the nonprofit Urban Institute to study the impact of expanding the housing voucher program to better meet the huge need among poor and near-poor families with children who would have to pay more than half of their income to afford a fair market rent apartment. The Urban Institute found that providing enough subsidies to serve eligible families would reduce child poverty by 20.8 percent and lift 2.3 million children out of poverty — the largest impact among the nine policy improvements we proposed in our report. More than 2.5 million more households would receive a subsidy, worth an average of $9,435. We could easily pay for this housing subsidy expansion by making fairer and common sense reforms to close corporate accounting tax loopholes, saving $58 billion a year. Or if we had more responsible and more just members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, instead of repealing the estate tax which amounts to a $27 billion a year giveaway to the 5,400 ultra-wealthy estates worth over $5.4 million — in the top two-tenths of 1 percent — as the Senate and House both voted to do, we could invest the $24 billion a year needed to ensure poor and near-poor children a chance to grow up in a stable place to call home.

Instead of making extraordinary students like Ayriq struggle to beat the odds every day we should be taking common sense and essential steps like this to change the odds. The stories about the tens of thousands of people seeking entry in New York’s “poor door” are an urgent reminder of the need for more affordable housing across our country. Cutting back on already inadequate help to those most in need to give more tax welfare subsidies to those least in need is not the answer and is profoundly unjust. Families should not have to win a lottery to live in segregation just to get a roof over their heads.

Thank God for Peanut Butter and Jelly Day

Kaylyn Sigman is a high school senior with big plans. A star soccer player from a poor rural Appalachian Ohio community who loves calculus and creative writing, she's college-bound this fall and dreams of becoming a middle school special education teacher. Kaylyn's overcome a lot to arrive where she is today. Her parents' relationship was rocky throughout her childhood, and they finally divorced when she was 10, leaving Kaylyn's mother alone to raise her, her younger sister, and her two younger brothers, who were adopted. Her mother, who suffers from seizures, worked as a labor and delivery nurse but is now on disability. Both brothers have special mental health needs, and Kaylyn, a bright student who skipped second grade and was reading at the ninth-grade level in third grade, has ADHD, all leading to an ongoing pile of medical appointments and bills. After her father left, Kaylyn's family struggled in poverty, moving seven times in four years, trying to find an affordable place to stay. Kaylyn's mother says that when they lost their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or food stamps) benefits last year, their family never would have survived the toughest times without PB and J Day, held once a week during the summer months at the children's school thanks to the local County Children's Services Agency. They'd come home with enough bread, peanut butter and jelly for each family member to have one sandwich for three meals a day until the next pickup.

Kaylyn is one of five inspiring high school seniors whom the Children's Defense Fund (Ohio) is honoring this month with a Beat the Odds^® award and college scholarship. But millions of other children continue to go hungry every day in our wealthy nation. Some aren't even lucky enough to be able to count on peanut butter sandwiches to get them through. What do those hungry families do?

SNAP helps feed 21 million children -- more than one in four children in our nation. SNAP prevents children and families from going hungry, improves overall health, and reduces poverty among families that benefit from it. The extra resources it provides lifted 2.1 million children out of poverty in 2013. It's the second most effective program for rescuing families from poverty, and the most effective program for rescuing families from deep poverty. SNAP doesn't just keep a child from going to school or bed hungry but has long-lasting effects. Research shows that children with access to food stamps are less likely to experience stunted growth, heart disease, and obesity by age 19 and are nearly 20-percent more likely to complete high school. And SNAP's positive effects extend beyond individual children and families to entire communities. During a recession, the impact of SNAP's economic growth is estimated to be from $1.73 to $1.79 for every dollar of benefits provided. In short, SNAP works. It's critical that SNAP be improved and expanded, not cut as proposed under the House and Senate Republican proposed budgets.

Although we know cuts to SNAP would mean millions of children might lose benefits and be more likely to go hungry and suffer the long-term negative impacts of hunger, and despite the fact that every major bipartisan budget commission has said that SNAP should not be cut, that's just what current Republican budget blueprints in the House and Senate are proposing. Worse, the House budget plan would block grant SNAP and cut its funding by $125 billion -- more than a third -- from 2021 to 2025. The Senate budget doesn't provide enough detail to tell exactly how SNAP would fare, but it cuts non-health entitlement programs serving low- and moderate-income people -- which includes SNAP -- by 24 percent.

SNAP benefits now average less than $1.40 a person a meal, and as critical as they are, they're not enough for many low-income families like Kaylyn's. In 2013, 54 percent of families receiving SNAP were still food-insecure, and overall one in nine children in our nation didn't have enough to eat. During the recession Congress recognized that SNAP benefits were too low for many and increased the value of the maximum benefit by 13.6 percent. The impact was powerful: Some 831,000 children were kept out of poverty in 2010 as a result of the change. But Congress ended that increase in November 2013. Further slashing SNAP benefits now will cause even more children to go hungry, push families deeper into poverty, and have negative repercussions for the entire nation.

There are many other choices. The Children's Defense Fund's recent Ending Child Poverty Now report shows that increasing SNAP benefits by 30 percent would decrease hunger for 12.6 million families with children, and that the added resources would lift 1.8 million children out of poverty, reducing child poverty by 16 percent. Families like Kaylyn's need more help, not less -- and it's not too late for our leaders on all sides of the political aisle to do the right thing. In a nation where millions of working families still can't earn enough to pay rent, pay the bills, and put food on the table at the same time -- and where in fiscal year 2013 there were 4.9 million households with no income but SNAP, including 1.3 million households with children -- relying on the charity of PB and J Day is not a substitute for justice. Tell these leaders seeking to make already hungry children hungrier that they should instead cut the $38 billion from the defense budget that the Pentagon did not ask for and restore the $269 billion in lost revenue from the repeal of the estate tax that only helps the wealthiest two tenths of the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans. It boggles my mind to try to understand such skewed moral values and lack of understanding that the real security of our nation is in the minds and bodies and education of our children.

Big Winners and Big Losers in the House and Senate Republican Budgets

"A budget is a moral document; it talks about where your values are." – Representative Rob Woodall (R-GA) discussing the House Budget Committee’s FY2016 Proposal

"There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children." — President Nelson Mandela

In the House and Senate budget proposals for fiscal year 2016, passed with only Republican votes at the end of March, there are big winners and big losers. The big winners are defense spending and contractors and very wealthy people and powerful special interests. The big losers are children, our poorest group in America, and struggling low- and middle-income families trying to stay afloat in our economy.

Very big winners: Defense spending and contractors. The House and Senate Republican budgets add $38 billion more in defense spending above the Pentagon’s request in fiscal year 2016. Instead of being up front and including it in the regular defense department budget, it was added to a catch-all war fund not subject to budget caps. This is a budget gimmick some conservatives have decried as deceptive and fiscally irresponsible. The $38 billion additional defense spending could provide 2.5 million subsidized jobs to poor families with children lifting 1.2 million children from poverty; and double the Head Start program, which serves only 40 percent of children who need it, for one year. The House Republican budget goes much further adding $387 billion in defense spending between 2017-2025. This amount could lift 60 percent of our children out of poverty for five years. 

Very big winners: Very wealthy people. People making more than $1 million a year would get a $50,000 average tax cut from the repeal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) in the House budget. The overall taxpayer loss would be more than $1 trillion in revenue over 10 years. The Senate budget includes a last-minute amendment to repeal the estate tax, which benefits only the wealthiest 0.2 percent of Americans with estates worth over $5.4 million for an individual or $10.9 million for a couple. An estimated 5,400 wealthy estates would save $2.5 million each with a taxpayer loss of $269 billion dollars between 2016-2025. This morally indefensible government giveaway for super rich people could provide housing subsidies for 10 years for 2.6 million poor and near-poor families with children struggling to find a place to live and reduce child poverty by 21 percent; or pay for the President’s $80 billion proposed investment for child care subsidies for all low-income children under 4 and $75 billion for quality preschool for low-income 4 year olds and extend through 2025 Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit improvements that keep 1 million children out of poverty. 

Very big losers: Vulnerable children and low- and middle- income families. Under the guise of balancing the budget and cutting the deficit, recklessly unjust massive cuts of more than $3 trillion over 10 years will undermine lifelines of stability and hope. The House and Senate Republican budgets will cut programs for those who need help most and increase government welfare for those who need help least.

Very big losers: The millions benefiting from health coverage under the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Both Republican budgets seek to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which prohibits discrimination against 129 million children and adults with pre-existing health conditions, helps over 5 million uninsured 18-26 year olds now covered under parental insurance plans, and extends coverage for some foster care youths to age 26. More than 10 million near poor adults in twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia will lose Medicaid coverage received under ACA. The House budget also proposes to block grant Medicaid, merge CHIP into it, and make deep cuts that will reverse the progress made in reducing the rate of uninsured children by almost half since the late 1990s. 

Very biggest losers: America’s future, dream and struggle to become a more just nation. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said at New York City’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 that “we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values . . . A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies . . . A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth . . . A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” A year later—and 46 years ago this week—Dr. King was assassinated. At his death he was urgently calling for a Poor People’s Campaign to end poverty in the world’s largest economy. How disappointed he would be to see us continue to take from the poor to give to the rich, the rising and huge wealth and income inequality gaps, the bloated military budgets and 45 million poor Americans including 14.7 million poor children in our midst. 

These Republican budgets do not meet the test of the gospels and the prophets or America’s professed commitment to being a fair nation. These morally repugnant budgets would move us backwards. I hope every American will break their silence and demand better fairer leadership from these leaders beginning with just treatment of the most vulnerable among us.

Let's Give Child Hunger a Summer Vacation

Many children and families eagerly look forward to the end of the school year and the carefree days of summer, playing outside in the warm sun, splashing and swimming in pools and at beaches, and gathering with family and friends for backyard barbeques. But for more than 17 million children the end of school can be the end of certainty about where and when their next meal will come. While 21.7 million children received free or reduced-price lunches during the 2013-2014 school year, only 2.6 million children—12.2 percent—participated in the Summer Food Service Program. This huge participation gap suggests that nearly nine out of 10 of the children who benefit from free or reduced-price lunches during the school year may not be receiving the nourishment necessary for proper physical, cognitive, and social development during the long summer months. Hunger has no vacation.


The good news is that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food and Nutrition Service operates the Summer Food Service Program that is administered by state agencies to serve these hungry children. Although the program is 100-percent federally financed and can create desperately needed summer jobs for cafeteria workers and others, there is still a severe shortage of school and community programs to serve all needy hungry children. And there are other barriers. Summer food programs sometimes tend to be available at odd hours and for short periods of time and in inconvenient places, making it challenging for children to get there, a problem exacerbated by lack of safe transportation to the sites.


Over the last few years, the USDA Food and Nutrition Service has been piloting innovative strategies in diverse communities across the country to help overcome many of these barriers. Some programs have had success using mobile vans to provide meals, which is especially helpful in rural communities. In other communities without sites, it has allowed the use of electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards—like those used for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC)—to transfer money to families so they can purchase extra food for their children in the summer. A 2012 evaluation of the Summer Electronic Benefits Transfer for Children demonstration found that a $60-a-month-per-child benefit reduced the percentage of children experiencing “very low food security,” the USDA’s most severe measure of food insecurity, by one third and helped reduce food insecurity in the household. Sites in Arizona, Kansas, and Ohio in 2011 and 2012 participated in a demonstration program, providing weekend and holiday meals in backpacks for children in the Summer Food Service Program when the program was not serving meals. These sites saw substantial increases not only in the number of meals served but also in average daily attendance rates.


Congress has a role to play in ensuring that countless children do not go hungry during the summer. The Summer Meals Act of 2015 (S. 613) was introduced by Sen, Kristen Gillibrand (D-New York) and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) both this year and last. Their bill would significantly expand summer nutrition programs by lowering the threshold for community eligibility from 50 percent to 40 percent of children in the area eligible for free or reduced price meals. Community eligibility reduces the administrative burden on sites and allows them to serve more children. The bill also simplifies the administration of the program for sponsors, provides funding for transportation grants, and allows sites to serve a third meal. The Stop Child Summer Hunger Act of 2014 (S.2366), introduced by Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington) and Rep. Susan Davis (D-California) (H.R. 5242) in the last Congress and expected to be reintroduced in the current Congress, would make permanent the successful EBT demonstration project piloted by the USDA, providing $150 EBT cards for families for the summer for each child eligible but without access to a summer food site.


There has been progress, but it must be increased so children do not suffer hunger. USDA data show that between July 2013 and July 2014, the number of children participating in the Summer Food Service Program increased by more than 220,000, and 11 million more meals were served to hungry children. Our friends at the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC) note in their annual report on summer meals that during this same time period, the number of sponsors and sites across the country also increased. However, while improvements have been made to reduce the participation gap, millions of children continue to go hungry during the summer months. I find it shocking that in 2012-2013, 4.9 million households, including 1.3 million with children, an increase from the previous year, had no cash income and depended only on food stamps (now called SNAP) to stave off hunger. I find it even more shocking that some Republican leaders are trying to cut SNAP when the need is so enormous. 


There is a role for all of us in getting food to children during the long food desert of summer months for millions of young children, and right now, we still have time to take action for the coming 2015 summer. I will begin by reaching out to U.S. Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan and asking him to contact school superintendents all across the country to ask them about steps they are taking to ensure that none of their children goes hungry during the long summer months, and to request a report back. I hope you will do the same with your local superintendent. Find out how you can help—or how at-risk children you know can fully participate in sites already planned for the summer.


Individuals and organizations in communities can help serve the meals, promote the program, provide transportation, volunteer at summer food sites, and help find sponsors. The USDA has a number of great resources to help sponsors and sites get up and running, including a “Summer Meals Toolkit” that provides information on sponsors, sites, links to state agencies, and much more. And if you know hungry children in your community, you can call 1-866-3-HUNGRY or 1-877-8-HAMBRE to find the nearest summer feeding site. Most importantly, if there are not enough summer feeding sites, ask why not. Urge your schools, congregations and other local programs to continue serving children during the summer months and take advantage of the opportunity to use federal dollars to do it. We are happy that this summer, the nearly 13,000 children at our Children’s Defense Fund Freedom Schools^® summer program sites in 28 states and the District of Columbia will get not only food for their bodies, some with support from the Summer Food Service Program, but food for their minds to stop summer learning loss. Let us work together to give hunger a summer vacation and help all children have a more joyful vacation.