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Bay Area residents have never sought more help getting food.
As millions of Californians lost their jobs due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of people receiving help from food banks has doubled across the seven-county Bay Area from pre-pandemic levels. Local food banks now serve more than 1 million people per month — one in seven Bay Area residents.
“If there’s ever been a time in our 35 years to use the word ‘unprecedented,’ this is it,” said Michael Altfest, director of community engagement and marketing for the Alameda County Community Food Bank.
Food banks have arguably never been more vital. But their response has come at a cost, and organizers are trying to figure out how they can sustain it. Second Harvest of Silicon Valley, the region’s largest food bank, is serving half a million people each month, the most of any single food distributor in the history of the Bay Area, according to Leslie Bacho, the food bank’s chief executive officer.
“We know we’re headed into a big recession, and it’s not going to get better for people for a long time,” said Bacho, who expects the organization will have to find a way to keep nourishing some 500,000 people for up to a year and a half, a task that thus far has required the help of 150 members of California’s National Guard.
When Bay Area counties and California became the first in the nation to impose shelter-in-place orders, food banks decreased warehouse staff and increased requests for food supplies. Organizers sent volunteers out to help transform golf courts, schools and church parking lots into drive-thrus where thousands of cars now line up for hours every day to wait for food. In Silicon Valley, an empty truck warehouse became additional freezer space for meat; in San Francisco, the Giants’ stadium parking lot hosts the city’s only drive-thru distribution center.
But with shelter-in-place orders easing up around the Bay Area, those makeshift drive-thrus, pantries and freezers soon will return to their former uses, and officials say they’re already rethinking solutions.
In Alameda, the food bank has to figure out how to sustain orders of about $2 million worth of food each month — almost three times what it used to serve. That includes a rising number of applications to CalFresh, the state’s nutrition assistance program.
Calls to food bank helplines have gone up tenfold. Volunteers report longer calls since so many are asking help for the first time. In Alameda and Silicon Valley, about half of the calls come from newcomers.
“In these drive-thrus, you’re seeing a lot of nicer cars. These are probably folks who, a month ago, thought they’d be able to make their car payments and now can’t,” said Bacho.
Before the coronavirus, one in five residents in Alameda County was at risk of hunger. In Silicon Valley, it was one in four. Specific data on Bay Area residents falling below the poverty line since the coronavirus outbreak has yet to be released, but pre-pandemic numbers showed that forty percent of households couldn’t withstand a small emergency.
With federal unemployment benefits coming to an end in July and moratoriums on evictions set to expire soon, organizers are not foreseeing a break.
Bay Area school districts have continued providing meals to children on school grounds, but many senior centers, community pantries and soup kitchens have stopped providing food for the needy, meaning food banks had to take over.
“This is what food banks are for. This is why we’re here. At our core we are an emergency response service,” Altfest said.
This article is part of The California Divide, a collaboration among newsrooms examining income inequity and economic survival in California.
