With food to spare, disparity remains By Erica Blair
W
hile growing up in northeast Iowa, food was never a concern for Susan Anderson: Her family ate T-bone steaks each week, the refrigerator overflowed with food and two deep freezers were regularly stocked. And throughout her 20s, when she lived and worked in Tokyo as a part-time English teacher making $40,000 a year, Anderson often dined in restaurants. “We had all we could eat and more,” she said. Today, however, food is not so abundant for the 55-year-old single mother of two. Since moving to Iowa City in 1993, Anderson, whose name was changed for this article, has held retail, day care and service industry jobs. Now disabled for orthopedic and anxiety disorders, she’s been out of work for several years. Yet throughout her entire motherhood, even as a full-time employee, she has needed help accessing enough food for her family. At school, her sons have always qualified for free and reduced lunch. And to provide meals at home, Anderson makes weekly visits to the Crisis Center Food Bank, in addition to purchasing groceries with her recently reduced $35 in monthly SNAP benefits—enough for roughly one trip to the store. But with no car for the past eight years, she buys only what she can carry on the bus, making it difficult to stock up. University of Iowa students. Though commonly assumed otherwise, many students receive no Defining the breadth financial backing from their parents, and now of the issue more than ever, they face the harrowing odds of Susan Anderson is, according to a 2012 finding a well-paying job to pay off loans postreport by Feeding America, one of 18,640 graduation. And because they have access to Johnson County residents facing food insecurity, loans, students don’t qualify for some of the same which the U.S. Department of Agriculture programs as other low-income individuals. “Students are making a choice,” Benson defines as the “lack of access, at times, to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household Witry said. “Do I go further into debt so that members and limited or uncertain availability of I can feed myself ? Or do I reach out and try to nutritionally adequate foods.” About 14 percent get services?” of Johnson County residents are food insecure— one of the highest rates in the state of Iowa— Why is food access a problem and 40 percent of them don’t receive government in Johnson County? food assistance. The Crisis Center of Johnson County Food Compounding the food insecurity problem Bank is seeing even more visits than ever, says is Iowa City’s distinctly high cost of living, which Food Bank and Emergency Assistance Director directly affects how much people can spend Sarah Benson Witry, with 12,778 individuals at the store. About half of Iowa City residents served in 2014. She adds that households now are renters, and according to a 2013 report by rely on the pantry for more of their food than the University of Iowa Public Policy Center, in the past, a lingering symptom of the 2008 63.5 percent of them are cost burdened, which recession when high-paying jobs were exchanged means more than 30 percent of their income goes for low-wage work without benefits. toward housing. On average, families visit 10 times per year, but This is the highest rate in the state of the range of needs varies widely, Benson Witry said: Iowa. For a single mother to afford a twoAccording to her, roughly 20 percent of families bedroom apartment—with a fair market rate of visit only once during an unexpected emergency, $853 per month—she would need to work 2.3 while about 1 percent of families visit nearly every minimum wage jobs, or 92 hours each week. week to obtain their sole source of food. When Little Village spoke with Mark Patton, “We’re having to do a lot of purchasing Executive Director of the Iowa Valley Habitat from the retail system because people’s needs for Humanity, in September 2014, he noted are too great,” Benson Witry said. Last year, the that with an unhealthy vacancy rate of 0.5 food bank spent $74,000 on about 25 percent of percent (a healthy vacancy rate hovers around its supply in order to cover what corporate and 5 percent) little competition exists between individual donations could not. landlords, keeping rental prices high in Iowa Adding to Johnson County’s large food- City. According to Crissy Canganelli, executive insecure population, Benson Witry says, are director of The Shelter House, the vacancy rate is 16 | BREAD & BUTTER 2015
so low because Iowa City’s rental market caters to university students. “It makes it that much more difficult for folks who are living in poverty and have no other resources, who are trying to live on service sector and minimum wage jobs,” she said. While zoning regulations and the cost of land are barriers to increasing the amount of affordable housing in Iowa City, it really comes down to a lack of political will to address this deficit, she said. But there’s yet another issue when it comes to affordable housing: physical access to food. Looking at census tracts, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Access Research Atlas identifies two large urban regions in Johnson County that it classifies as food deserts, meaning low-income areas where a third of residents live a mile or more from a supermarket. In Coralville and Iowa City, the food desert to the west is bordered by Interstate 80 and Highway 1, and the food desert to the east slopes south along Highway 6 in what is often referred to as the Southeast Side. The clustering of low-rent apartments in these regions away from affordable grocery stores means that low-income residents must choose between spending more of their budget on transportation or shopping for food at nearby gas stations with limited selections. Some people also seek affordable housing in isolated mobile home courts or even outside city limits, Benson Witry said, which further limits their physical access to food.
What are current area initiatives? Coupled with access to affordable housing is access to land. Fred Meyer of Backyard Abundance, a local organization that helps people turn their grass lawns into productive and food-producing ecosystems, says that this is the greatest barrier for renters growing their own food. If there’s any land on the property, renters would need to ask permission from landlords to use it, and if that doesn’t work, they would need to buy community garden plots, which are often inconveniently located and require transportation. “But even if they have all those things, we model our gardens after our industrialized agriculture system, which requires incredible amounts of energy to keep going,” Meyer said, “so you have to make frequent trips out there.”