City's Hunger Problem Worst In Brooklyn, Study Finds

BEDFORD-STUYVESANT, BROOKLYN — Brooklyn is the borough where the most people go hungry, according to a new report from a local nonprofit.

Food Bank for New York City analysts argue that a nationwide cut to SNAP benefits has aggravated the hunger problem in New York City, and in Brooklyn most of all, in a new report released in November.

The study found that 488,560 Brooklyn residents — or about one in five — are food-insecure (or without enough to eat) and that Brooklynites missed more than 87 million meals in 2015.

The high numbers of food-insecure people in Brooklyn were unmatched by any other borough: The Bronx, Queens and Manhattan each reported about 250,000 people while Staten Island reported 44,500.

In Brooklyn, seven neighborhoods reported up to 5,400,000 missed meals — the largest number of missed meals per neighborhood in the city — in 2015.

The meal gap topped 5 million in Bed-Stuy, Brownsville, Canarsie, Crown Heights, Ditmas Park, East New York and Flatbush, according to the study.

Food Bank New York City cited the November 2013 benefit cuts in SNAP — the federal program that supplements food costs for people with low incomes — as the root of the problem.

Cuts to New Yorkers’ SNAP benefits amount to about $770 million, as the average monthly SNAP benefit dropped $21 and food prices went up by 6 percent, analyists estimated.

The cuts to SNAP have placed increasing pressure on the city's soup kitchens and food pantries, the study found. More than half of pantries ran out of food in September and more than a third were forced to turn people away unfed.

Read the full report on the Food Bank New York City website here.

Photo by Aron Heller/Associated Press