More than 47,000 Staten Islanders now get ‘food stamp’ help, By Deborah Young, October 7, 2012, Staten Island Advance: “They are becoming ever more familiar at Staten Island supermarket check-out aisles – those white and blue EBT cards, slipped quietly out of the wallet when it’s time to pay. One in 10 Islanders received the government benefit commonly known as food stamps as of June 2012, according to the most recent statistics from the Human Resources Administration — the city department that oversees the federal program meant to keep Americans out of hunger’s grip. The 47,131 Islanders who got help paying for groceries (but no other form of assistance) represented a quadrupling since June, 2000, when 10,263 Islanders received the benefit. The use of food stamps — a monthly allocation of funds for groceries, available only to citizens or legal residents of the country who have lived here five years or longer — has increased far more sharply in the borough than across the city and the nation, where the number of recipients is also on the rise…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty