Half of Allegheny County's Black Population on Food Stamps

Allegheny County’s food stamp recipients are disproportionately Black and without transportation

At her home in East Pittsburgh, Frederica Phillips cooked a stir fry with carrots, cabbage and shrimp on a stove next to a wall with chipped paint and beneath a roof discolored by water damage. She spoke about the realities of Black life in Pittsburgh. When she was at the local corner store, Phillips saw someone steal a loaf of bread and peanut butter. She didn’t report him to the owner because she knew the person was hungry. 

“The fact of the matter is that there’s more Black people on it because we don’t have the advantages of a whole lot of white people,” Phillips said. 

For those who live in wealthier communities, Pittsburgh may be America’s most livable city. But within a few miles and a different zip code, food insecurity makes people think merely of how to survive on whatever food they can get and however they can obtain it. 

Phillips, a 52-year-old Black woman, belongs to a demographic group that is disproportionately represented within the food stamp program in Allegheny County. Figures from the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services, which administers the food stamp program, indicate that close to 69,000 Black people living here rely on government assistance to purchase groceries. The overall Black population is roughly 157,000, according to the most recent census. 

Food insecurity has many associated problems--lack of access to reliable transportation, insufficient salaries at their jobs and health issues that stem from a poor diet. The DHS statistics on the county’s food stamp program show many employers fail to pay their workers enough for them to get by. Taxpayers cover the rest of their living expenses.

The modern food stamp system originated in West Virginia when John Kennedy toured the state as part of his 1960 presidential campaign. The level of poverty stunned him and compelled him to create a program designed to alleviate hunger. After Kennedy’s assassination, his successor Lyndon Baines Johnson passed the Food Stamp Act in 1964. The name of the program changed from food stamps to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, in 2008. 

Back then, the picture of poverty was a white hillbilly, but the reality of modern food insecurity is disproportionately represented by people of color. Allegheny County has more than 158,000 people on Food Stamps in total. The racial disparity is the most apparent statistic when looking at DHS figures. White people represent roughly the same number of SNAP recipients despite vastly outnumbering Black people here. 

The problem is concentrated in the Mon Valley, which includes Braddock, Duquesne, Downtown, East Pittsburgh, Charleroi, Homestead, Monessen, North Braddock, Rankin, Swissvale and Turtle Creek. Residents there languish in poor health and hunger. Things that white people take for granted--fresh bananas on the kitchen counter and a car to fill groceries with--are not a given for many Black people here. 

At the grocery store, Phillips filled her cart with ground beef, boneless chicken breasts and hot dogs as she shopped for groceries at the Giant Eagle in Braddock Hills. She goes twice a month when she gets her federal benefits. The grocery store was at its busiest, which is the beginning of every month when residents in the area get their SNAP payments. 

“Sometimes I’ll fall short and have to ask my mother for money, and she’ll send it to me,” Phillips said. “But the majority of time out I can stay in my budget.” 

Phillips thought the bleach at the Giant Eagle was expensive. So she rode in a car over to the local Family Dollar in Braddock. She passed Comet News, a blue brick building that has a jitney headquarters in the back. It’s there that she calls one of several drivers to transport her from her home to get food. The drivers want to be paid before the trip. 

“If you have cash on-site, there won’t be no fight,” Phillips said.

Automobile ownership is far lower in the Black community than it is in the white population. According to the National Equity Atlas, 14 percent of black households lack access to a car while six percent of white ones are without vehicles as of 2017. The lucky ones in poorer communities in Allegheny County have enough to take an Uber or Jitney ride to the grocery store. Others have to make multiple trips on foot or pay multiple fares on public transit. Gentrification has forced many Black people into new neighborhoods that have less access to public transportation. To get to various points in the city, a passenger from outlying areas first travels into the downtown area before catching a connecting bus. Sam Applefield, a project manager for the Pittsburgh Food Policy Council, advocates for lower fares because of this. 

“If you’re living in East Liberty and you’re right next to the busway, it’d be easy to get downtown,” Applefield said. “But if you get priced out and now you’re in Penn Hills, then suddenly your transportation costs are potentially a lot higher or it just takes a lot longer to make your trips.” 

Food delivery would be the seeming solution, but SNAP benefits don’t cover the cost of food deliveries from many grocery chains. Several services in the area, including 412 Food Rescue, have stepped in. Leah Lizarondo, the organization’s leader, described her company as the Doordash for those facing food insecurity. Owners of restaurants and other companies donate food that they deliver. 

“Equalizing convenience is something that we need to push through,” Lizarondo said. “And we’re starting with SNAP. It’s getting accepted online. Let’s push it all the way and make it convenient.” 

While Phillips was out in the community, overweight and obese people surrounded her. Though it seems paradoxical, obesity and food insecurity intertwine. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that Black people have the highest obesity rate of any ethnicity at 38 percent. It’s connected to the type of food Black people purchase at the grocery store. The inability to get healthy foods frustrates Phillips. If she bought the ingredients and meals that were good for her family, she wouldn’t have enough food to last before her next benefit payment. 

“I hate to say the reason people are sick the majority of time is because they can’t afford to eat healthy,” Phillips said. “They have to pick up what they can eat, what they can afford to eat.” 

Unhealthy eating brings other problems than heart disease, obesity and diabetes. For children who are part of households on food stamps, they have a harder time performing well academically, according to Ann Sanders, a public policy advocate at Just Harvest, which is an anti-hunger organization in Allegheny County. 

“Intervening with child hunger is incredibly important for the welfare of our community,” Sanders said. “It contributes to long-term problems like obesity. All of that impacts a person’s ability to work. If you’re sick, you can’t work. And so it has sort of a cycling impact.” 

Children can receive governmental support through the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), which provides federal grants to states for supplemental foods, health care referrals, and nutrition education for low-income pregnant, breastfeeding, and non-breastfeeding postpartum women, and to infants and children up to age five. Once the children reach that age, they get to have school lunches as part of the effort to alleviate hunger. 

Leaders of the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank have sought to improve access to healthier food in poorer neighborhoods through its Green Grocer program, which sends produce trucks to areas like McKees Rocks and the Hill District where fruit and vegetables aren’t sold in any nearby local market. The average transaction at their mobile food truck is around $9 to $10. They serve 20 markets twice a month. Twenty to 45 percent of their sales go to SNAP recipients, according to Jordan Bailey, who is the mobile markets coordinator. 

“We don’t think of ourselves as a solution,” Bailey said. “We think of ourselves more as a band-aid because we’re only in each community two hours a month. And every community deserves a lot more access than that all the time.” 

In Allegheny County, the average household income for those that receive SNAP assistance is around $1,200 a month, according to the DHS figures. On average, most households have to feed two children.

In Phillips's predominantly Black neighborhood, she estimates that nearly 30 to 40 residents on her street use food stamps. Many live in Section 8 housing as well. Academic studies show that a significant portion of food stamp recipients receives other forms of welfare. Phillips, who had worked as a nurse, collects disability payments after she injured herself from jumping from the second floor of her home to escape a burglary more than a decade ago. 

But even when she worked, Phillips collected food stamps because she didn’t have enough to provide for her four children. 

“By the time I paid my rent and utility bills, it wasn’t enough,” she said. “And then my kids were in school, so I had to make sure they had clothes on their back and shoes.” 

People in her community tell her that they have to go to food pantries and distribution sites to get enough food to survive the month. 

“They’ll say they got three more meals in their freezer,” Phillips said. 

That’s for the ones that have a method of storing food. Phillips knows several people who don’t have a refrigerator. They travel to the store daily to find something to eat. 

There’s a stigma for many who look at food stamp recipients in the abstract or from a distance. Even in some of their communities, neighbors see lazy people abusing the situation. But Phillips knows it’s different. As a religious woman, she knows the fundamental truth. There but for the grace of God go I. 

“You get these people that are uppity thinking we’re stealing from the system and stuff,” Phillips said. “But they don’t realize that the majority of people that get food stamps...they work. So they’re putting money into the government too because they’re taking social security out of their checks, taxes and everything.

“So when people sit up there and say you’re beneath them because you’re on food stamps, the majority of the time they end up being on them because circumstances change from one minute to the next.” 

Cody McDevitt is the author of several books, including Banished from Johnstown: Racist Backlash in Pennsylvania, which received a bronze medal in the most recent IPPY Awards. He is an investigative journalist based in Pittsburgh.