It’s lunchtime at Alder Elementary in the east Portland suburb of Gresham, and even though it’s summer, the school’s gym-turned-cafeteria is packed with children. There are about 80 grade school kids sitting at benches munching away at sandwiches and fruit as about 20 parents look on. This food is free, and that’s important says Lena Fox, who oversees the meals’ distribution, because without this extra help many of these low-income kids might go hungry.
“We really worry in the summer about what kind of food is available because we know a lot of them (students) face hunger issues,” says Fox.
Fox coordinates the Schools Uniting Neighborhoods, or SUN, program for Alder. A joint effort between the Oregon Food Bank, Multnomah County, and Metropolitan Family Service, the poverty-abatement program expects to serve thousands of summers meals like this one at Alder and its other affiliated schools. Like Alder, many of these schools are not in Portland but in its suburbs. This, say experts, is poverty’s new landscape: America’s suburbs now have more people in poverty than its cities.
According to a recent Brookings Institution report (“Our Sinking Suburbs,” Street Roots, June 21), between 2000 and 2011 poverty grew in America’s suburbs by 64 percent, or roughly twice the rate it grew in the nation’s cities. During the same period, poverty nearly doubled in Portland and Vancouver area suburbs, outpacing the two cities which together saw poverty grow by 71 percent.
From housing to unemployment, the new landscape of poverty has many metrics. But hunger, in particular, draws some stark lines on Portland’s metro area map, clearly depicting poverty’s suburban migration.
“Are you guys hungry? Did you already eat?” Fox asks a mother clutching her young son. The woman looks reluctant to enter the noisy cafeteria. The coordinator assures the mother that it’s OK and that the food is free.
The mother looks skeptical. But Fox’s face is warm and disarming. After waiting in the doorway for a few minutes, she puts her ambivalence aside. She enters the cafeteria and grabs a tray for her son.
The food is free and not just for the children. Along with serving lunch, SUN also serves kids breakfast over the summer. During the school year, it provides qualifying students a meal before they head home. “We don’t want them to go home and not eat,” explains Fox. But Fox says the program isn’t just about helping kids. It’s also about helping families.
That’s why year-round SUN schools provide qualifying neighborhood families with a 3-to-5-day supply of food. This is done via eight metro-area schools that double as pantries. Alder is one of these. According to numbers provided by SUN Hunger Relief Coordinator Rick Freed, last year Alder alone gave out 45,000 meals through its pantry. And these meals were needed.
Alder is located in Gresham’s Rockwood neighborhood where above average rates of poverty and the number of kids on free and reduced meals; 95 percent of Alder students qualify for the program. It is by many accounts the most impoverished neighborhood in the Portland metro region and Multnomah County. But Rockwood isn’t so much an outlier as a poster child for poverty’s suburban shift.
SUN on the Map
Currently, SUN’s 68 schools are split roughly in half between Portland Public Schools, the Portland’s central school district, and the outlying districts. But hunger’s suburban presence really pops on the map when looking at SUN pantries.
Six of SUN’s eight pantries are within Portland city limits with the remaining two in Gresham. However, five of those six Portland pantries are located in east Portland in the once expanding strips malls and track homes that made up the city’s post-war suburbs. Many of these burbs have since been incorporated by Portland. But incorporation hasn’t kept these former suburbs — now known as East Portland — from experiencing the same problems seen in actual suburbs like Gresham.
Roughly 46 percent of Portland Public School’s 47,523 students qualified for free and reduced meals in 2012. In Park Rose and David Douglas school districts, both of which serve East Portland, the numbers get higher.
The most recent numbers for Park Rose have the district’s enrollment at 3,744 students; 2,697 of these kids qualify for free and reduced meals.
The hunger trend continues in Gresham and neighboring Fairview, Wood Village, and Troutdale. In the Reynolds school district, which serves these communities, 76 percent of its students qualify for free and reduced meals. South in the Centennial school district, which also serves Portland, that number is 69 percent. Five of the district’s seven elementary schools have rates in the 80s. Further east in Gresham-Barlow, the district average drops to 55 percent.
So how should a suburb respond? The sad answer is it might not be able to.
Gresham’s Response
“With issues surrounding poverty and homelessness in Gresham, we can’t keep up,” says Gresham City Councilor Mario Palermo.
Councilor Palmero is a benefits coordinator for the Oregon Department of Human Services. Being a Gresham councilor, he explains, isn’t a full-time paid gig like being a Portland city commissioner. It’s volunteer work, he says, which is why he’s kept his day job. Palmero also lives in Rockwood and has seen first hand the poverty there. In fact, he’s one of three Gresham city councilors who live in the notoriously impoverished neighborhood. He says small city governments like Gresham just can’t muster the same resources that larger cities like Portland can. They also don’t have the infrastructure to do so, which is why, he says, Gresham relies heavily on nonprofits to administer services to those in need.
According to numbers provided by City of Gresham spokeswoman Laura Shepard, in 2013, Gresham gave area nonprofits $834,041 in federal money as part of its community revitalization program. This included money for job training and $83,068 to groups helping with rental assistance, and transitional and affordable housing.
Gresham gave no money to hunger relief efforts, according to Shepard.
Palmero says there’s still a lot more that needs to be done. In particular, he says there’s not enough affordable housing in Gresham. But according to some it’s the concentration of low rent and affordable housing in Gresham and East Portland that’s driving much of the current need in the area.
Affordable Housing’s Suburban Drift
“People came because there was low rent,” says Human Solutions Executive Director Jean DeMaster about the rise in low-income residents in East Portland and Gresham.
DeMaster’s organization finds affordable housing for those in need through a mix of facilities it runs and landlords it works with. She says the reason you see the kind of hunger in places like Rockwood is because of the sheer volume of affordable housing available there.
“Historically there was a large amount of multi-family housing that was not kept in good repair,” she says about the region. “So it went down in quality. That made rents go down. So when there was gentrification in northeast Portland, families looked around and said, ‘Where is there low rent?’” Many moved to East Portland and Rockwood.
Human Solutions has also moved into the area. Of the organization’s 675 apartment units, 350 are in East Portland. The rest are in East Multnomah County, including Gresham and Fairview. A look at how the group’s Section 8 housing has been distributed shows a similar pattern. DeMaster says at least 100 Section 8 vouchers it helps distribute are currently in Rockwood, 45 are in Fairview, and another 100 are in East Portland between 82nd and 162nd Ave.
And it’s not just Human Solutions. Home Forward, Portland’s housing bureau, which also serves Gresham, has also been slowly moving its Section 8 housing eastward into East Portland and Gresham.
Without blaming any one organization or factor, DeMaster says this influx, and the poor economy, has placed increasing pressure on available services. Providers say it shows. Again hunger is our guide.
The View From SnowCap
“You can see the higher part is where the building will be,” says Judy Alley, pointing to a recently poured concrete foundation in front of her.
Alley is the executive director of SnowCap Community Charities, a nonprofit food pantry in Rockwood. The foundation, says Alley, is part of a new expansion that she hopes will help SnowCap serve more people.
Currently, Alley’s organization serves about 8,000 low-income Gresham-area people a month. But, Alley says, due to a combination of high demand and a cramped warehouse, the pantry has had to turn away food shipments. The new construction is an attempt to solve that problem.
The foundation and the warehouse it will support will give SnowCap an extra 2,000 square feet of storage. Alley says the need for more space first became apparent five years ago when the economy plummeted and unemployment skyrocketed. As a consequence, demand for SnowCap food also grew.
“2008 was very scary,” says Alley. “We started seeing more people. We were serving about 4,000 people a month and that was all we could do. But the people were lining up.”
To compensate for the increased demand, Alley says she reached out to find new sources of food and funding. But adding more food quickly filled up the pantry’s tiny warehouse. They had to expand.
Along with laying the groundwork for more space, SnowCap also started a community garden. Today it’s a sprawling cornucopia of raised beds filled with zucchini, squash, broccoli, kale, chard, and other sumptuous vegetables tended by about 40 gardeners. Alley says despite efforts like these and talk about the recession being over, she doesn’t see hunger in Gresham diminishing.
“The fact is Rockwood has changed the demographic,” she says. “This is hardcore systemic poverty happening in a small town. And Gresham is a small town.”
Back to School
Back at Alder, lunchtime is over. Fox is at the front of the gym. Nearly all the 80 kids are sitting attentively, listening to her as she reads off the results of a raffle. At the back of the room, a group of five mothers sit talking at the cafeteria’s furthest table. They’re Latino immigrants and spoke with Street Roots with help from Jessenia Jimenez, a 22-year-old volunteer fluent in Spanish and English.
“My apartment is too much of a problem,” says one woman, adding that her landlord has yet to fix her leaking roof. These low-income women say they don’t have cars and have to endure long bus rides to get groceries. They say violence is huge in Rockwood.
The mother who was reluctant to enter the school is now among them, her child in her arms. She says rape is a big problem in Rockwood. She doesn’t feel safe. She says the police aren’t helpful.
Another woman, 29-year-old Eva Morales Vasquez, her three kids huddled around her, says, “There are good things about the community too. There are clinics that don’t charge a lot. And there are places where you can get (free) food.”
Editor’s note: This is the second in our periodic series on suburban poverty. According to a new study by The Brookings Institute, the rate of poverty in the Portland-area suburbs rose 99 percent since 2000. Find the first article here.