By Jemar Ryan Bather
I’ve heard quite frequently from children’s welfare and education non-profit organizations that many children from low-income households face hunger regularly and rely heavily on free and reduced school lunch programs in order to be fed a nutritious and wholesome meal. It is widely stated that, for these children, school lunch is often either their only or the most filling meal of the day. This is striking and worthy of further consideration and investigation.
With school out of session and summer in its place, I question how well children below the poverty line will eat until school reconvenes in the fall. This concern leads me to ask a few questions: what resources and programs are available for individuals, especially children, who are living in poverty to feed themselves? If resources do exist, how are they geographically distributed and are they widely accessible? These questions were studied through spatial analysis and addressed in a memo submitted for my Geographic Information Systems “GIS” course. The analysis studied the quantity of “feeding locations” in New York City. Feeding locations are defined as facilities and program sites that are owned, operated, funded, licensed or certified by a City, State, or Federal agency in the City of New York. Specific facilities and programs include food banks, soup kitchens, summer day camps, and other free-of- cost activities accessible to impoverished children.
The first step in the analysis was to determine what “accessibility” means and what it looks like. A feeding location was defined accessible if it was within a half-mile from an individual’s home residence – what we can also call “walking distance.” By creating half-mile radiuses around every summer feeding location in NYC, I was able to determine how many New Yorkers live within walking distance of a free or reduced summer meal program.
I used poverty data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey at the census tract level, to map where and how many children who are below the poverty line are located throughout the city. When this data is disaggregated at the census tract level, it determines the percentage of impoverished children that live within a half-mile of a summer feeding location. I compared this value to the total number of impoverished children in NYC to determine the percentage of the total who lived within walking distance of a food resource.
The results showed that New York City has over 300 feeding locations across all five boroughs. Figure 1 shows the percentages of children in poverty that live within a half-mile of a summer feeding location. There are 662,000 children under the poverty line in New York City with 653,000 of them living within walking distance of a summer feeding location; that’s approximately 91% of impoverished children in NYC. Assuming no other barriers, summer feeding locations are highly accessible to nearly all children in need for the city in aggregate. However, Staten Island appears to be an outlier in terms of accessibility, as only 65% of children in poverty live within walking distance to a feeding location.
Although it is widely suggested that children who are dependent on free and reduced lunch programs may struggle with meal supply outside of school, especially during the summer, the results of this study suggests that their struggle is not due to spatial or geographic barriers. Even when accounting for the possible bias in the analysis caused by assumptions, it is unlikely that they are substantial enough to draw the opposite conclusion. Feeding centers in New York City are abundant and geographically accessible to over 90% of children in poverty. These feeding locations create a plethora of options for low-income families to feed their children during the summer. It is important that the City of New York reconsider and sharpen its communications and marketing strategies to assure that information about these resources are being relayed to the individuals who need it most. Inadequate information about these locations will hinder the impact and efficiency they intend for. With proper knowledge-sharing and communications to promote these resources, less children will be hungry. This not only benefits those individual children and families, but it benefits all of society in its aggregate.