Young and struggling: Why SNAP benefits are so important to Austin House – by David Sarasohn

May 3, 2016 – Austin House might seem like just the kind of person Congress had in mind when it toughened the food stamp requirements in 1996. He’s able-bodied, he’s single, he has no children and he even has a high school degree, so why can’t he just get a job?

Actually, Austin would like to know the answer to that, too.

There’s a macroeconomic answer, but as usual, macroeconomics aren’t that nourishing – especially when half a million to a million people like Austin face losing their food stamps this year.

That sound you hear is hundreds of thousands of stomachs rumbling.

Austin graduated from high school in Bend in 2010, in a recreation-dependent area hit particularly hard by the Great Recession. “I had the unfortunate timing of graduating when it was really bad,” he remembers, sitting in a supermarket coffee shop. “People were being let go, not hired.”

Still, he looked for a job for months and months, until his mother told him to try his luck in the larger economy of Portland. But that’s been hard, too, partly because the longer you’ve been unemployed, the harder it is to get a job – especially if you haven’t had experience.

“I’m in that gray zone,” says House, “because I haven’t had opportunities.”

Right now, while he looks, he’s living with his grandparents, a disabled aunt, two cousins and his mother – who moved up to Portland after losing her job in Bend. His contribution is to help with the heavy lifting and fixing things around the house, and $198 a month in food stamps, which he notes are usually gone by the first week or so or the month.

Those are the food stamps threatened by the three-month limit for able-bodied childless adults, one of those pieces of the 1996 welfare reform that were supposed to get fixed later, but somehow never did. For a while states managed to get waivers, but now that’s running out, and hundreds of thousands of Americans are approaching the edge.

These are not people who have been living high off the government, or people likely to be rescued by some other strand of the safety net. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a D.C. think tank, able-bodied food stamp clients working less than 20 hours a week have an average income at 17 percent of the poverty level, or around $2,000 a year. Most of them, including Austin, don’t qualify for unemployment compensation.

The CBPP, or anyone else, doesn’t know what will happen to them if they lose their food stamps, but is confident about one result: The impact will be felt quickly, and dramatically, at food pantries.

Meanwhile, Austin keeps trying to find work. He applies for whatever seems possible – motels, gas stations, supermarkets – and tries not to get discouraged that he usually never even hears back. He volunteers twice a week at the food bank, trying to do a wide range of jobs, both to be helpful and to try to develop some skills and experience. Right now, he doesn’t have the money to go to community college for some new credentials; he’s trying to learn some computer language from a Web site.

“I’ll be working whatever job I can get my hands on, so I don’t have to rely on others,” he says, twisting his coffee container. “If I don’t like it, I’ll put a smile on my face and do it anyway.”

Until then, that $198 is important.

“I have no job. I have no means of getting jobs for myself. I need the food stamps,” Austin says bleakly.

“If the government says I don’t need them, the government doesn’t know what its citizens need.”

Which could be a whole other problem.
Oregon Food Bank welcomes David Sarasohn as an occasional contributor on topical issues.