These days, it feels like the price of everything is going up, and working families’ salaries just aren’t keeping pace. New Yorkers are finding it harder to pay the rent and fill the car with gas, and many are even struggling to put food on the table.

The food stamp program is designed to help those people. Over 1.1 million New Yorkers currently receive food stamps, bringing back $1.5 billion in federal funding to our local economy. Increasingly, these are working people, not welfare recipients, whose income from low-wage jobs or disability benefits simply isn’t enough to feed their families with the increased cost of living.

Over the last 40 years, food stamps have proven to be one of the most effective tools available to government in the fight against poverty, serving 26.5 million people nationwide last year. Almost entirely financed by the federal government, the program was created in 1964 to share our nation’s great abundance with those in greatest need, enabling low-income Americans to buy nutritious food while boosting local economies with federal dollars. When President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Food Stamp Act, he said it brought together “the best of the humanitarian instincts of the American people with the best of the free enterprise system.”

Nearly two million New Yorkers are potentially eligible for food stamps based on their income, but only 1.1 million people participate in the program. That puts New York far behind cities that have higher participation rates, like Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Detroit, and Memphis.

While New York City has taken some steps to streamline the food stamp application—for example, reducing the length of the food stamp application from 16 to four pages—inefficiencies and red tape remain, and all too often create impenetrable barriers that prevent hungry New Yorkers from getting what they need when they need it.
Take the story of one Queens resident, a 29-year-old single mother of two.
A full-time student, she did not have enough money to feed herself and her kids. She decided to apply for food stamps to help her family get by, so that she could provide her kids a home-cooked meal without having to rely on her mother and siblings.
After taking three trips to a food stamp office over two months, and waiting almost eight hours in total, the mother was still waiting three months later to find out whether she’d even be eligible for food stamps. She was certain that when the answer finally came, she would find a full-time job and no longer qualify.

Stories like this should make every New Yorker angry. It is terrible that there are children in desperate need in our city who may go to bed hungry tonight. The fact that there are concrete steps we are failing to take to help them is unconscionable.

Using 21st-century technology and modern management techniques, other states and municipalities have taken steps to simplify and improve the food stamp application process. For example, in many places people can now apply for food stamps online, so they don’t have to wait in line. Madison County in upstate New York has been doing this for five years, with great success. In its first year alone, the number of people receiving food stamps increased more than 25 percent, thanks to the online applications. In West Virginia, where food stamp applications can also be submitted online, the enrollment rate is near 100 percent.

There’s no reason we can’t do as well here in New York. In fact, allowing people to apply online is now city law, but has been implemented only as a limited pilot program. Food stamp applications should also be distributed at all our city’s food pantries, soup kitchens, and senior centers, and sent home with every child who qualifies for free school lunch. And every food stamp office should accommodate working New Yorkers by remaining open until 9 p.m. and by opening on weekends.

These steps are practical, cost-efficient, and will go a long way toward alleviating hunger and poverty in our city. Cutting red tape from the food stamp program is a win-win proposition for everyone. Not only do food stamps help parents feed their kids and lessen New Yorkers’ reliance on emergency food programs, but studies show that New York City today is leaving as much as $1 billion in food stamp aid on the table—federal dollars that would boost our economy.

It is time that we, as a city, get down to basics and make sure that in a prosperous city and country like ours, truly no man, woman, or child among us goes without enough food to eat.

Please spread the word. If you know a family with children that earns approximately $25,000 per year, they may qualify for food stamps. Please let them know that food stamp information and applications are available by contacting the Human Resources Administration information line at 877-472-8411 or 311, or on New York City’s Web site, http://www.nyc.gov.

The author is chairman of the City Council’s Committee on Oversight and Investigations, and represents the neighborhoods of Woodside, Sunnyside, Long Island City, Astoria, and Maspeth in the Council.