Postcard from America’s richest city, where hunger and poverty are mainstream

3 months ago 18

Opinion

November 13, 2025 — 12.00pm

On a cold autumn morning last week, a security guard outside a food bank in the New York neighbourhood of Harlem was dealing with a steady stream of people. A friend and I had come to this branch of the city’s largest hunger relief organisation, the Food Bank for NYC, to drop off donations our kids had collected for a school community service project.

Volunteers sort donated food items at a food bank in New York.

As we unpacked bags of soap, shampoo and toothbrushes, a woman with salt-and-pepper hair knocked on the window. “Can you help me?” she asked. “What exactly is being done for people who didn’t get their food stamps?”

During the federal government shutdown, 42 million Americans who rely on the country’s largest food assistance program have been living under a cloud of anxiety. The Trump administration has refused to fully fund the program, resulting in delays and uncertainty over whether recipients would receive benefits this month.

An end to the longest government shutdown in US history is now in sight, after the Senate passed legislation on Monday night (local time). But while politicians have spent the past six weeks arguing in the nation’s capital, here in New York, where 1.8 million residents rely on food stamps, lines for donated food have grown longer.

More than 350 people waited for groceries at the Food Bank for NYC’s Harlem branch last Thursday night, more than double the number from six weeks earlier, staff told me. More federal workers, some of whom have not been paid during the shutdown, have joined the queue.

Desperate stories of people struggling to put food on the table have made headlines in recent weeks, but hunger is nothing new in America’s richest city. New York might be home to Wall Street titans, luxury skyscrapers, designer boutiques and 384,500 millionaires, but one in four of its residents live in poverty, nearly double the national average, according to research published earlier this year by Columbia University and Robin Hood, an anti-poverty group.

“Monday through Sunday, we know that there are millions of New Yorkers facing food insecurity,” Sultana Ocasio, director of the Food Bank for NYC’s Harlem branch, told me. “That’s not new to us.”

You don’t need to visit a food bank to see people struggling. In this city, the gap between rich and poor seems to be everywhere you look. Each day, people beg for spare change outside pizza shops and cafes. Most nights, a man sleeps on the steps of the bank across the street from our apartment in Greenwich Village. Meanwhile, a short walk away, a store sells knitted sweaters for dogs worth $US50 ($76). You can buy your pet pooch a packet of Alaskan salmon chips while you’re there. You don’t have to be a bleeding heart to recognise there’s something seriously wrong when dogs seem to enjoy a better quality of life than some of this city’s human residents.

New York’s high cost of living and rising rents have long dominated local politics. Promises to address the affordability crisis, including a pledge to raise taxes on the wealthy and provide free buses and free childcare, were credited with helping Zohran Mamdani win the mayoral election last week.

But narrowing the wealth gap will be no easy task. The same week Mamdani was elected, more evidence emerged of the country’s growing income disparity. Oxfam published new research showing that the wealth of the 10 richest US billionaires surged $US698 billion ($1.07 trillion) in the past year, and warned that the Trump administration’s policies “risk driving inequality to new heights”.

“While the wealth of the working and middle classes has barely grown in more than 30 years, the gains at the very top – disproportionately wealthy white men – have been astronomical,” Oxfam said in its report.

You don’t need to look beyond the country’s seat of power for an example. While President Trump’s bank balance has long been the subject of speculation, the most recent estimate by Forbes puts his personal wealth at $US7.3 billion. He may have campaigned on a pledge to make America more affordable, but Trump now stands accused of abandoning its poorest citizens, many of whom helped return him to the White House. His administration waged a court battle to avoid having to pay food benefits to millions of Americans during the government shutdown.

In New York, the governor has announced that food benefits will begin flowing, despite the administration threatening to punish states that resume distributing federal funds. With winter fast approaching, help can’t come soon enough. It’s a time when almost 1 million households rely on federal government funding to help pay their heating bills, a time when more people ride the subway throughout the night to stay warm.

Staff at the food bank told me more people have been asking for socks as temperatures have dropped.

With Americans preparing for Thanksgiving later this month, will the hungry and the homeless in this country’s richest city have much to be thankful for?

Liz Gooch is an Australian journalist living and working in the US.

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