One in 10 Travis County Residents Are Food Insecure. Public Transit Is Part of the Problem.

Central Texas Food Bank folks at work (photo by John Anderson)

Food insecurity is rising sharply in Travis County, with the number of Austin area residents who struggle to afford food expected to continue rising in the coming years absent interventions from both local and federal governments.

“Whenever you have high areas of wealth in metropolitan areas, you also have great areas of need – and Travis County is no different,” said Sari Vatske, the president and CEO of the Central Texas Food Bank. “So we’ve seen an unprecedented amount of food insecurity, with the highest rate since 2014 and the largest one-year increase since 2008.”

The numbers are striking: Texas has the second-highest rate of food insecurity in the country, and the Austin area is no exception to the statewide issue. According to a May report from Feeding America, roughly 187,000 people in Travis County were food insecure last year – a number which the Central Texas Food Bank estimates will increase to 208,000 people this year and includes one in five children. The food bank is currently projecting a further 14% increase in food insecurity over the three to five years.

In the face of those challenges, as well as challenges keeping food banks stocked amid rising food costs, the food bank last Wednesday launched a new partnership with the nonprofit Workforce Solutions Capital Area to provide wraparound services that Vatske says are designed to “address the root causes of food insecurity and poverty.”

At a conference at the Austin Area Research Organization in December, Workforce Solutions CEO Tamara Atkinson told Vatske that her organization was moving out of its building and was looking for a new home. Within just a few months, the two organizations were moving towards a deal to bring their services under the same roof at the food bank headquarters on Montopolis Drive in Southeast Austin. For the food bank, which has long sought to provide or facilitate the provision of wraparound services like culinary and warehouse training programs to its clients, connecting with an organization like Workforce Solutions made sense as a means of addressing food insecurity.

“If there’s one thing we know, it’s that needs don’t exist in isolation,” Vatske said. “Oftentimes, food insecurity is the result of a larger systemic breakdown.”

For Workforce Solutions, which is engaged in workforce development in the Austin area, the partnership makes sense as well: a number of the clients Workforce Solutions sees are also dealing with varying levels of food insecurity, and their being located in the same building as the food bank may make it significantly easier for their clients to access the services of both organizations.

“Food insecurity can be a significant barrier to finding a job, and access to food is one of the most frequently requested forms of support we receive at Workforce Solutions Capital Area,” Atkinson wrote in a statement provided to the Chronicle.

Vatske said a lot of factors play into rising food insecurity locally, including the elevated cost of living pushing people out of urban areas with reliable public transportation and nearby grocery stores.

“We even see it in Del Valle,” Vatske said. “Folks might have transportation, but there might be six-plus people living in the house – and so the person who needs the car to get to work is not the same person who does the grocery shopping. So there are just a lot of factors at play, and we don’t have an interconnected public transit system that can get people from Pflugerville or Round Rock or even further south, like from Kyle or Buda, to Austin where there are jobs.”

Even as inflation has made food more expensive, public transportation looms as a major issue. While Austin is set to expand its public transportation system significantly in the coming years, regional transportation network additions have been slower to materialize.

“Locally, we need to make sure that our local elected officials are looking at things like transportation and connecting areas and working with developers to make sure that they’re thinking about retail stores if they’re going to grow population in certain areas,” Vatske said.

To reverse the trend, the region will likely have to address a number of its most intractable issues. But it also needs help from the federal government. Vatske said it is critical that Congress pass a new Farm Bill that fully funds The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP) that provides commodities to food banks across the country, along with the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) programs. The House version of the bill introduced in the spring would cut roughly $30 billion from the program over the next decade, which could have a devastating effect on thousands of families in the state.

“If these numbers this year are an indication, particularly with the sunsetting of pandemic-level benefits and depending on what happens in the Farm Bill in terms of USDA funding food insecurity programs, we are continuing to anticipate an increase in food insecurity,” Vatske said.