Business

Charities suffering

Hunger and homelessness are escalating in the New York area as the middle class feels the economic noose tighten at the end of the Great Recession.

Local charities, more familiar with financial hardship among lower-income groups, are stretched, as donations decline, caseloads increase, and even some once comfortable donors slip into the growing ranks of the down and out.

Monsignor Kevin Sullivan, executive director of Catholic Charities in the Diocese of New York, says the level of personal economic distress today in New York is the worst he’s seen in the recent past.

“It is more extensive and more pervasive, and it is going on for a longer period time,” he told The Post. “Now, one of the things is that some of those same people who were helping us in the past, donating, volunteering, are now looking for help themselves. ‘Gee, can you give me some food to get me through until the end of the month.'”

The statistics are not encouraging.

Even as the economy officially climbed out of recession this past summer, financial hardship among families and individuals appears more pervasive than ever before.

And US Census data show little movement in the numbers of New Yorkers, 18.7 percent, who live below the poverty line, $17,600 for a family of three. Brooklyn led in the poverty tables, with some 554,186 residents officially classified as poor in 2009.

The New York City unemployment rate of 9.3 percent, though below the national rate of 9.8 percent, still remains elevated in a city gripped by long-term joblessness, staggering levels of personal debt, massive foreclosures, and a high cost of living.

“The economic recovery simply hasn’t been reflected in lines at emergency feeding programs,” says Jilly Stephens, executive director at City Harvest, a local charity that currently feeds more than 300,000 hungry New Yorkers each week.

Msgr. Sullivan estimates a 15 percent to 20 percent increase in demand for food assistance from Catholic Charities in New York in the past 18 months.

Local agencies serving the hungry reported 2.7 million visits in the last quarter of this year compared with 2.6 million in the same period of 2009, according to a study by City Harvest.

Among the findings of City Harvest is that visits to the Riverwatch food pantry in Melrose in The Bronx shot up 141 percent in the third quarter of this year, compared with the same period in 2009.

People were arriving from everywhere, hitching rides from other boroughs. There were 1,960 reported visits by seniors to the meal program, in the last quarter, compared with 1,165 visits in the same period last year.

Catholic Charities of New York says fear of homelessness has reached alarming proportions. “We are getting over 400 calls every week for the past year from people who are saying, ‘I don’t know if I can pay my rent, I lost my job, I can only pay my rent for another three months, what am I going to do?'” said Msgr. Sullivan. “That is really causing a great deal of consternation — and that number is up significantly on past years.”

“The fact is that, in many cases, we are now providing support to people more accustomed to giving to the Bishop’s Appeal than receiving from Catholic Charities,” said Joseph Duffy, president of Catholic Charities for the Diocese, in a recent letter urging support for local Bishop Arthur Serratelli’s annual fundraiser.

Standing next to a group of seniors lining up in the drizzle this past week on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to collect free turkeys for the holiday from City Harvest, Stephens listened as one woman talked about the irony in her own life. “She had once fundraised for City Harvest, she used to run food drives for us in her office,” Stephens said.