Stuck At Home, Some Elderly NYers Are Struggling To Get Food During Coronavirus PAUSE

Stuart Lahn, 79, considers himself lucky. His home at the Coliseum Apartments on the Upper West Side comes with a two-acre garden where he’s able to pound out four to five miles on foot each day.

Lahn is also an active member at his neighborhood senior center, JASA Club 76, which used to serve congregate meals before it shut down last month. That’s when Lahn enrolled in an option for meal home delivery administered by the city’s Department for the Aging. The process has not gone smoothly.

“It's been a tearing-your-hair-out kind of thing,” Lahn explained. Since March 27th, on at least four occasions, he said he’s received text and phone alerts notifying him that a delivery of five meals would be arriving. No meals ever did, he said... until Tuesday afternoon, hours after an inquiry to the city from Gothamist/WNYC.

Up until that point, Lahn said it was one “false alarm” after another. “And there is no follow up communication that says, ‘sorry we couldn't deliver that day,’ or whatever. It's just repeated false alarms,” he added.

Still, Lahn said he’s getting by: his wife stocked up their apartment last month before the lockdown. They have a younger neighbor who checks with them before he shops for his own family. But he worries about the older members from his center, Holocaust survivors, people who live alone and those who rely on the city meals to survive.

The number of New Yorkers who are food insecure is increasing as unemployment soars in the city. Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Wednesday a $170 million initiative to combat hunger with a plan enlisting 11,000 TLC drivers to pick up food packed by Parks Department employees and deliver them to housebound New Yorkers.

Before the coronavirus pandemic reached the city, de Blasio said at a briefing Wednesday, there were already 1.2 million New Yorkers who didn’t have reliable access to food — a number that “very, very painfully included about one in every five children in this city,” he said. “This crisis is now adding to that number of people who are food insecure every day, because literally people are running out of money every single day. So, we expect it to grow.”

De Blasio said he expects 10 million meals to be served this month to New Yorkers through the city’s various food programs.

In mid-March, the mayor tapped his Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia to serve as the Food Czar responsible for ensuring the city’s food supply chain continued “without disruption” and to launch the GetFoodNYC program for emergency food deliveries. A million meals have been delivered so far, including to 6,000 households with at least one senior resident, according to Josh Goodman, spokesperson for Garcia.

A separate program to feed seniors who used to eat meals at congregate centers — people like Lahn — has delivered more than 300,000 meals to about 38,000 seniors in the city. The two programs are now merging under the GetFoodNYC umbrella, and with enrollment simplified through calling 311 or visiting nyc.gov/getfood.

But reports from communities around the city suggest senior citizens have not received meals on a consistent basis.

Gregory J. Morris, executive director of the Isaacs Center on the Upper East Side, which administers the Meals on Wheels program in the area, said the number of their senior clientele seeking food assistance has surged in the past month.

Before the shelter-in-place order, Morris said they were delivering Meals on Wheels meals to about 550 clients, and that number has jumped to 900 clients. The Isaacs Center’s senior center had typically served food to 100 to 150 seniors who came for congregate meals — now 407 seniors have told the center they are food insecure.

“We strategically started to wind down those services because we wanted seniors to be at home safe and isolated, but we were creating grab-and-go meals, meaning that we were cooking meals in our kitchen and then giving them to seniors, if they were capable of coming to the center to pick them up. That was ended at the end of March, through the Department for the Aging’s direction,” Morris said. “Essentially the Department for the Aging said ‘seniors are safer at home and we are going to centralize meal delivery.’”

“But we learned very quickly that there were seniors that we knew had expressed to us food insecurity or food needs that were not getting those meals. And then we spent the last week or two trying to get them on the meal delivery list. And they have still not received meals,” Morris said. “I don't know what seniors are getting (from the city). I just know I have seniors calling and saying, 'I don't have anything. Can you help me?’”

Absent any direction from the city, Morris and the Isaacs Center staff are still preparing meals and personally delivering them to their clients who have asked for help.

“So we're scrambling in some cases, potentially, to duplicate what the city is doing, because we don't know any better,” Morris said. “I don't feel compelled to wait for the city to try to get meals to those folks. And I'm doing the best I can.”

“One delivery a week of five meals isn't enough to take care of a senior to start with. That's not what you would want for your parents or your grandparents, right? So that concept from the city should have been a supplemental one to start with,” he added.

“No New Yorker should go hungry, and multiple agencies are working together to ensure we get food directly to as many people as possible. We recognize there have been growing pains in transitioning more meals to delivery, and the team lead by Food Czar Kathryn Garcia is stepping in to fill any gaps in service,” said Laura Freyer, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office.

The mayor acknowledged a failure at one building complex in Lower Manhattan last week, apologized for it and thanked the press for drawing attention to the situation at Independence Plaza. He also asked for anyone, journalists or others, to provide his team with names of any seniors not receiving the meals they expected, so Garcia and her team could address the issue.

“If there are individual instances, we need to know about them immediately,” the mayor said on Tuesday. That same day Gothamist/WNYC sent a list of 270 names, including Stuart Lahn, to the mayor’s team. The lists were compiled by City Councilmember Helen Rosenthal who said she's repeatedly sent City Hall names of seniors from her district’s centers on the Upper West Side. She said the current meal-delivery snafus were unacceptable.

“Imagine if this was your parent,” Rosenthal said. “We cannot confirm that seniors are getting meals. We know some are and we know many are not.”

In a bit of good news, Lahn said he and his wife received their first delivery of four kosher entree-style meals around 4 p.m. on Tuesday. “I’m not going to complain,” Lahn said Tuesday night.

He noted that he also received a delivery of “meals” from the Department for the Aging the previous week, a selection of shelf-stable kosher for Passover foods: a box of matzoh, two cartons of almond milk, a jug of grape juice and a handful of canned goods.