By Greg Childress
NC Newsline
At the top of Fayetteville Street in Durham, about a mile from the city’s bustling downtown, a Walgreen’s has closed. It sits idle in a mostly low-income, historic part of town whose prosperous edges are dotted with expensive, modern apartments and homes.
Not too far from the empty Walgreen’s, the former Heritage Square Shopping Center is also idle. All stores are shuttered. The former retail center is surrounded by chain-linked fencing, wrapped tight even as potential customers fill hundreds of new apartments and condos nearby.
Residents in the area depended on the eclectic Food World and a Family Dollar store that operated in the shopping center. When they closed more than a year ago along with the drug store, it created an improbable food desert near a part of Durham that has experienced unrivaled growth and unprecedented prosperity. The store closures combined with federal cuts to safety net programs to ensure low income, elderly people don’t go hungry, has local organizations looking for community solutions to keep them fed.
At the 79-unit Veranda at Whitted School on East Umstead Street, the aging residents felt the loss of the stores immediately. The senior housing facility is in a repurposed school that once served Durham’s black children. It’s a short walk from the Walgreens and the shopping center. Now, the closest grocery store is a mile away, a Compare Foods on University Drive. The next closest option is a Food Lion on Fayetteville Street, nearly two miles away.
Both are long hikes for seniors, many of who do not own cars and some who use walkers. For some tenants, catching a city bus can present a challenge
This month, The Integral Group, the Atlanta-based developer and owner of the Veranda at Whitted School, partnered with the Durham Housing Authority, CenterWell Primary Care Anywhere and Feed My Sheep of Durham Inc., to create an onsite food pantry to keep residents from having to “choose between a lengthy bus ride and a healthy meal.”
“We have some seniors who have more energy than you and me, but we do have some seniors who don’t drive, that have health conditions and the easier we can make things for them, the better,” Kimberly Williams, a project adviser for the Integral Group, told a reporter on a recent visit.
The food pantry is also a response to federal budget cuts that might impact tenants’ ability to feed themselves, Williams said.
“Even if some people might not need the food now, at some point they might,” Williams said. “With all of the cuts that are happening with food stamps and Medicaid and possibly SSI [Supplemental Security Income] benefits, I just want them [tenants] to know that it’s [food] available.”
Meals on Wheels and other agencies deliver food to tenants, Williams said, but those meals are perishable and sometimes go bad before tenants can finish them. It’s good to have the food pantry as an option to help sustain residents through the month, she said.
Williams got the idea for the food pantry after seeing a Facebook post about a pantry at J.J. Henderson Towers, a senior housing community operated by Durham Housing Authority.
“At some point, I want to do it [provide food] for the entire community, where if someone off the street needs food, we would set up something on a Saturday in that circle [in front of the building] and allow people to eat,” Williams said. “This world is getting tough.”
Williams is still working out the details about how food will be distributed with Feed My Sheep of Durham, but tenants told NC Newsline that they welcome the food pantry.
‘We help each other’
“Oh, it means a lot,” said long-time tenant Regina Royster when asked about the pantry. “I’ve seen people and you can tell they need a little something [food] here and there and we help each other.”
The pantry is in an small room that wasn’t being used. Several shelving units are filled with cereal, pasta, dried beans and various canned goods. A refrigerator in the corner is nearly empty except for a few bottles of Gatorade and two cases of Ensure that a tenant donated during a reporter’s tour of the pantry.
“When I get my nourishments from the VA [Veterans Administration], they can kind of go overboard sometimes,” said James Mitchell, 72, an Army veteran. “This [the pantry] gives me an opportunity to share it with the residents.”
Mitchell has lived in the Veranda at Whitted School since it opened in 2017, and believes the apartment he occupies was his science classroom when he attended the school in the 1960s. He has a car and can travel to grocery stores but said some of his neighbors cannot.
“It [the closing of the stores] created an inconvenience for most people in my age bracket because we now have to travel,” Mitchell said. “We have some who don’t have transportation and some who do and we have to travel further out.”
Senior hunger a growing problem
Food insecurity among senior citizens is a growing concern for many organizations, particularly as the U.S. population aged 65 and older grows rapidly. The growth is driven by the the Baby Boomer generation. According to Population Reference Bureau, the number of Americans age 65 and older is projected to increase to 82 million by 2050. There are currently more than 61 million people in the U.S. aged 65 or older, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
As the population ages, they will need more health care services and assistance for government agencies and nonprofits that provide food and other necessities to help sustain them.
Amy Akroyd, director of development and communications for Meals on Wheels Wake County, noted that a report released by Feeding America a few years ago found that the Raleigh metropolitan area ranked high among the nation’s other metropolitan areas for senior hunger.
“So, we know that the constituency that we serve has certainly seen an increase in that need because of the way that things are going right now with food prices increasing, with fuel prices increasing,” Akroyd said. “Everyone’s just stretching their budgets to meet a greater and greater need every day.”
Meals on Wheels is 50% funded by the federal government. Program operators across the country were disappointed there was no funding increase to meet growing demand, Akroyd said.
“We were fortunate in that we were continued to be funded, but it was flat funded, so that extra push that we really needed to continue to meet the growing need is not quite there anymore,” Akroyd said. “We’re relying on our private community of donors, volunteers, supporters to continue to make sure that we can pay for the meals that are so desperately needed by our seniors.”
Determining the extent of hunger in America could become more difficult in the wake of a Trump administration decision to end the federal government’s annual report on hunger in America.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently announced that it is terminating future Household Food Security Reports, calling them “redundant, costly, politicized” that do “nothing more than fear monger.”
The 2024 report is scheduled for release Oct. 22. It will be the last under the Trump administration.
The decision to halt the annual hunger report follows the passage of the Trump administration tax cut and spending bill that the Congressional Budget Office estimates will kick 3 million people off of food stamps, which is also known as SNAP benefits.
“When you look at some of the things that are being cut in terms of certain entitlement programs, SNAP has been cut, Medicare, Medicaid, they’re [seniors] are facing some tough choices,” Akroyd said. “Those are all services that our seniors rely on, so the less services that seniors have in their own day-to-day lives the more they’re going to find a need [for food] that we’re going to hopefully be able to fill.”
