By Tara Duggan, San Francisco Chronicle, November 4, 2019
Most people think of people lining up at food pantries and soup kitchens as an urban phenomenon. But in Alameda County, which has one of the highest rates of food insecurity in the Bay Area, an increasing number of people living in the suburbs are also having trouble affording food. That includes Livermore, a city in the Tri-Valley area that’s better known for its wineries.
“When people think of homelessness and poverty, they don’t think of this area,” said Clare Gomes of Open Heart Kitchen in Livermore, which in the past five years has doubled the number of schools providing free bagged lunches for children to take home on the weekends. “They think of it as being affluent, but there also is the opposite extreme. It’s more hidden than in Oakland and San Francisco.”
As low-income Alameda County residents get displaced from the urban center, rates of food insecurity are increasing in outlying areas like Hayward, Fremont, Dublin and Pleasanton, according to a new report by the Urban Institute, a Washington economic and social policy research organization.
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