Opinion: Feeding families requires expanding the FRESH program

The sights of emergency rooms overflowing, healthcare heroes wearing trash bags as PPE and crowded testing locations during the most chaotic days of the COVID-19 pandemic are seared into our collective memories forever.

But some of the deepest cuts COVID inflicted on us as a borough were not made in a hospital or a nursing home.

They were in the basement of a church, the lobby of a community center or even the parking lot of Queens Borough Hall. Because in my eyes, the visuals of hours-long lines at food pantries that wrapped around corners will always be some of the most heartbreaking of the pandemic.

So many of our neighbors, including some of you reading this, found themselves on those lines in need of basic necessities. Seniors. Families with young children. People who had never financially struggled before until they lost their job or a family member to COVID.

In the years since lockdown, our unemployment rate in Queens is down to just 4% – the lowest of the five boroughs and in line with the pre-pandemic rate. Our hospitals are no longer scenes of daily death and despair, thanks to an unknown virus, and I’m proud to have invested more than $50 million in capital funding into our borough’s healthcare network since taking office in December 2020.

But what hasn’t changed, sadly, is the staggering number of our neighbors experiencing food insecurity or the lines at food pantries across this city.

According to the most recent statistics from leading food bank nonprofit network Feeding America, more than 1.5 million New York City residents – nearly 20% of our population – are food insecure, including 360,000 of our neighbors here in Queens.

Those numbers shouldn’t just stun us. They should infuriate us and inspire us to do all we can to expand access to affordable, high-quality food in every single community, from the North Bronx to the southern tip of Staten Island.

During my tenure as borough president, I’m proud to have allocated nearly $180,000 in funding to food pantries across Queens in order to bolster their resources and help them expand their services.

But we urgently need a citywide, all-hands-on-deck approach to solving this crisis, because the number of families going hungry in our communities each day continues to grow.

I proudly support Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s innovative effort to establish city-run grocery stores in each borough, which will sell foods at a significant 30% discount. Such a program will undoubtedly allow families to more easily put food on their dinner table, and I look forward to working with the Mamdani administration on identifying the most sensible site for such a grocery store in Queens. 

This new program, however, is not and cannot be the only answer to the food insecurity crisis. It must be paired with a significant expansion of an existing initiative that has proven to be successful in eliminating food deserts: the Food Retail Expansion to Support Health (FRESH) program.

Created in 2009, FRESH gives property owners and developers the ability to construct slightly larger buildings in mixed residential and commercial districts if they include a supermarket in their building plans. And in the 17 years since its creation, more than 1 million New Yorkers have seen a supermarket open within walking distance of their home through this program.

In Queens, we know first-hand how this program – only available in parts of five Queens community districts and sections of 30 districts across New York City as of now – has been a critical addition in communities like Far Rockaway, Corona, Elmhurst and Long Island City.

In Far Rockaway, which has been one of Queens’ most blatant food deserts for generations, we just opened a bright, new, cost-conscious supermarket in the heart of the recently completed Rockaway Village affordable housing development this summer. Not only will this supermarket feed thousands of families, but it has already created dozens of good-paying jobs for residents of this community.

Down the peninsula in Arverne, we’re on the verge of a similar milestone, as we prepare to open another high-quality supermarket within Edgemere Commons – the stunning new waterfront affordable housing development on Beach Channel Drive. 

Created through FRESH and leveraged through the Downtown Far Rockaway Rezoning, which I am proud to have led, these two supermarkets alone will transform how Rockaway residents provide for their families and significantly reduce food insecurity along the peninsula. 

That success we’ve seen is why I staunchly believe we must immediately expand the FRESH program, not just to a handful of other community districts at a time but to every single neighborhood in this city. 

As more families continue to go hungry, we must move with the urgency of now.

As the cost of groceries and cost of living continues to rise, more families in our city will continue to go hungry. The lines we saw at food pantries during COVID could very well pale in comparison to those we will see going forward if we do not act.

We must move with the urgency of now, because our neighbors struggling to put food on the table for their loved ones do not have the ability to wait. 

So, while we approve of new apartment buildings in our communities, let’s ensure they come with grocery stores to sustain those who live there. Let’s ensure that every land use action taken in this city is taken with the most vulnerable among us in mind. 

As long as there are seemingly endless lines at our food pantries, we cannot relent until we eliminate the scourge of food insecurity from our city, once and for all.