When Jessica Rangel first moved to Berkeley, she knew she would need help to survive the costly Bay Area. Rent and food were expensive, and her budget as a master’s student at UC Berkeley only stretched so far.
Soon after arriving in the region, Rangel visited an Alameda County website and filled out an application to access CalFresh, California’s rebranded version of food stamps.
As a public health and nutrition student — and a former recipient of food stamps — she felt confident that she was able to access that aid. Rangel knew she qualified, and she hoped that maybe even within a few days she could stop worrying so much about buying groceries.
But those days turned into weeks, and then a month. When she tried to check in on her application, she experienced delays and what she perceived as incompetent staff. After six weeks, she finally received the benefits — but only after she became convinced that the system was broken.
“If it was someone else who didn’t know that they qualified for these benefits, and that they should advocate for themselves, they would fall through the cracks,” Rangel said.
In Alameda County and across the Bay Area, food banks say that families’ needs are as high as they have ever been, rivaling the demand seen during the pandemic. But Rangel’s experience highlights the challenges that many residents face in accessing CalFresh benefits that could ease the strain on community nonprofits.
In Alameda County, the incident also raises questions about whether a county that has historically struggled to administer the CalFresh program has regressed since a lawsuit nearly 10 years ago.
California requires that counties respond to CalFresh requests within 30 days, and sooner if the applicant reports having less than $100 in their bank account. In 2015, Alameda County was one of the slowest counties in the state — 20% of applications were not processed within 30 days, and up to 10,000 people were waiting for benefits.
Those delays led to a class action lawsuit and, in 2016, a permanent injunction ordering the county to process the applications more quickly. According to Tom Loran, one of the lead lawyers in the lawsuit, the county did in fact improve, and by 2017, 97% of all applications were being processed on time.
“The county came back a year later and said, ‘We’ve been on time, we’re at a high percent, there’s no need for an injunction,’ ” Loran said. “But counties always backslide, and their past history wasn’t an indicator of (future) success.”
So was Rangel’s experience a one-off, or is Alameda County again failing its residents on a systemic level?
According to publicly available data, Alameda County is, for the most part, processing applications on time. For the most recently reported months — July and August 2023 — only about 3% of applications were approved or denied after 30 days. That figure is about in line with how the county was performing during the injunction. According to the Alameda County Food Bank, which helps residents access CalFresh, applications are usually processed promptly.
But the county is also denying thousands of applications — about 20% — every month for undefined “procedural reasons.” And it is these nebulous procedural reasons that may prove to be barriers to many people who need, and should qualify for, the benefits.
It’s possible Rangel herself would have been one of those rejections. On the last day the county had to process her application before it would be considered late, she received a notification saying that her application was discontinued because she never uploaded documents, even though she had done so weeks before.
“I called and left a voicemail saying, ‘I’m confused and worried because I really do need these funds to feed myself,’ ” Rangel said. “She called me back and she was like, ‘Oh, I do see your documents right here.’ ”
The Alameda County Department of Social Services, which administers CalFresh, declined repeated requests for comment.
According to the state, procedural denials are commonly due to missed interviews or failed “verifications.” But it is not unlikely that others in Rangel’s position, but without her expertise, may just give up trying to access the benefits if they’re denied for those reasons.
It’s also possible that such a person would end up waiting in line at the food bank, but food banks across the Bay Area say they can barely keep up with the current need. That need is illustrated in Alameda County’s CalFresh application numbers — about 10,000 every month, compared to 4,000 in 2015, when the lawsuit was filed.
“We’re serving the same amount of people we were during the pandemic, but the support isn’t there,” said Diane Hayward, the director of communications at Second Harvest of Silicon Valley, which serves Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, and is the largest food bank in the Bay Area. “Everybody is forced to cut back on the amount of food they provide.”
CalFresh, Hayward said, should be a resource that helps lessen the strain on food banks. But like many public benefits, the application process is tedious and complex. To access the benefits, you must meet federal income requirements, which are based on national numbers and are often far removed from the realities in the Bay Area. A one-person household needs to make less than $30,000 a year to receive the maximum benefit of $291 per month.
“From our perspective, if low-income people could have access to the food resources they need through the government then our services would be less needed,” said Tracy Weatherby, the Vice President of Strategy and Advocacy at Second Harvest.
The California Department of Social Services, in a statement, said that they are doing their best to help people receive the benefit.
“We have implemented various policies and program changes to increase CalFresh program access and reduce barriers for applying,” department spokesperson Theresa Mier said in the statement. Those changes include flexible interview times, and allowing people to self-attest for certain verification requirements.
But for Rangel, those policies clearly haven’t been successful. If a master’s student studying public health and nutrition can barely navigate the system, she wonders who else reasonably can be expected to.
“There needs to be some reconsideration of how we’re doing things,” Rangel said. “I just don’t think what we’re doing now is working.”