Some New Yorkers Could Lose SNAP Benefits Next Week. Nearly Half Are Young People.

Title: Some New Yorkers Could Lose SNAP Benefits Next Week. Nearly Half Are Young People.

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Janae Pierre: From WNYC, this is NYC Now. I'm Janae Pierre. New Yorkers who haven't met the new SNAP rules could start losing their food benefits on June 1st. On today's episode, we look into what the city is doing to help thousands of New Yorkers who depend on the federal food assistance program. Before we get into that, here's what else is happening in our region.

The attorneys general of New York and New Jersey are investigating FIFA's World Cup ticket practices. Officials served soccer's governing body with a subpoena on Wednesday. AG Letitia James and her New Jersey counterpart, Jennifer Davenport, say their investigation follows widespread complaints from fans about high ticket prices. The officials say they're also responding to complaints that some fans paid for premium seats only to discover that they'd been placed in lower-value sections. Tickets for the eight games at MetLife Stadium are currently selling for an average of $2,800, and that's more than twice the rate of other host cities.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani says his new housing plan will deliver on a campaign pledge of building 200,000 affordable apartments over the next decade. He billed the plan as a means of addressing a long-running housing shortage in the city.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani: I know there are many who doubt that change can ever come. I want to speak to the skeptical New Yorker because I was once the skeptical New Yorker.

Janae Pierre: The program, called Our Home, would also formalize the process for tenants buying apartment buildings to turn them into co-ops. It'll also create a pathway to ownership for some renters. Mamdani says the plan includes a pledge to formalize the city's funding process and issue $75 million in loans to allow hundreds of renters to purchase buildings from financially distressed or absentee landlords.

Now to another campaign promise. Mayor Mamdani is closing the book on one of the city's most controversial bike lane projects. The Department of Transportation is completing safety improvements on McGuinness Boulevard in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. As a candidate, Mamdani pledged to install a protected bike lane all the way down the dangerous roadway. During the Adams administration, only half the road got safety improvements. Prosecutors say chief advisor Ingrid Lewis-Martin meddled in the project after accepting bribes from opponents. She denies the charges and is still awaiting trial. Construction will start this week and is expected to be completed by the fall.

We're going to take a quick break, but when we return, an important deadline is approaching for New Yorkers who depend on SNAP, the federal food assistance program, and the people most impacted aren't who you'd expect. More on that ahead in a minute.

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Janae Pierre: Welcome back. SNAP is the federal food assistance program that more than 1 million New York City households rely on to buy groceries. New rules took effect here in March, and for the first time, about 126,000 New Yorkers have to prove they're working, volunteering, or in school to keep those benefits. The grace period ends on June 1st. That's when people who haven't met the new rules will start losing their benefits. The people most at risk? Not who you'd expect. WNYC and Gothamist reporter Karen Yi has been on the ground covering this one. Hey, Karen.

Karen Yi: Hey, Janae.

Janae Pierre: We had you on the podcast a couple months ago to talk about these new work requirements, but remind listeners what's happening here.

Karen Yi: Okay. New York State has long been exempt from federal SNAP work requirements for years because of its high unemployment rate. Now, that ended in March when strict new federal work rules came down from the Trump administration. What also changed wasn't just that New York was no longer exempt, it's that more people were also subject to these work rules. People like veterans, homeless people, people aging out of foster care, and parents whose kids are older than 14 years old, and people up to 65 years old.

The city estimates that's about 126,000 New Yorkers that now have to prove that they're working, volunteering, or in school in order to hold on to their benefits. This is a really big change. To prepare for that, the city partnered with 100-plus nonprofits to connect people to jobs and volunteer programs that could meet the requirement. What these changes mean is it ups the age requirement. People were really concerned about seniors.

The work requirements used to go until age 54. Now it goes up to age 65. What I heard from a lot of advocates was, "What about seniors who have maybe already retired and now they have to come out of retirement, figure out where to work or volunteer just to hold on to that monthly benefits?" New Yorkers have a three-month grace period to not comply until their benefits are shut off. That's why we're facing this looming June 1st deadline, where we're going to start seeing the first wave of people lose their benefits.

Janae Pierre: What is the city doing to get people prepared for this?

Karen Yi: This is a momentous task. The city's Human Resources Administration has been doing a lot to prepare and really try to do as much of the administrative paperwork on their end, just to alleviate as much of that as possible from SNAP recipients. The first step the city took on was figuring out who this even applies to because work rules, like I said, haven't really been in place for years. People who maybe have a medical issue or a developmental disability or are caring for somebody who can't care for themselves, they haven't documented that.

The city had to figure out, "Okay, who are the people that can be exempt? Who's getting a disability check? Who has a medical issue that's documented with the public hospital system? Who is enrolled in CUNY and could meet that education component?" And really whittle down the list from there. They also took the bold step of partnering with the Mayor's Public Engagement Unit to really send out outreach workers building to building, knocking on doors all across the five boroughs, using these lists of people who had not responded to the city's notices that work requirements were coming.

Janae Pierre: How do they know who to target here?

Karen Yi: This was an interagency effort. You had the people from the Mayor's Public Engagement Unit downloading lists of people that were compiled by the Human Resources Administration and knocking on doors of people who had not met the rules yet and hadn't really engaged with the city on this issue. I went out with a couple of these door knockers last week. One of them, Jude Ipepe, explained to me how targeted this outreach really was.

Jude Ipepe: We don't want to be knocking at random doors. It's only the clients on our list that we need to knock on their doors because not everybody within this building receives SNAP or receives the benefits. We want to make sure we are reaching out to those clients, the specific clients that are impacted with this federal guidance.

Janae Pierre: Karen, how many people were actually home, and how do they reach those who weren't?

Karen Yi: I was out with a team for about two hours. We hit about 25 doors, and I would say less than half were home. It was a morning on a weekday. Sometimes a roommate would answer the door or another family member. A lot of the work was just leaving flyers tucked into the doors, waiting for somebody to exit a building so we could go in, and really urging anyone who was there to please tell the SNAP recipient, you have to take action, go online, check your app. Something big is coming, there are changes coming.

For people who weren't home at all, the city's also doing phone banking and calling at the same time. Even while we were out canvassing the streets, the workers that I was with were calling people and saying, "Listen, I'm outside your door. I'm going to leave a flyer here. Make sure you read it."

Jude Ipepe: Please tell him to read the information and make sure to take action. Very important for his benefits.

Alfred: Okay.

Jude Ipepe: Thank you so much. Thank you, Alfred.

Karen Yi: There is a lot, a lot of work and effort going into making sure people just know that this is happening.

Janae Pierre: This is a really old-school approach, phone banking, door knocking, flyers. I would totally appreciate this, but how are people reacting?

Karen Yi: People are coming to your door and telling you that something bad may happen. That was my question too: "Are SNAP recipients mad? Are they mad at you, thinking that you're potentially taking away their benefits?" What Jude told me is that most people said they were really grateful and thankful that the city worker was showing up at their door and telling them that this was urgent and this was important.

Jude Ipepe: They feel skeptical. When we introduce ourselves and why we are in the community, they feel like, "Oh, okay, this is something interesting." They feel from being skeptical to very comfortable, and they start telling us, "Oh, this is very great to have us in the community." They actually been getting notices, but they just thought it wasn't something of a big deal. Just having us in the community is a huge game-changer just to ensure that they're taking action.

Janae Pierre: It sounds like the city is really taking this seriously.

Karen Yi: Yes. The stakes are just really high here. There's an affordability crisis. Food prices are just so, so expensive and people rely on these benefits. It's about 1 million New York City households that use SNAP to feed their families. There's really true urgency here.

Jude Ipepe: We are time-crunched here because by June 1st, some folks may start losing their benefits. We want to make sure that doesn't happen.

Karen Yi: I want to take a step back here and understand why this is even happening. These are requirements that were passed by congressional Republicans and signed by President Trump. Now, what Republicans have argued is that this is a way to encourage more people to work and to contribute and to curb waste, fraud, and abuse.

What several studies show is that work requirements actually result in people getting kicked off their benefits and doesn't actually end with more people working or higher incomes. The city's new commissioner for the Department of Social Services, Erin Dalton, really didn't mince words when I spoke to her about what these new rules are. She called it just an attack on the safety net of the city.

Erin Dalton: It's devastating. No matter how hard we work, no matter how much we do, how much door-knocking we do, how much government excellence we put forward, unfortunately, people will lose their benefits. That is what this is designed to do, and they can't be replaced with our emergency food system. When we talk about a city that is as challenging from an affordability perspective as New York, we have to do every single thing we can to keep people on benefits and just work as a community to keep it up.

Karen Yi: Now, to explain the series of agencies involved in this, SNAP is a federal program that is largely federal funding, though that's also changing, and it's administered by individual states. New York State administers the program, but it's the city that has to deal with the eligibility of who can and can't get benefits. That's why they've had to take on the bulk of the effort to keep people from getting kicked off.

Janae Pierre: Yes. That's why the city is taking this sense of urgency we've been talking about towards New Yorkers who are impacted. Karen, have you ever seen anything like this before?

Karen Yi: I think all of it is unprecedented. You have these sweeping federal requirements that frankly have been confusing. I've been on the show talking about how it's fits and starts and court battles, trying to slow it down and delay it. I think for the average person, it's been hard to follow, and it feels chaotic. You also have just an unprecedented number of people receiving SNAP in the city, more than almost 1.8 million across the city and 3 million across the state.

As the city's trying to comb through data systems and its own information to figure out who's exempt, who has to meet these rules, they're really running into the outdated systems and data systems that exist in the city while they're trying to do something very quickly with accurate information because the stakes are so high. You have this door-knocking effort. All of these workers that have been knocking on doors for more than three weeks now, really targeting people and letting them know, " Hey, this is important, you have to pay attention now."

Janae Pierre: Yes. I want to talk, Karen, about the people who are most impacted here. People will probably assume that the New Yorkers who are most at risk are older people on fixed incomes, but that's actually not what the city is finding, is it?

Karen Yi: That was surprising to me, too. I think everybody was really concerned about older adults because the work rules that existed before, the cutoff was at 54, and now it went up to 65. What the city's preliminary numbers show is that 40% of the people who haven't met the work rules yet are young adults between the ages of 18 and 30.

Most of these cases are single adults, and even in the cases where there is more than one person on a SNAP beneficiary case, there are multiple family members. Those cases will see a reduction in benefits because the young adult in the family is not meeting the work rules. Jude is also seeing this anecdotally in the doors that he's knocking on and the people that he's speaking to, and he explained to me why so many young people are getting caught off guard.

Jude Ipepe: We've noticed that young adults have been impacted more. Young teens who have been with their parents' SNAP case, they're now eligible for them to bring all the necessary documents. They're now able to impact it. Some just graduated from college, some may be doing their internship, so they don't know because their parents have been doing all of this application and making sure that they are SNAP compliant.

Karen Yi: That's why you see even Mayor Mamdani stepping in and trying to get the word out. He was trying to reach younger viewers online, made an appearance on the influencer Subway Oracle's Instagram this weekend, telling people about the June deadline.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani: If you are on SNAP, you may have your SNAP benefits at risk by June 1st. If you're a SNAP recipient and you're not sure of your status, make sure to go to ACCESS HRA or call 718-SNAP-NOW.

Janae Pierre: Karen, I can't help but think, who actually checks the mail? I check my mail, but if you're an 18-year-old, I'm not too sure how often you're going to your mailbox.

Karen Yi: That's right. I think the way the city agency has operated and usually operates, it's they snail mail these notices. If you're someone who doesn't check the mail or you live in a family where your parent or another guardian checks the mail, you may not have seen this. I think that's why the city has really tried to communicate in multiple ways. They're really urging people to go on the app, and if all else has failed, they're just coming to your door and meeting you right where you are.

Janae Pierre: Yes. If someone's listening and they're not sure if this applies to them, what should they do?

Karen Yi: Check their mail. Also, check the ACCESS HRA app. If you have a SNAP case, you can download the ACCESS HRA app, and all the notifications will be in there. If you fall within the new categories of able-bodied people, as they call them, between 18 and 64 years old, you have to show that you're working toward meeting these rules, and you could do so through the app as well.

I want to say that these rules are ongoing. They're every month. They're the law now. People have to consistently document this, and the city says it's going to consistently work to whittle down that number of folks who may lose their benefits month to month, but they have a very clear message for New Yorkers that it's not too late. Even if that June deadline comes and goes, you can still reach out, and you can still do something to find a way to turn your benefits back on. Here's Human Resources Administrator Scott French.

Scott French: Please call us. For those who are making some outbound calls, do not pick up the phone, but call us and talk to us, and we can work through how we can help maintain people's benefits. What's important is it is not over. All is not lost. Reach out to us.

Karen Yi: He says if you just call the city back and you tell them, "Yes, I'm planning on complying, yes, I want to comply, these are the things that I am trying," that can buy you more time to hold on to your benefits for another month. The key thing is the city's really trying to make sure as many people do not have their benefits turned off in June, don't show up at the grocery store trying to buy groceries and realize there is no balance left on their card.

Lastly, a little PSA, I'll leave you with a number too that you can call. That's 718-SNAP-NOW, 718-SNAP-NOW, to find out if you're even eligible and how the rules work.

Janae Pierre: That's WNYC's Karen Yi. Karen, thanks so much for covering this for us.

Karen Yi: Thanks, Janae.

Janae Pierre: Thank you for listening to NYC Now. I'm Janae Pierre. See you next time.

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