‘It’s going to be very ugly’: Major Queens food pantry faces eviction
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Volunteers at La Jornada, a major food pantry in Northwest Queens, confirm appointments for nearby residents in need of fresh produce and groceries. The food pantry is being evicted from its NYCHA headquarters at the end of the month.
By Jacob Kaye
A major food pantry based in Northwest Queens that played a large role in feeding struggling families during the height of the pandemic is facing an eviction from its NYCHA headquarters.
La Jornada, a food pantry and immigrant services provider based in the Bland Houses in Flushing, will be forced to leave its public housing headquarters – one of 10 food distribution sites it operates – by the end of the month. Without a place to go, the 10,000 Queens families it feeds will be forced to turn elsewhere for their weekly groceries.
The pantry’s impending closure comes as food insecurity rates remain high two years removed from the start of the pandemic, and as national inflation rates raise prices on food staples in grocery stores throughout the city.
“It’s going to be very, very, very ugly,” Pedro Rodriguez, the executive director of La Jornada, told the Eagle. “That’s the scary part.”
Public housing officials told Rodriguez that the pantry had grown too large and that it had begun to interfere with the everyday lives of the 500 families living in the Bland Houses – around 20 percent of the Bland Houses’ residents utilize the food pantry, according to Rodriguez. NYCHA leadership asked the nonprofit to address the issues but weren’t satisfied with the response, according to a NYCHA spokesperson. The public housing authority is seeking to fill the space with a youth program.
“La Jornada has agreed to vacate the space by the end of July and, with the help of the mayor and elected officials, they are looking for temporary and permanent locations that will be appropriate for the work that they do,” a NYCHA spokesperson told the Eagle.
To meet the continued demand for fresh and free groceries, Rodriguez said the food pantry needs a 10,000 square foot space for a warehouse and additional space for offices and classrooms – the nonprofit also provides immigrant services, including English language classes and documentation assistance.
Despite being granted a meeting with Mayor Eric Adams and Assemblymember Catalina Cruz several weeks ago, the nonprofit has yet to be reallocated and will be forced to leave the NYCHA complex by July 31.
“I don’t care where it’s going to be,” Rodriguez said. “As long as we can serve these people.”
Rodriguez said the city has already offered him a potential spot inside a school, but that accepting the offer would be both an expensive and temporary solution.
Moving into the school at the start of August would cost the nonprofit around $20,000 and then another $20,000 at the end of the month when the school year begins.
“We only can't be there until September when the kids come back to school,” he said. “Then what am I going to do?”
The mayor’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Cruz’s office told the Eagle that the assemblymember did not have time to comment on Tuesday.
The Eagle visited La Jornada on a recent Saturday this month. A fluctuating line of around 50 to 100 people snaked through the public housing complex throughout the morning. Each Queens resident made their way through the line and into the first-floor space to confirm their appointment – all 800 available appointments had been filled before the pantry opened.
After confirming their spot, residents were given a bag of dry goods, several pounds of produce, a rack of ribs and household supplies, including soap and hand sanitizer. All of the food and household products had been donated to the pantry.
Throughout the day, Rodriguez met privately with a number of the nonprofit’s clients, some of them new immigrants trying to figure out how to make Queens their home. One man came in and left a half-hour later with several bags filled with donated clothes.
La Jornada was created in 2008. Operating out of a church in Bayside, the pantry mostly fed sandwiches to day laborers in the area. It slowly grew to serve around 25 families in the neighborhood before moving to Flushing and expanding its operation two years later. In its first Flushing location, the pantry fed 5,000 families. It moved to a larger space and its population grew to 12,000 families, Rodriguez said.
Not long before the start of the pandemic, La Jornada entered into a service contract – not a lease – with NYCHA to operate out of the Bland Houses, opening the pantry one or two days a week to meet the needs of nearby residents.
But the pantry’s population ballooned at the start of the pandemic. To meet the demand, Rodriguez opened up nearly a dozen mobile sites throughout Northwest Queens, including one along the 34th Avenue open street in Jackson Heights.
Resources poured in – more food was donated, more volunteers came out, local elected officials took notice, raising the profile of the pantry further.
But even as demand increased, NYCHA didn’t have an issue with La Jornada operating outside of one of their buildings, according to the executive director.
“We told them we need more space, we’re going to need more days, and everything was like, ‘Go ahead,’” he said. “Everybody knew the emergency.”
“But then, all of a sudden, they said we have a problem,” he added.
Despite the space being approved by the city’s health department, NYCHA officials told La Jornada that the operation had become too large and unruly, and that they had broken the rules of the service agreement.
After meeting with Adams and Cruz at the start of the month, Rodriguez said he has yet to get an update on the search for a new space.
“[Adams] said we’re going to give you a school, it’s temporary, but after that we’re going to give you a permanent place,” Rodriguez said. “That promise was two weeks ago.”
While La Jornada’s opaque future is derived from a unique set of circumstances, food pantries around the city are contending with a similar fate.
An emergency food program, known as the Pandemic Food Reserve Emergency Distribution Program, which was created by City Hall at the start of the pandemic and funded by federal COVID-19 relief funds, was recently hit with dramatic cutbacks.
“P-FRED was really established at the height of the pandemic,” Department of Social Services Commissioner Gary Jenkins said at a March City Council General Welfare Committee meeting, THE CITY reported. “We see New Yorkers are rebounding and getting back to work and getting into the jobs that they so deserve to be in as far as being part of the workforce.”
Food insecurity in New York City remains high. According to a May report from City Harvest, food insecurity among New York City children is higher in 2022 than it was in both 2020 and 2021.
