‘People are going to go hungry': La Jornada continues search for new home following NYCHA eviction
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Pedro Rodriguez, the executive director of La Jornada, and Assemblymember Catalina Cruz, stand in front of a deconstructed industrial fridge outside of the Elmhurst Educational Campus, the temporary home for the La Jornada, a major food pantry in Western Queens. Eagle photo by Jacob Kaye
By Jacob Kaye
A Western Queens food pantry that has been feeding around 10,000 families per week since the start of the pandemic is still without a permanent home after being evicted from its NYCHA headquarters earlier this month.
La Jornada, a food pantry and immigrant services nonprofit that was previously based in the Bland Houses in Flushing, is currently operating out of a temporary site at an Elmhurst high school, but must move by the end of August ahead of the students’ return in September.
City officials, including Mayor Eric Adams’ administration, vowed to find the pantry a new permanent location ahead of its July eviction from the Bland Houses, but a site has yet to be secured.
In the meantime, the pantry – one of the only pantries in the borough that feeds New Yorkers regardless of their immigration status – is offering its services seven days a week from inside the Elmhurst Educational Campus, which houses several high schools, including the high school with the highest number of undocumented students in the city.
“I don't understand why people don’t understand that these people need food, and we have to give it to them – somehow,” Rodriguez told the Eagle.
La Jornada has been operating in Queens in one form or another for over a decade. It first began as a much smaller operation, feeding day laborers in Bayside out of a church beginning in 2008. A little over a decade later, it entered into a service contract with NYCHA to operate out of an unused community-use space in the first floor of one of the Bland Houses’ buildings. Not long after the contract was signed, the pandemic began.
Long lines snaking throughout the public housing complex became a daily occurrence and the pantry’s profile grew. Donations increased, including from U.S. Rep. Grace Meng, who represents the area the pantry was located in. She gifted La Jornada an industrial fridge.
The fridge now sits behind the school under a tarp, deconstructed into over a dozen metal panels.
The Eagle was recently invited on a tour of the temporary site alongside Rodriguez and Assemblymember Catalina Cruz, a longtime ally of the pantry. During the tour, Rodriguez became visibly upset while observing the state of the fridge.
“This should be filled with milk for children,” he said with frustration.
La Jornada executive director Pedro Rodriguez was joined by Rep. Grace Meng, Assemblymember Catalina Cruz and Borough President Donovan Richards for the unveiling of a new industrial fridge on Monday, June 14, 2022. Photo via Donovan Richards/Twitter
Earlier this year, NYCHA informed La Jornada that they believed the pantry was in violation of the service agreement and cited the violation as grounds for eviction, as first reported by the Eagle. NYCHA claimed the operation 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 complex’s residents utilized the food pantry, according to Rodriguez. Additionally, NYCHA officials said they had asked the food pantry to remedy a number of safety concerns but that they had gone unaddressed, a NYCHA spokesperson told the Eagle last month.
Prior to La Jornada’s eventual eviction, Rodriguez met with Cruz and members of the Adams administration, including the mayor himself. The elected officials told Rodriguez that they’d begin a search for a permanent site. Additionally, the mayor’s office, Cruz and the office of Queens Borough President Donovan Richards agreed that should a site be identified, they’d all pitch in financially to secure it and alter it, if necessary, according to Cruz.
“La Jornada’s work has been extremely vital for the survival of neighbors, not just in Flushing, but, I would argue, probably in the 20-mile surrounding area,” Cruz told the Eagle. “It was a very difficult process to figure out that we had to move after all the work that we did to actually create a home, but sometimes that happens.”
“Our work now is concentrating on not just finding La Jornada a new home, but a permanent home,” she added.
A spokesperson for Richards said: “Borough President Richards is committed to contributing funding — along with the Mayor's Office and Assemblymember Cruz — to help offset the cost of La Jornada's relocation.”
A number of City Councilmembers in Western Queens, including Councilembers Sandra Ung, Shekar Krishnan and Francisco Moya have been asked to join in on the search.
"La Jornada, like countless other food pantries, mutual aid networks, and community refrigerators, fed thousands of our most vulnerable neighbors – undocumented immigrants and low income families – during the darkest depths of the COVID pandemic,” Krishnan said in a statement to the Eagle. “It continues to serve so many in need across our Queens communities. Our office is now working urgently with Assembly Member Catalina Cruz and City Hall to find it a new home in our community, here in the immigrant heart of Queens."
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 the effort that began earlier this summer, a site of that size has yet to be found and secured.
“La Jornada has become a true lifeline for so many New Yorkers struggling during the pandemic, and Mayor Adams is completely committed to helping the organization identify a space where it can safely continue to meet the significant need in the community,” a spokesperson for the mayor said in a statement to the Eagle. “Our administration is working actively and in close coordination with our partners on the ground to make that happen.”
Rodriguez and a number of volunteers packed up and moved the pantry during the last weekend of July. In total, the move cost the nonprofit around $20,000, a figure they’ll have to cough up again at the end of the month and at least twice more if a permanent site isn’t found by the end of August.
La Jornada, a major food pantry in Western Queens, is serving those in need of weekly groceries from inside a school in Elmhurst after it was evicted from its NYCHA headquarters in Flushing at the end of last month. Eagle photo by Jacob Kaye
Though fewer people have been making the trip to the Elmhurst site – and though the pantry is unable to give out the same amount of food than it previously was able to – around 7,000 people in need of weekly groceries have been coming to La Jornada’s new home on a weekly basis. The pantry also has around a dozen satellite sites throughout the borough that have continued operations since the eviction from the Bland Houses.
Rodriguez noted that a majority of the familiar faces he’s seen at the Elmhurst site are younger families. A large portion of the seniors who utilized the pantry in Flushing have been unable to make the trip, he said.
“We have probably 1,000 seniors that don't have food from Flushing because of this,” he said. “The young people are coming because young people can travel and can walk and it's the summer, it’s okay. The seniors are the ones who are suffering.”
However, a temporary solution – unrelated to La Jornada – has popped up in Downtown Flushing.
A new pantry launched by a number of local organizations, including Flushing Hate Free Zone, Minkwon Center for Community Action, the Greater Flushing Chamber of Commerce, the Free Synagogue of Flushing, Kissena Synergy, the Flushing Interfaith Council and the First Baptist Church of Flushing, began handing out food one day per week this month.
“There's now a vacuum in terms of emergency food assistance in Downtown Flushing,” said John Choe, the executive director of the Greater Flushing Chamber of Commerce.
Choe spoke with the Eagle several hours before the pantry opened its doors on Thursday for only the second time since its creation. He said lines had already begun to form around the church the pantry operates out of on Sanford Avenue.
“It's just very heartbreaking to see that so many people, mostly seniors, have to stand out in the hot weather for three hours just to get food in New York City, and no one in the city government seems to be paying attention to this,” he said.
Though both the city and federal government’s COVID-19 public health strategy has shifted toward a lighter touch over the course of the past several months, the economic effects of the pandemic, particularly surrounding food insecurity, have yet to subside.
A July report from the Food Bank For New York, a network of over 800 soup kitchens and pantries, found that demand for food increased by 93 percent in 2021 in New York City.
Queens, and Flushing in particular, suffered the effects of the pandemic more than any other borough in the city, according to a December report from New York State Comptroller Thomas DeNapoli. The same report noted that nearly 36 percent of Flushing’s residents are age 55 or older, the fourth-highest percentage of all of New York City’s neighborhoods.
“There is no reason at all for this – this is the richest city in the world and people who live in it suffer for lack of food,” Rodriguez said. “We’re talking about food, the most basic need of a human being. Why?”
Despite the stalled effort and the difficulties of finding a new permanent location for La Jornada, Cruz said that she “can’t afford to lose hope” that a site will be found, and soon.
“If I become hopeless, if I just sit and I wait on the politics, on the money, on whatever else, people are going to go hungry,” she said. “It may mean that from here, just like many of us immigrants, we have to move around to where the rent is cheapest, or it may mean that we end up like many of the families that we serve, having to move around from place to place – we're going to go couch-surfing until we find a permanent home.”
“But I'm not going to give up until we find one,” she added.
