Certain work training or volunteer programs also fulfilled the requirements.Ĭome 2009, deep into the recession, there were so few jobs that the federal government allowed states with high unemployment to ask to waive those work requirements.īut starting this year, with Florida’s economy doing better overall, the state couldn’t ask for another waiver. Before then, if you were an adult without kids and were able-bodied you had to work at least 80 hours per month in order to get food stamps. In order to understand why she got cut off, you have to go back to 2009. “Now, I’m having to go out here and ask people for help just to eat, and that’s embarrassing as hell,” she says. In March, Perry stopped getting food stamps. WLRN Homeless people line up for food in downtown Miami. “Because of us being homeless, we don’t have no way to cook so you get sandwiches, lunch meats, peanut butter and jelly - stuff like that that can last,” says Perry. They’d use the money at Publix buying the tightly regulated allowable items, which excludes hot foods. “These people have gone all day with nothing, not a sandwich or nothing,” says Royal.įor years, Royal and Perry each got $194 in food stamps per month, the highest amount allowed under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. People immediately form lines when the trucks of food pull up. Perry, Royal and many others out on the street are among the 350,000 people who lost their food stamps this year because of new state rules that adults without children who can work must work in order to get the monthly assistance. With about four dozen other homeless people, they wait for a church group to come by and hand out styrofoam containers of food. For the past year, Lucy Perry and her longtime boyfriend William Royal have lived beneath a traffic sign on the sidewalk along Southwest Second Street under I-95.
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