Households on food stamps rise

PORTLAND – The recession spread poverty into thousands of mom-and-dad households where good jobs had been common, a study of food stamp use in Oregon concludes.

The study from Oregon State University compared first-time food stamp users in 2009 and in 2005, when Oregon’s economy was better.

It found outsize increases in such categories as adult males who had lost manufacturing or construction jobs, households that hadn’t used food stamps and households that reported sharp drops in income.

The findings were not a surprise. Even as the recession was easing, food stamp use was rising, with one in six Oregonians using them.

“It’s closer to one in five now, so it’s getting worse,” said Mark Edwards, an associate professor of sociology who worked on the study with Suzanne Porter, the lead author. It was released this week.

Porter is a caseload forecaster for the state Department of Human Services who did the research as part of her graduate program. She said it grew out of anecdotal reports of caseworkers in the department, but the results still took her aback.

The study said, for example, that even though households headed by single women still outnumbered those headed by two adults, the number of two-adult households starting food stamps was 50 percent greater than four years earlier, while the number of households headed by single women and starting food stamps was 37 percent larger.

Households going on food stamps with more tenuous work experience – any work in the prior year – were up by a smaller rate, 66 percent.

What followed from those statistics was households reporting sharper drops in income before going on food stamps.