For many, Collier County elicits images of golf courses, beautiful beaches and affluent people. But for some residents, a different reality exists, as the population experiencing food insecurity continues to grow.
Federal Reserve Economic Data reports Collier’s annual median household income at an estimated $75,799 in 2021, the last reported year. Of the nearly 386,000 population, 10.4% were living in poverty.
But a Community Needs and Assets Assessment done by the Collier Community Foundation the same year showed a large income gap between high- and low-income residents, skewing the median income of the population. It found that “the top 1% in the area makes 73.2 times more than the bottom 99%.”
Michael Overway, executive director of the Collier County Hunger & Homeless Coalition, said the number of people who sought food services in the county in 2022 grew from the prior year by 19,215. Since the beginning of 2023, 8,000 households have been served.
This data comes from the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS), which connects to pantries in the county and tracks how many residents do not get adequate food.
However Overway said not all Collier pantries provide numbers to the system, and no pantries have been added to the database since 2020. This was partly because of COVID, but mostly due to the manpower required to report.
What sparked the initiative to create the HMIS in 2019 was identifying food deserts — areas that don’t have access to nutritious food. Among them was Golden Gate.
John Ritz, who lives in Golden Gate and has been on disability for 10 years, said he has felt the most financial pressure in the last two years. With only one major grocery store in the area, a Winn-Dixie, and rising prices just about everywhere, Ritz said he is more conservative in his shopping.
“I hate going without coffee,” he said, referring to higher prices for a can of coffee. “So sometimes you just got to toughen up and say, ‘No coffee today.’”
He said he frequents the local food pantries weekly to get by.
“Food prices are getting so outrageous on everything,” Ritz said. “I mean, ground beef is $7, $8 a pound. I don’t understand that either, why the cost of food went up so much.”
He has seen a recent increase in people getting assistance, even those who appear to be middle- and upper-class.
“Like, even during COVID, there wasn’t as many as there are now,” he said. “It’s weird because you see people driving up in these BMWs getting food from the food pantry. I mean, they’re driving brand-new cars, and they’re going to the food pantry. They can’t be doing that good.”
Overway said that a lot of low-income families do not have access to enough healthy foods. “The issue is that, in order to feed their households, a lot of times, folks have to buy things that stretch, or they go a long way, Overway said. “And a lot of that involves pasta.”
“They have to make the decision on whether or not they’re going to go and spend $200 on fruits and vegetables or $200 paying their rent or their electric or their water bill,” he said.
Overway believes non-affordable housing is one of the driving forces behind this increase in food insecurity.
“It used to be that people's housing burden couldn't be more than 30% of their income,” he said. “Housing burden rates are into the 70 and 80 percentile range.”
The current data from the National Association of Realtors reports that the median listing price for a home in Collier is $675,000, up about 32.5% from a year ago.
On the Apartment Home Living website, current rentals for a one-bedroom unit are listed at $1,250-$4,546. Two-bedrooms range from $1,475-$4,948.
Right now, the coalition considers 16,343 households on its radar as at risk for homelessness. “These are folks that if they miss one day of work, chances are good they're homeless,” Overway said.
Stephen Popper is the president and CEO of Meals of Hope, a nonprofit with 15 mobile food banks that serve all of Collier County and parts of south Lee. He said the organization has signed up 1,239 new residents for food services since the beginning of the year.
“We're having to spend upwards of a million dollars this year going out and buying food for our food pantries because we just can't get enough through sources like the food banks or store pickups or food drives,” Popper said. “We have families that used to donate to our food pantries that are now actually receiving assistance.”
Popper said one of the fastest growing populations getting assistance is older, retired residents. “It’s their retirement not keeping up with inflation,” he said.
One area the organization serves is Immokalee, a community with a population of about 28,000 and a reported median household income of $40,114 in 2021. But Popper doesn’t see much of a difference between the community served at the Farm Worker Way pantry and the ones in Naples.
“The need is as equal in Immokalee as it is everywhere else,” Popper said.
Tony Mansolillo, the founder of the nonprofit Feed Thy Neighbor (FTN), is combating food insecurity by delivering 1,500 hot meals a week all over Collier. “A lot of these people made very good endeavors, and then life just turned on them,” Mansolillo said. “Even though they were scraping money out of their welfare checks to pay rent, that’s not good enough anymore.”
Alma Moretz, 42, lives in East Naples and became unemployed recently. Moretz said she has to think twice before buying nonessentials.
“You know, a vanilla Coke is like $2.65,” she said. “And they’re two for $4. Well, you can just go get a whole 12-pack.”
FTN has been delivering food to her on weekdays since before Hurricane Ian. “There’s times where I would have been left hungry without Feed Thy Neighbor,” she said.
Thomas Felke, the vice chairman of the Hunger & Homeless Coalition of Collier County, said the solution would involve the government, the nonprofit sector and the for-profit business sector working together.
“Homelessness, food insecurity, affordable housing, access to education, living wages and eventually self-sufficiency all require a proposal to address them simultaneously,” he said. “We keep addressing things in silos.”
He said poverty in Collier is not something most people think about. “People have a really difficult time getting past the beauty of the beaches in our areas to understand that, even though we have all those things, we still have social issues in our community,” he said. “And we don’t have the resources to support it, particularly in Collier County.”
Felke believes too many people ignore the issue.
“We’ve gone beyond NIMBY (not in my background),” he said. “We have gone to CAVE, which means citizens against virtually everything…I think we have jumped from the ‘not in my backyard’ to the ‘not anywhere that I can see it.’”
This story was produced by Democracy Watch, a news service provided by Florida Gulf Coast University journalism students. The reporter can be reached at gwendolyn.salata@yahoo.com
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