$50K to Ballard Food Bank
...330 days to go...
This month Jen and I are giving $50K to Ballard Food Bank! I think this gift will have two meaningful impacts: a direct impact (meals in stomachs), and a less obvious indirect impact of keeping people from becoming homeless. I’ll explain how below. Apologies: the math will get a bit math-y.
Direct Impact: Meals Served
Let’s start with the direct impact. How much does it cost for BFB to distribute a meal to a hungry client?
In 2024, BFB’s community market (essentially a free grocery store) distributed 4.5 million pounds of food to clients1. That’s the weight of five fully-loaded 747s!
This required donations worth about $7.9 million. The majority of that was the value of food donated by individuals and businesses, but a good chunk was cash donations as well. Because food/product is only about 70% of a typical grocery store’s costs, we can say that the total cost of distributing that food was closer to $11.2 million ($7.9M divided by 70%), with the non-food value being supplied by a combination of volunteers and full-time staff. After all, just like Albertson’s or Kroger, BFB’s community market needs a lot of labor to get food on the shelves and out the door.
Thus, we can calculate BFB’s cost of distributing a pound of food at around $2.49 ($11.2M divided by 4.5M pounds). By that logic, a $50K donation buys about 20,000 pounds of food. If we use the USDA guideline of 1.2 pounds of groceries per meal, that’s 16,720 meals! If a person eats three meals a day, that’s enough to feed 15 people for a year while they get their feet under them.
But the impact extends beyond these individual meals.
Indirect Impact: Preventing Homelessness
There’s also an indirect impact. Every meal provided by BFB frees up money that individuals and families can use toward rent, utilities, medical bills and other necessities. If clients had to buy those meals in the private market, each meal would be a possible tipping point jeopardizing a rent payment and risking descent into homelessness. And once an individual is homeless, particularly for an extended period, it often becomes much more expensive to provide the tools they need to lift themselves back out. People in the field use the term ‘diversion’ to talk about helping housed people avoid becoming homeless.
Can we quantify this diversion impact?
A study of 11,000 at-risk families in New York City found that families receiving one month’s rent assistance were 2.5% less likely to enter shelter over the next three years than similarly at-risk families who were not provided assistance. Put another way: for every 40 families who avoid spending a rent payment’s worth of groceries (thanks to food bank assistance), about one family avoids homelessness.
We can’t ‘divert’ people who are already homeless, so we can only count dollars that go to housed people for this analysis. My estimate is that about 40% of BFB clients are homeless2, so that means $30K of our $50K gift will go to housed individuals and families.
How much is a rent payment in Seattle? The American Community Survey (conducted by the US Census Bureau) reports that an apartment in Seattle in the 25th percentile (i.e., 75% of apartments cost more) rents for $1,460 per month. This means our $30K is worth about 20 rent payments, statistically enough to help about 0.5 households avoid homelessness. The average Seattle household has 2.06 people, so this donation will divert about 1 person from homelessness (0.5 * 2.06).
Looking only at the indirect impact of this donation, is $50K to divert one person from homelessness good value? It’s probably not bad, when you consider that new housing units cost around $285K each according to an analysis by the Third Door Coalition.
In theory though, it’s probably possible to do better on this metric. If our donations target only housed individuals (vs only 60% of housed individuals at BFB), they’d be 1.7x more effective. And if our donations target only the highest-risk, most precariously housed individuals, the New York City study suggests they might be as much as 10% less likely to enter shelter over the next three years (vs only 2.5% less likely), an additional 4x multiplier.
But even attempting to target the highest-risk people requires asking a lot of intrusive questions and probably denying a lot of aid to folks who need it, so I feel pretty good we’ve gotten good value here.
The Bottom Line
With this donation, we’ll keep 15 people fed for a year while they work to improve their circumstances. Those full stomachs may mean the difference between holding onto a job and losing it, between a child focusing in school and getting distracted by hunger. And we’ll help one person avoid the devastating slide into homelessness entirely.
If you think I’ve gotten the math wrong, please consider leaving a comment - I’d love to know if you think the impact is different. If you think I’ve gotten it right, please consider making a donation alongside us to Ballard Food Bank (and let me know if you do!). It would be amazing to have you join us and scale the impact proportionally! A donation of $270 feeds one person for a month and just might prevent them from becoming homeless!
This post assumes the money will be used in BFB’s “community market” or grocery store, since that’s where over 75% of its 2024 budget was allocated. In reality, since we are pledging unrestricted funds, some of the money could be used to provide case management, direct financial support, or prepared meals. Each are worthy uses of the funds, and BFB is better positioned than we are to assess where the money can do the most good. But we think it’s likely the bulk of these funds will be used in the community market.
BFB doesn’t keep this data, but a proxy is that it distributes about 800 ‘no-cook’ bags per week, which are primarily used by homeless clients. That’s about 40K no-cook bags per year out of 112K total client visits and deliveries (a bit under 40%). I assume the percentage is lower in the community market (because housed clients take larger baskets than unhoused clients) and higher in the Kindness Cafe and HUB, so I think the 40% figure is quite conservative here. The true number is likely lower, meaning more food goes to housed individuals and more diversionary benefit.
I'm also shocked at the per unit TDC. Could ylthat be for micro-units, ADUs, or SROs ( although in MA, even those are more!)? Whatever, I love what you're doing for a year and can't wait to learn more about it!
Interesting deep dive into the numbers. I’m shocked at how low the per unit PSH development cost is in Seattle. I’m in Pasadena, California, and we (I work for the city) just committed funding to a project that has an $800k/unit cost. I think in LA County we’ll likely see some projects hit $1M/unit within the year. Our system, like so many, is broken. All that being said, we can’t conflate the development costs with the cost to end a household’s homelessness. Units house many households over time, and unit development is just one piece of housing people. No matter how you slice it, it is cheaper (and more humane, less traumatic, better for everyone…) to prevent homelessness than to house someone who has fallen into homelessness.