(DailyVantage.com) – The City of San Francisco has launched a program where qualified shoppers can take whatever product or produce they need from a “free market” without paying a single cent.
Shoppers will still need to check everything out, but only for inventory purposes. Entry is through a benefits eligibility card granted to people who qualify for the program. The initiative, which is called the “District 10 Market” is located in the city’s Bayview Hunters Point location, which is close to a number of neighborhoods that do not have adequate access to a grocery store.
All in all, the initiative costs the city $5.5 million in taxpayer money, and also receives a lot of help through donations from other grocery stores.
The facility is 4,000 square feet, and is designed to address the food insecurity experienced by many of San Francisco’s poorer population. The free groceries qualified residents can claim for their own also include produce and dairy products, as well as other food products.
Geoffrea Morris, the activist who campaigned fiercely for the initiative to pass the city’s legislature, said that the program will especially help families whose benefits through the government’s food stamp program run out before the month is done. Morris said that inflation has especially exacerbated the poverty and lack of food security many poor Americans experience, necessitating programs such as the District 10 Market. Morris also clarified that the program is only meant to supplement what beneficiaries’ obtain from food stamps.
San Francisco’s free grocery is the latest in the city’s initiatives designed to ostensibly uplift the lives of the city’s poor and homeless population. Earlier in the year, the city launched a “managed alcohol program” that provides a certain amount of free alcohol to alcoholic homeless people, in a bid to ease the burden on the city’s public health services. Proponents of the program say that managed “doses” of alcohol given for free will help avoid incidents of withdrawal.
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