RATES OF FOOD INSECURITY for low-income adults in the Bay Area have risen dramatically in the last two decades, according to data from a statewide health survey.
For the Bay Area’s nine counties, food insecurity for adults who earn less than 200% of the federal poverty level has increased from 26% in 2001 to 46% in 2024, according to the California Health Interview Survey.
“Food insecurity is rising and this is especially true for the poorest Californians,” said Ninez Ponce, the director of the Center for Health Policy Research at University of California, Los Angeles, in a webinar Wednesday.
The California Health Interview Survey is an annual survey where more than 20,000 households from every county in the state answer questions related to health, such as food and housing insecurity, public program participation, and health conditions.
UCLA’s Center for Health Policy Research, which conducts CHIS, held a webinar with several researchers Wednesday to discuss the survey’s findings for 2024 and compare it to previous years.
For food insecurity data, CHIS includes rates for adults who earn less than 200% of the federal poverty level, which measures household income to determine eligibility for public assistance programs.
The rise in food insecurity for low-income adults in the Bay Area from 2001 to 2024 reflects a similar trend seen statewide, where the numbers went from 29% to 47.2% for the same income group and time range.
… Nearly half of the lowest-income adults in the state could not afford enough to eat.
Ninez Ponce, director of the Center for Health Policy Research at UCLA
“That means nearly half of the lowest-income adults in the state could not afford enough to eat. This is a sharp increase,” Ponce said.
In the Bay Area, the counties of Sonoma, Napa, Santa Cruz, Contra Costa, and San Mateo saw the greatest increases in food insecurity in the state for adults making less than 200% of the federal poverty level in 2024 compared to 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic. In Sonoma County, 63% of adults in this income group had food insecurity in 2024, one of the highest rates in the state.
On the other hand, San Francisco and Marin counties were the only Bay Area counties to experience a drop in food insecurity rates from 2019 to 2024 for this income group. For example, 28% of adults in this income group in San Francisco reported food insecurity in 2024 versus 59% in 2019.
The San Francisco-Marin Food Bank, which serves meals and food staples to about 44,000 households weekly in San Francisco and Marin counties, uses CHIS data to try to understand how it can shape its services to match the level of local need.
“We really need strong data on food security trends,” said San Francisco-Marin Food Bank’s chief data and technology officer Maxwell Titsworth during the webinar. “Who is being served, who is not being served, and how can we better meet the needs of those populations?”
The food bank has partnered with CHIS to expand the survey’s population pool to include adults in San Francisco and Marin counties who make between 200% and 400% of the federal poverty level for the 2025 and 2026 surveys.
“Right now, we don’t really have a great understanding of food security at the middle-income level,” Titsworth said. “For us in the high-cost-of-living counties and region, we really need to understand what food security prevalence looks like at those higher ranges.”
The data for the 2025 CHIS is expected to be available toward the end of this year.