Motorists began to line up on roads surrounding Broadacres Marketplace last week, well ahead of a Three Square food giveaway amid increasingly punishing temperatures.
Most weekends, the vast parking lot welcomes families to the popular swap meet, where they shop and eat. Recently, it has also served as a pop-up food pantry.
The twice-weekly events have drawn as many as 500 vehicles and 100 pedestrians each day, Three Square President and CEO Beth Martino told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
The mammoth food bank also supplies dozens of Southern Nevada nonprofit food pantries.
“People are willing to come out and sit in their car for an hour and a half or walk up when it’s over 100 degrees outside,” said Martino, underscoring rising food insecurity in the region.
Feeding America — Three Square’s national counterpart — recently updated its annual Map the Meal Gap report that highlights food insecurity across the United States.
Southern Nevada, according to the findings, was home to nearly 400,000 food-insecure residents in 2024, or about a 20,000-person increase from the previous year.
Martino said that the report takes about 18 months to compile.
That means that one in six residents lacked enough food to live an active, healthy life, per federal guidelines, according to Three Square, which serves the Nevada counties of Clark, Nye, Lincoln and Esmeralda.
More than half a million Nevadans were food insecure in 2024
The Southern Nevada food bank distributed nearly 60 million pounds of food during its last fiscal year, “a significant increase over recent years,” the nonprofit said.
As a whole, the state had more than 540,000 food-insecure residents in 2024, according to the report. The state’s annual food budget shortfall was about $370.2 million.
Without current data, it’s challenging to determine where the 2026 figures stand, Martino said.
“I can’t say definitely that these numbers have worsened,” she said. “But I think all anecdotal indicators, and probably a few economic indicators, point toward the likelihood that food insecurity is worse.”
State of the economy contributes to rise
Cost of living increases are contributing, she said.
“We’ve definitely seen prices at the grocery store continue to rise. We all know that prices at the gas pump are higher,” Martino said. “So, whether it’s groceries or gas prices, all of those things today are affecting the people we serve.”
Transportation, she said, is one of the biggest barriers to accessing food, adding that the cost of owning a vehicle, including insurance costs, isn’t helping.
“It just creates a situation where it’s much more difficult for people that are lower and middle income, because all of those expenses are a greater portion of their take-home pay than for people at higher income levels,” Martino said.
Changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program also are factors, she said.
Increased SNAP benefits implemented during the pandemic began to lapse around the time the data for the 2024 hunger report was collected, she said.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law in July 2025 by President Donald Trump, expanded requirements for many adult SNAP recipients to work, volunteer or participate in job training for at least 80 hours a month.
In late July, Nevada’s SNAP had a monthly average of 440,115 enrollees, a decrease from nearly half a million beneficiaries reported in late 2025, when Nevada implemented a funding stopgap after the government shutdown led to a benefits pause.
Trump administration says SNAP changes were necessary
Proponents of the new SNAP eligibility provisions have argued that the program has long been rife with fraud.
The White House countered last year that the changes did not gut food stamps for hungry families, adding that only 28 percent of the able-bodied adults enrolled in the program worked.
“The mission of the program has failed: SNAP was intended to be temporary help for those who encounter tough times,” a White House fact sheet said. “Now, it’s become so bloated that it is leaving fewer resources for those who truly need help.”
Added the fact sheet: “We are committed to preserving SNAP for the truly needy.”
In late April, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said more than 4 million people no longer received SNAP benefits, which she attributed in part to fraud and an improving economy.
“As of just a couple of days ago, we now have moved 4.3 million Americans off of the food stamp program. A lot of that is fraud,” Rollins said. “A lot of it is people taking the program that shouldn’t have been. And a lot of it is just a better economy. We’ve had wage growth that has outpaced inflation for the first time since early 2021. This is a really big day. So people don’t need food stamps.”
Martino said that not everyone who exited the program did so because they didn’t qualify, adding that administrative changes also made it harder to apply.
The neighborhood where the swap meet is located lacks brick-and-mortar food pantries, Martino said. “And we knew that was a good location for us, but even we have been surprised at the turnout.”
Contact Ricardo Torres-Cortez at rtorres@reviewjournal.com. Contact Lucas Hellberg at lhellberg@reviewjournal.com. The Associated Press contributed to this report.
