The drive through Greenwich, pearl of Connecticut's Gold Coast, can feel like a journey into 48 square miles of money.

From back-country lanes around the exclusive Round Hill Club - past patrician estates, $5 million colonials, the Ferrari and Porsche dealerships, Saks and Hermès - to the Indian Harbor Yacht Club on the sound, Greenwich, celebrated hedge fund capital of the world, seems to drip with wealth.

This is a story about the other Greenwich - the one that's brought Patricia Restrepo to a downtown food pantry, not far from the Citarella Gourmet Market, on this crisp November Monday.

Restrepo is trying to make ends meet in one of the wealthiest places in America. And she's trying to do it on a housekeeper's wages - about $14 an hour is the national average - here on the seacoast of Fairfield County.

Restrepo is one of the thousands of people living in Greenwich today who face food insecurity. Between stubborn inflation and nosebleed-high rents, they're struggling to afford food, and in some cases don't know where their next meal will come from.

And the problem is getting worse - not only here, but across the US.

The numbers are startling. Nationwide, food insecurity rose in 2022 for the first time in a decade. As savings dwindled among the poorest and grocery prices continued to rise this year, about 28 million adults had "sometimes or not often" enough to eat in the past week, according recent household surveys from the Census Bureau. That represented 12.5% of the total, up from 11.4% a year earlier. The jump was even more pronounced in Connecticut, and the latest data from the state food bank Connecticut Foodshare shows the problem has worsened in Greenwich.

"The world thinks of Greenwich as a place where the roads are paved in gold," says Rep. Jim Himes, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who represents the area in Congress. Not so, the Democrat says.

Rich and poor live side by side in some of the world's biggest cities, the former often employing the latter - and each dependent on the other, in their own way. But in this era of hyper-wealth and gaping inequality, affluent enclaves like Greenwich render the extremes with a miniaturist's brush. The picture is troubling. Inflation has pinched everyone's wallet. The well-off are donating less money, after a surge in philanthropy during the COVID-19 crisis. For many, the end of pandemic-era relief measures seems to have torn new holes in the nation's already-fragile safety nets.

Greenwich, 35 miles from Manhattan, has been luring shiny new fortunes for more than a century. Today it's home to at least four billionaires, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Among them are hedge-fund moguls Ray Dalio ($16.5 billion) and Steve Cohen ($13.9 billion). Lesser lights, mere multimillionaires, work at some 400 private investment funds on the Gold Coast.

The average home price here recently topped $4 million and the per capita income, at $112,136, was almost three times the national figure. Top-flight Greenwich High School boasts a championship water polo team and an electron microscope.

Restrepo arrived here from Colombia 25 years ago. She wants a tiny slice of this American dream for her daughter. But these days, she's feeling squeezed. Her rent runs $1,850 a month (the median in the area has risen more than 6% in the past year to $5,000), and she covers that herself.

And so, the Neighbor to Neighbor food pantry is the first stop each week for Restrepo and her sister, Sandra, also a housekeeper. They pick up fruit, vegetables and other basics in the brightly lit annex on church property named after Cohen, a donor. It's a "client choice" pantry that lets people choose food with the help of a points system based on the size of their family. The sisters strategize about which groceries they pick up at the pantry.

Restrepo knows she could move to a cheaper town, but that would make her commute to work longer. She also stays for the public schools, some of the country's best. Plus, if she leaves, she would lose access to the local food bank and other services, which are only available to Greenwich residents. And, she says, tearing up, Greenwich has felt like home since the day she arrived.

It's the warmth of the town that makes her stay. Here, philanthropy is a resource in ways big and small.

"People really do care, once they understand," said Gaby Rattner, the executive director of the local nonprofit Barbara's House. Getting the word out about issues like food insecurity can be difficult, she said, but once residents are aware of what their neighbors are going through, there's "nothing but generosity and support and kindness and enthusiasm."

Roughly 8,500 people in the area are eligible to receive food assistance through the state, and Neighbor to Neighbor supplies three days' worth of meals to 600 households each week. In its 2023 financial year, the pantry distributed 100,000 pounds of fruit and vegetables, plus eggs, meat and other goods. It collected $4.2 million in donations.

Those millions might sound like a lot of money. But donations have dropped 10% to 15% since the worst days of the pandemic, while the price of just about everything has gone up, says Duncan Lawson, the operations manager. The decline reflects similar national trends in giving by the wealthy.

Neighbor to Neighbor is one of dozens of food pantries across Connecticut, where the share of households facing food scarcity jumped to 12.5% in October from 8.6% a year earlier, the Census survey showed. The problem is particularly acute in areas like Hartford, the state capital, and Bridgeport, a former manufacturing city 29 miles up the coast from Greenwich.

Families like the Restrepos face a catch-22. They need help to make ends meet in pricey places like Greenwich. But if they move or make even a little more money, they become ineligible for benefits they depend on.

Connecticut, for instance, allows households that make as much as 100% above the poverty line to collect benefits under the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. For a household of four, earning more than $5,000 a month will mean losing the benefits.

Better job? Fewer benefits? "It becomes a hard decision to make," says Dan Giacomi, director of the state's SNAP program.

Jason Jakubowski, president of Connecticut Foodshare, says people's needs are greater now that pandemic-relief programs have ended. But the big issue in Connecticut is that the state has become such a costly place to live. Federal data released this month shows that it is the 10th most expensive state in the country.

"The issue is cost of living," Jakubowski says.

The wealthy don't feel the pinch as hard as the less well-off. In the gated community of Belle Haven, on a pristine spit of land jutting into Long Island Sound, the annual household income averages nearly $620,000. Directly north in Chickahominy, where many of Greenwich's non-white residents live, that figure drops to under $110,000, and 40% of residents make less than $50,000 a year. On average, a family of four in this town needs to make $151,000 a year to get by without a struggle, according to the Greenwich United Way.

"Inflation in this town, to be honest, doesn't impact a lot of people," said Juan Benitez, a private chef in Greenwich who charges clients $100 an hour to shop for groceries and prep meals - the going rate among the area's culinary workers.

But he turned down that work during the week of Thanksgiving so he could put together dinner for 100 seniors and box ingredients for 75 families. It's part of a running effort with Greenwich native Tony Calabrese, chief operating officer of Shorenstein Properties LLC, and Barbara's House.

Calabrese, a Greenwich native, met Benitez for coffee one day three years ago to discuss what they could do. Even he was floored by how many people struggle to make ends meet. "It's easy," he said, "to move to New York or live in back Greenwich and not really understand what's going on this side of the highway."