The impact of across-the-board federal budget cuts is starting to affect more than impatient air travelers. They're hitting the poorest Californians, like Sfia Smith, whose political voices aren't as powerful as a frequent flier's.

This week, the 69-year-old Santa Clara resident learned that she would have to pay $50 more a month to live in her senior apartment complex because of cuts to a federally subsidized housing program.

It is an extra $50 she doesn't have: Smith lives on less than $1,000 a month in Social Security benefits.

The cut to Smith's housing subsidy is one of a growing number of examples of how the federal sequester is hitting low-income Californians. The sequester is the sour fruit of a congressional deal to trim the federal deficit and includes 5 percent across-the-board cuts to all federal programs except for a few, including Social Security, veterans' benefits, food stamps and Medicaid.

Some of the earliest of the $85 billion worth of cuts to affect the general public included the furloughing of 13,000 air traffic controllers.

But soon after hearing complaints from air travelers, lawmakers quickly found money at the Federal Aviation Administration to bring the controllers back to work.

Advocates for the most-impoverished Americans say lawmakers acted so quickly because they perceive air travelers to be a cross section of well-to-do Americans who vote and frequently contribute money to campaigns. And poor folks aren't.

"Congress reacted so fast because members of Congress have to fly," said Paul Kraintz, director of the senior nutrition program in Contra Costa County, where federal cuts have hurt Meals on Wheels recipients.

"A member of Congress can work to have a military weapon manufactured in their district - even if the Pentagon doesn't want it - but they can't find the money to feed homebound seniors," Kraintz said.

Other social-services advocates worry that there isn't much bipartisan support in Congress for the plight of low-income Americans like Smith.

A bad position

After a lifetime of working a series of low-paying jobs - maid, cannery worker, assembly-line employee - Smith doesn't have a pension. Her daughter brings her lentils or fish most nights for dinner. She rarely goes out because she can barely spare money to see a movie.

Smith's housing options are limited in one of the nation's hottest housing markets. She lives a few miles from where the San Francisco 49ers are building a $1.2 billion stadium and top Silicon Valley tech firms are rolling in money.

Her daughter, Karima Holdman, is an unemployed former janitor and assembly-line worker. Holdman's longtime partner, Louie Campos, is a grocery checker, and they have little room to spare in their condo.

"This puts me in a bad position," Smith said of the cuts. "I don't understand why they have to do this to poor people."

Trickle down

Slowly and largely under the radar, sequester cuts are trickling down to programs like Kraintz's in Contra Costa, which just lost $100,000. To deal with the cuts to Meals on Wheels, which delivers food to low-income homebound seniors, the program stopped accepting new people into the program. Ordinarily, it accepts 50 new seniors a month.

Eventually, people who can't get into the program "will become an even larger burden on the taxpayers," Kraintz said.

The cuts will be especially painful to low-income residents in the Bay Area, where the cost of living is much higher than in the rest of the state.

In Silicon Valley, rents have increased 28 percent over the past four years. The Santa Clara Housing Authority is scrambling to deal with a recent $21 million cut in federal funding.

Last month, the authority voted to raise the rent for its existing tenants holding federal housing vouchers from 30 percent of their incomes to 35 percent. It was a painful choice, housing authority leaders said, but preferable to dropping families from the program.

"That sequester money isn't coming back, and we're living in the hottest housing market in the country," said Alex Sanchez, executive director of the Santa Clara Housing Authority.

Chopping Head Start

Across the Northern California counties of Tehama, Sutter, Colusa and Yolo, 40 young children of migrant farmworkers will be dropped from Head Start programs this month. The E Center, a private nonprofit that administers Head Start programs to low-income children in nine counties, must cope with $900,000 in funding cuts.

The cuts mean the children, who range from 4 months to 5 years old and for whom English is often a second language, will lose valuable early education time, said E Center CEO Tom Wagner.

In addition, he said, "many of the farmworkers will have no day care for their children, so many of them will just take them into the fields with them."

Getting attention

In southern Alameda County, leaders of Child, Family and Community Services, a Union City nonprofit, are trying to figure out how to slice 5 percent of its budget without cutting services to any of the 1,245 Head Start and Early Head Start children it serves.

Recalling the success airline travelers had in restoring sequestration cuts, Child, Family and Community Services President Denny Stein wryly suggested a protest tactic that advocates for low-income Americans could try.

"Maybe we should go to the airport and stage a sit-in," Stein said. "It might be the best way to get the attention of Congress."

Joe Garofoli is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli