I live in a medium Canadian city with a fair amount of industry, some insurance companies and a good university. There has always been a bit of tension between “town and gown” with a large student population. The downtown area, apart from a strip of bars and restaurants, has continued a long trend of becoming more downmarket and less densely populated. The pandemic will worsen this. There are many nice, historic buildings there owned by companies in no apparent hurry to develop them, as they feel prices will increase with time - as is slowly happening. There is really only one grocery store in the downtown area, which is often mentioned with regards to the desirability of living downtown. Still, it’s not a long drive to the malls closer to the edges of town. And there is a downtown market, and plenty of grocery stores outside the downtown area of several square miles.
My town is not LA. You could make an argument there is a small “food desert” which would likely be corrected by market forces. Several nearby cities in a similar spot, but closer to the Big City, saw their downtowns rejuvenated after building booms and rises in housing prices, due to the fact Big City has long been unaffordable and people moved away. Our town is two hours from Big City and it is a crowded and unpleasant commute, though. The downtown has shown few signs of rejuvenation.
I have read about food deserts - big patches on US cities where vegetables are hard to come by and prices predatory. Do these exist near you? Are they common? Is this problem improving, or has some company targeted this niche with smaller stores and moderate prices?
It’s often whined about in Chicago, but it follows a familiar cycle of building stores in low income areas and then they’ll be burned or looted fairly quickly.
Chicago has excellent public transportation though so it’s pretty hard to be isolated away from decent grocery stores.
It says 20% of rural areas in America are considered a food desert since there are no large grocery stores. This amazes me - in Canada even small towns tend to have a store - outside of Northern Canada, where food is astonishingly expensive.
This is not new. I lived in New Orleans’ French Quarter in the 60s. Few people had cars. There was just one small superette in the whole Quarter, I had to walk way out below Esplanade to buy an onion. There were a lot quicker ways to make a buck on a storefront invrstment.
Dallas is kind of interesting, in that the USDA maps are pretty inaccurate, or if not inaccurate, at least kind of misleading.
One thing they don’t do is list ethnic food stores, which is kind of absurd, and the other thing they do is that they confuse walkability with food deserts. I mean, in my part of town there’s no shortage of grocery stores spaced about what they are everywhere else. But there are a few low-rent apartment complexes and houses which are tucked up near a major freeway intersection that technically meet the food desert criteria because two sides are taken up with 1/2 mile of freeway. And on the other, they’re about a mile from a big Kroger. So on paper it’s a food desert, but it’s more a matter of not being able to easily walk to the Kroger than any sort of widespread unavailability of grocery stores.
In the southern part of town, there’s some sort of issue with grocery stores not making money and pulling out. It’s not clear if it’s theft, too low of income in the area, competition from bodegas/corner stores or what, but the city keeps trying different subsidies, etc… and none seem to work for the long term.
That’s almost certainly a function of whatever distance they use. If they set it at like 10 miles, there are LOTS of small towns without a grocery store in 10 miles. But there’s almost certainly a Wal-Mart superstore in 15 miles of them, for example.
That said, there are some areas I’ve been in where it literally is a LONG way from anywhere. If you lived out in western Nebraska/eastern Wyoming, it might be 40-50 miles to anything.
The other thing that is absurd is that the absence of a supermarket that sells meat and produce defines a desert. I live in an urban neighborhood - and at times, the only thing preventing it from being a “food desert” was the median income. Because one supermarket didn’t have a produce section, so it didn’t count. Even though there was a fruit and vegetable store across the street. In fact, there can be a butcher, a fruit/vegetable store and a grocery store all adjacent to each other - and because they’re separate buildings with possibly different ownership that area still can still qualify as a food desert.
If I walk from my house to a 35mph road (so in-town road, not a major highway, and easily crossable) then go about a quarter of a mile down the road, I’m standing at the entrance to a Food Lion parking lot, which is obviously not a food desert. If I cross said road, I’m now in a neighborhood that is designated as a food desert. If I drive to my favorite Mexican grocery store, which has fresh produce and a huge meat counter, I’m smack in the middle of another food desert. I think the Asian Market nearest me is also in one.
I think the definition of ‘food desert’ is designed to be alarming, but doesn’t show anything meaningful. If a ‘food desert’ neighborhood requires crossing literally one 35 mph street to be in a supermarket parking lot, and another designated area has a grocery store that has a lot of unusual items at its meat counter, I have a hard time buying that the designation shows a real problem.
I think that depends on your maneuverability both injury/age-wise and small-children wise. While crossing a medium-sized road ideally should simply be a modifier rather than an absolute barrier, it could be a major factor in feeling that a grocery store is far away if you can only cross the street slowly and have to wait longer for a safe time to cross.
No, I think that calling a neighborhood that literally borders a supermarket a ‘food desert’ is simply absurd. If someone is so injured that they can’t travel 1000 feet without help, the issue is their severe disability, not the location of places to buy food. The idea that suburban neighborhoods need so many supermarkets that you never need to cross anything but a 25mph road to get to one or they’re a ‘food desert’ where healthy food is unavailable to people makes no sense whatsoever, and you shouldn’t try to justify it. It’s actually counterproductive to getting anyone to solve real issues with food availability, because they’ll see that kind of silliness and think that’s what all of the areas that supposedly have a problem are like. (Also not counting a Mexican grocery store as a grocery store is… yeah.)
Looking at Schenectady, there are only two full supermarkets that stock produce and fresh meat within the city limits and neither are anywhere near Hamilton Hill, the low-income neighborhood. Public transit is mediocre, involving a several block walk to get to any bus, so if you can’t drive, you’re in trouble. Also taking public transport means you can’t really stock up when you manage to get there. You can easily spend an hour in transit time.
The issue with not having produce and fresh meat is that people have to go to high calorie, high salt, high sugar meals, which can cause health problems.
I didn’t address the Mexican grocery store. I agree that it should count especially since it has all the major items needed (as opposed to having a produce market, a butcher, and a bodega next to each other which would meet all one’s requirements but would be hard to gather data-wise).
I think there are problems with food desert identification. Even in my city there are neighborhoods that are across from a grocery store that are labelled as food deserts, but I was lead to believe that the label was on a large enough granularity that it showed the whole neighborhood rather than just the parts that were far from the store.
I just don’t think it’s absurd to consider that crossing a non-trivial street would make something more inaccessible. I think that it is less informative to always consider it a firm barrier than to always consider it trivial, so I would agree with you that they should remove that criterion if those are the only two choices. Something in the middle would be better though.
When I hear the phrase “food desert” it makes me laugh because one time in a discussion on a local Facebook group where people were complaining about a lack of non-chain restaurants in town, some lady called this a “food desert.” I think also because we don’t have a Whole Foods, too. We’re a suburban area of about 30,000 people in 4 communities with a large grocery store, a tiny grocery store, an Aldi, a Wal Mart and a Target. But she couldn’t get what she wanted (a fancy dinner? I don’t even remember) so she declared us a “food desert.”
Anyway, food deserts are not a problem here. Just for that one lady.
The red stars are legitimate food stores. Specifically two Krogers, two Wal-Mart supercenters, a Tom Thumb(Safeway), a Fiesta Mart, two La Michoacana mercados, a El Rancho Supermercado, a Braum’s Fresh Market, an Aldi, and an Asian supermarket. There’s also a Costco on the map, but I didn’t put a star on it, since it needs a membership.
In particular, the three closest stars off the SE corner are a Kroger (the closest), the Braum’s Fresh Market, and a Wal-Mart Supercenter.
It’s a food desert in the absolutely most technical sense of the term. Beyond that, there aren’t any places to put a grocery store in or near that green area without excessive expense and trouble. And why would you? There are clearly LOTS of grocery stores nearby.
Here’s another in SW Houston where I grew up. Same deal- we’ve got a Super H-Mart, and a couple of other Asian markets (it’s a heavily Asian part of Houston), as well as a Fiesta Market and a humongous HEB on the map. Maybe not within walkable distance, but definitely not far at all. And part of the issue is that when the homes in the left side of the “desert” were built, there were two more grocery stores close by- one a couple of blocksd of where "Fountain Square is (Belle Park @ Bellaire- Minimax was its name), and there was a Kroger literally within the SW corner of the green area that has closed relatively recently.
I do. The idea that someone is in a ‘food desert’ when they can literally see a supermarket from their front door is completely and utterly absurd. This isn’t an exaggeration, I can literally stand on the streets of the food desert and gaze upon the sign of Food Lion.
If the idea of a food desert is actually about people being able to get food, then claiming that someone who lives RIGHT ACROSS THE STREET from a supermarket is in one is completely absurd. If it’s some kind of argument for foot transport, it’s still absurd because you’d have have 10x or 100x more supermarkets than today to have them all where no one has to cross a non-neighborhood street to get to one. With the way zoning works, I’m not even sure that you can legally build a supermarket that is only reachable by 25mph streets, as those are normally in areas zoned for only residential or very small, low-traffic business, not large retail areas with major parking like supermarkets.
I said that it should be a factor, but not the only factor, and if this isn’t possible then it would be preferable to ignore street size than to always eliminate adjacent stores. How did you get that I support eliminating adjacent stores? I pretty much said the opposite of that. I also said that small stores, without so much parking and zoning needs, should be counted if they have the necessary goods so I don’t see where you got that I support only full scale supermarkets.
You said that you didn’t find it absurd that a house that is ‘cross one single street to arrive at a supermarket’ would be considered to be in a ‘food desert’ because the street should count as some kind of significant barrier. I disagree completely, counting crossing a street as some sort of huge barrier warranting the name ‘food desert’ is, in fact, absurd.
