rouxfully replied to your post:at this point can we agree that the whole ~food...
Okayyy but having lived in a food desert in a city with shitty public transit it really really IS something that impacts the lives of people there?
Oh, zero disagreement there. The first year I was on tumblr I lived a 45 minute walk from a grocery store in a city in the same part of the world as yours (i.e. a very snowy one) and it does impact quality of life. But the policy question here is whether building new grocery stores will improve the lives of current residents.
And there doesn’t appear to be much evidence that that’s the case? Like, in a lot of cities, developers get incentives to build grocery stores, but this is almost definitely not a helpful policy since they choose to build in neighbourhoods that are getting richer (typically, poor neighbourhoods right next to downtown) anyway. And in general if you start putting in a bunch of retail amentieis in a neighbourhood that previously lacked retail amenities, rents are going to go up, and the incumbent residents are going to be replaced with new ones who can pay for the proximity of grocery stores - so in this scenario you’ve tried to subsidize the poor residents but ended up subsidizing their (generally wealthier) landlords.
There are plenty of policies you can think of to mitigate this (e.g. improving transportation options, putting restrictions on rent increases, full-on subsidized housing or cash transfers) but these are all broader anti-poverty measures that are more sweeping (and expensive!) than building a new grocery store in a currently poor neighbourhood. Whether you think these policies are a good idea depends on your idea of what your city should look like - I have some pretty strong feelings on this but ultimately it’s a political question. But I’d suggest the concept of food deserts (i.e., proximity to a grocery store as a specific outcome to be targeted) doesn’t have much relationship with the well-being of poor residents.
