Let them eat Cheetos
An interesting story in the Washington Post highlights a very tangible downside to the rapacious gentrification and condopalooza overtaking the five boroughs: a form of food insecurity tied to geography, not income.
Alicia Rivera has no good supermarket within walking distance of her Brooklyn home. A leg injury keeps her from taking the bus, so every three weeks a friend picks her up and drives her to a different neighborhood to stock up on green peppers, milk, chicken wings, ground beef -- as much as she can fit in her kitchen to last until the next shopping trip.
"It's hard," Rivera said as she unloaded her haul from the car into a cart. She buys mainly what she can freeze, and that means few fruits and vegetables. "I wish there was a good store close by," she added.
There's more.
Soaring real estate values are prompting property owners throughout the city to shutter grocery stores and sell to developers, according to city officials, supermarket owners and industry analysts. In the process, another of the essential services that make New York livable is pushed further away, replaced by glittering condos and more banks.
Today there are one-third fewer supermarkets in New York's five boroughs than there were six years ago, said Lawrence Sarf, the president of F&D Reports, a retail consulting company.
As it becomes ever easier to acquire a triple-shot latte on every corner of the city, not to mention artisanal cheeses at one's local bodega, the banishment of supermarkets from the urban core adds another burden on the City's harried working class, further fraying neighborhoods already beset by rising economic inequality. Considering the well-established linkage between food insecurity and broader societal challenges - childhood obesity comes to mind - a loss of a third of community-oriented retail platforms is disturbing.
There are policy tools available - a community food assessment, for example - to diagnose possible action items for policy-makers. The question is whether those steps will be taken as long as the real estate industry is flooding campaign coffers with cash.
The Bloomberg administration, to its credit, is looking for creative ways to address this variant of food insecurity.
One project is the return of the greengrocer pushcart, an effective and low-cost way to get fresh produce in certain neighborhoods, Bloomberg said. The city plans to license 1,500 street vendors to sell fruits and vegetables in the city's poorest neighborhoods.
Another program encourages bodegas to carry low-fat milk and to sell fruits and vegetables in single-serving bags.
Officials are also planning to launch a statewide supermarket commission that will seek new ways to interest grocery stores in neighborhoods that need them.
Problem is, that really is tinkering at the margins. There's no substitute for broadly dispersed retail accessible to all New Yorkers physically and financially. Unless, of course, we want a City that is a luxury ghetto.
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Urban Development
Valid point, but
Submitted by Bouldin on 19 February 2008 - 7:55pm.
when I say geographically based food insecurity, it's simply because this isn't uniformly distributed. Makes total sense to me at least. What's especially pernicious is that this extends insecurity into higher income brackets - if you don't have a store where you are, it doesn't matter how much you make, you sill won't be able to shop without extra effort you may not be able to make.
The spatial dimension is an additional burden beyond economic deprivation, that's clear.
This is what unthinking development leads to
Submitted by Paul Newell on 19 February 2008 - 6:36pm.
On the Lower East Side we are losing our Pathmark. This store got a 42 year lease in the 80’s to sell food in an underserved community. Today, having sold to A&P, they are planning to clse the store in favor of a luxury condo tower. This tower will be surrounded on two sides by NYCHA housing, and the other two by highway overpasses, and will have no supermarket for its residents. “Not to worryâ€, the brochures will read, “you can always get Fresh Direct.†Because that is what our community needs, more Fresh Direct trucks and less affordable food.
Not all development is bad, but it must be thought through. But our electeds have no incentive to listen to their community. When you have gamed the system to protect your sinecure for decades, the REBNY checks are much more persuasive.
"The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy." - Al Smith
http://www.newellnyc.org
The root of the problem
Submitted by Dan Jacoby on 19 February 2008 - 9:33pm.
I recently spoke with a developer, and he told me that once a large grocery store opens the availability of further development pretty much ceases. The point is, unless an area is already built up about as much as it can be (say, with luxury condos/coops/rentals) it's not worth it to the developers to let grocery stores in.
I don't know why he believed this to be so, as I was too shocked by the fact that he was willing to say this to me to question him further. But it may begin to explain why so many areas are either underserved by grocery stores or about to become so.
Clearly we need to find out: a) Is this true? b) If true, why, and if not, why is it believed? c) What can be done to change either the fact of it or the mentality behind it?
Grocery Stores
Submitted by ROSALIE907 on 19 February 2008 - 10:56pm.
I live in a middle class neighborhood. There used to be 2 supermarkets here then one sold out. The other (Key Food) then sold out to Rite Aid and now we have to go 3 Avenues for a Key Food, 1/2 mile for Stop & Shop or 1 mile to Pathmark. This isn't something new. The Key Food that was where Rite Aid is sold out more than 10 years ago.
It's a disgrace that especially our elderly or those with small children have to travel distances to do their food shopping.
Yesterday I was talking with the Mother of my niece's friend. Her daughter is going to FIT and and since this year's (her final) she wouldn't get out of class until after 10 PM she is dorming there. No grocery stores except for a Whole Foods which is 2 or 3 Avenues and several blocks from her dorm. They got her a Fresh Direct account and she placed an order in which she got rotten bananas and molded cottege cheese. She called them up and gave them hell but can you imagine if this had happened to a senior citizen.
The desertion of our supermarkets has been going on from early in the Giuliani Administration so Bloomberg can't get all of the blame. What he can do is get these chains to open new stores in areas where the poor and middle class live. Why is a Whole Foods going into Brooklyn Heights instead of another neighborhood? Why isn't Key Food, Pathmark (Paul I really feel for the people this store's closing is going to harm)Stop & Shop or any other chain opening stores in neighborhoods where they can service a population that's getting thrown in the garbage? Something needs to be done about this and only the people can do it.
You read this article differently from the way I do.
You characterize the closing of neighborhood supermarkets in lower-income areas "a form of food insecurity tied to geography, not income."
The adverse impacts are on lower income New Yorkers. The Washington Post article by Robin Shulman makes this clear as I read it. The neighborhoods which lack good food shopping are not those living life-styles like Mr. Bloomberg's. Indeed
Far from credit, Mr. Bloomberg deserves blame for driving supermarkets from the neighborhoods of lower and moderate income New Yorkers. His Administration's highest bidder, laissez-faire land-use policies drive out commercial uses that residents need and the counter efforts of Mr. Thomases (Mr. Bloomberg's food Czar) add up, as I see it, to Potemkin health-food push-carts.