Previous research had found that “supermarket flight” in fact traced back to the 1950s and 1960s, when retail suburbanized with housing and the grocery industry began a gradual process of consolidation to remain competitive . By the 1980s, Reagan-era deregulation relaxed previous corporate antitrust policies. This would encourage the trend towards larger, fewer supermarkets, each of which gained larger shares of grocery sales over time—an benefit to stockholders but not necessarily consumers . Between 1979 and 1989, 16 of the nation’s top 20 grocery retailers experienced mergers and leveraged buyouts, resulting in a complete reorganization of the grocery industry . Furthermore, between 1970 and 1990, half of the supermarkets in the three largest U.S. cities closed . The U.S. Mayor’s Conference report reinforced this findings emphasizing the implications for these industry wide changes on local communities and vouching for the creation of new policies to ‘end the redlining of urban America by the supermarket industry’ . As a result, the report drew a strong response from the national media, trade associations, grocery retailers, and the federal government. The news media featured the findings of the report as well as the beginnings of coordinated local responses by local entrepreneurs. Despite disputing the rhetoric of the report, the Food Marketing Institute created an Urban Initiatives Task Force designed to revitalize communities through the development of grocery stores and job creation.Regional retailers Lucky’s, Von’s,hydroponic growing system and Path mark Supermarket made new commitments to open stores in underserved areas mostly in the Pacific West and Northeast respectively .
The hearing featured statements from urban grocery experts, Ronald Cotterill and Mark Winne, residents of grocery-deficient communities, and notably, the work of the Monsignor William Lindor, executive director/founder of Newark’s New Community Corporation . A faith based CDC operating in Newark’s poor urban areas since 1968, NCC garnered widespread acclaim for its comprehensive scope of work including retail, housing, health centers, and social service programs initiatives for poor urban residents. Amongst its most notable achievements was its joint venture partnership with Path mark supermarket, among the first of larger supermarket chains to reenter urban areas by way of CDC partnerships. Together, these speakers highlighted several key trends among urban grocery stores that were beginning to be explored but had not yet been widely publicized. This included new evidence showing that poorer urban residents pay between 8 to 30% more for food each year than more affluent residents and spend an extra $400-$1000 per year to commute to supermarkets outside of their own communities due to limited vehicle ownership . Several ways forward were identified including: 1) more stringent corporate anti-trust policies that promote more competition within the grocery industry and Electronic Benefits Transfer systems ; 2) grocery shuttles for resident of low income communities ; 3) regulatory and tax incentives for urban grocery development ; 4) public private partnerships among entrepreneurs and community organizations ; and 5) municipal and federal policies to support the financing, development, and operations of new grocery stores, new funding streams to support inner city economic development . The hearing did not lead to immediate federal policy actions per se, but it generated political awareness of the visceral nature of disinvestment in poorer urban communities as exemplified by access to grocery stores. Additionally, it reinforced the critical role of CDCs as key drivers of economic development, even in spite of dwindling federal funding channels and limited organizational capacities for retail-oriented initiatives. Finally, while the hearing did not result in immediate federal policy actions around grocery stores, it would pave the way for a new era of federal revitalization policies advantageous to urban grocery development.
As such, the “urban grocery gap” was situated within broader discussions on how best to leverage the private sector, the burgeoning “community development industry” , and government to systemically address urban poverty and disinvestment. In line with the scope and intent of Clinton-era federal urban revitalization policies, scholars of business, economic development, and community planning looked to these CDC experiments as further confirmation of the need for modes of “inner city revitalization.” For example, Bendick and Egan argued for mutual integration of community development and business development to more systemically address the symptoms of urban poverty. Namely, community development activities can become a boon to business by expanding the pool of potential employees, improving service delivery, rehabilitating real estate. And yet, business alone may not impart the trickle down social impacts, which may be best provided in the form of community development activities including social services, housing rehabilitation, and workforce development. Ultimately, business that serves community goals and vice versa, may be more effective in revitalizing poor communities than one singular approach. Bendick and Egan’s view reflects a longstanding divide between social and economic goals in community development practice, despite integrated efforts through the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 and subsequent practices by CDCs. And yet the gradual diminishing of funding for business-oriented activities by CDCs reflected the continued challenge to truly marry these largely disparate approaches to neighborhood revitalization. Bendick and Egan begin to suggest the business benefits brought on by community development, however pre-eminent business scholar, Michael Porter, perhaps made the most influential argument for business development in the “inner city.” In his seminal article, “The Competitive Advantage of the Inner City,” Porter argued that entitlements and social investments alone may not mitigate urban poverty. Rather, inner cities must create wealth in order to redistribute wealth through “private, for profit-initiatives and investments based on economic self-interest and competitive advantage” . Furthermore, contrary to perceptions, inner cities are poised for successful economic development given their locational benefits, untapped market demands, an available workforce, and potential for regional economic development.
In a follow-up piece, Porter highlighted CDC-supermarket partnerships as models of how “the private sector is already waking up to the potential of inner cities” and how “entrepreneurs are creating businesses that cater to the distinct needs of inner city consumers” . Critics have argued that Porter’s model oversimplifies the solution to urban poverty , understates the role of minority-owned and locally-owned businesses in economic revitalization , and discounts the role of government and community development corporations in encouraging private investment .Yet Porter has been credited for widening ongoing discussions about inner city revitalization to encompass the question of retail. Porter put forth his proposal amidst growing research on the magnitude of urban grocery and retail gaps and continued suburban retail expansion due to available land, lower development costs, looser zoning laws, and higher purchasing power . Still Porter elicited a strong response from grocery retailers in particular,mobile vertical grow tables who began reentering poorer under served communities in the early 1990s in part due to new federal incentive programs . Although federal programs specifically focused on grocery stores would emerge in the 2010s, the Clinton Administration initiated a string of federal urban revitalization programs that would provide preliminary solutions to the urban grocery gap. The first of these programs was Empowerment Zone program, which aimed to combine the economic incentive structure of the statewide Enterprise Zones with workforce development and social services. Administered by U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development since 1993, the program provides competitive block grants to local governments for collaborative economic and workforce development activities. Food security was part of a national policy concern since 1930s and 1940s with the instatement of the first Food Stamp program and the National School Lunch Act of 1946 . Although the initial goals of the Food Stamp program was primarily focused on hunger alleviation, some argue that it was focused more on assisting farmers by purchasing food surpluses and feed the poor . The School Lunch Act was premised in improving childhood health, when almost half of potential draftees were rejected due to physical ailments traceable to malnutrition. Essentially, access to nutritious and healthy food was part of national security agendas—whether keeping the U.S. self-sufficient in terms of its food needs or as a way to ensure the health of future citizens. And yet by the 1960s, hunger became a central national policy issue with growing medical research and journalistic accounts of childhood hunger in poor urban communities.The Kennedy administration reinstated the Food Stamp Program, which was later expanded to include a School Breakfast Program and what is now known as Women, Infants, and Children . In cities across the U.S., anti-hunger movements proliferated against the backdrop of the civil rights, free speech, and anti-war movements. Between 1969 and 1970, the Office of Economic Opportunity funded the first anti-hunger voluntary associations, including the Food Research and Action Center, based in Washington D.C. . Amidst continued local advocacy around childhood malnutrition and hunger, in December 1969, Nixon initiated his own “war on hunger” at a White House conference on Food, Nutrition, and Health noting, “the moment is at hand to put an end to hunger in America itself. For all time” . For the decade that followed, federal food programs expanded its focus on cash subsidies and vouchers—all premised in a “medical model” of hunger and malnutrition . However, the anti-hunger movement would shift more broadly towards “food security,” with growing research and evidence of the connections between socioeconomic status and hunger. During the early years of Reagan administration, social assistance programs experienced significant reductions amidst an economic recession . As a result, existing emergency food providers reported an abrupt rise in the use of their services by ‘the new poor,’ suddenly under-resourced children, youth, and families . Evaluations of food assistance recipients at the time further confirmed that the risk of hunger multiplied with increasing poverty and reduced food assistance benefits .
Amidst this crisis, the Reagan administration looked to private sector food banks, food pantries, and soup kitchens to meet increasing food demands. These circumstances elicited a strong response from anti-hunger, anti-poverty, and social justice activists who began promoting “community food security” policies in the late 1980s and 1990s. The culmination of these early efforts was the Community Food Security Coalition, a national network of activists promoting new provisions in the 1995 U.S. Farm Bill ensuring community food security: that ‘all persons obtaining at all times a cultural acceptable, nutritionally adequate diet through local non-emergency sources.” The proposed 1995 Community Food Security Empowerment Act called for reductions in traditional food assistance programs and instead the creation of a new competitive grants program for community food projects35 in low income, under served communities. Already prior to the Community Food Security Act, the U.S. had a long history of community-based and local government community garden programs , counterculture food movements involving food buying clubs and cooperatives , and community-driven food assistance programs . However, the Act was distinct in its focus integrating social equity, economic justice, environmental sustainability through community-based means . As of 1996, the Act was included in the Farm Bill, authorizing the USDA Community Food Projects Competitive Grants Program, which allocates $16 million over the course of seven years with guidance from the Community Food Security Coalition. Through a competitive application process, the USDA administers one to three-year matching grants ranging from $10,000-300,000. The community food security movement distinguished itself from the anti-hunger movement by focusing on community food needs through community food planning, direct marketing, community gardening, food assistance, farmland protection, food retail strategies, and associated community and economic development . Domestically, this initial scholarship inspired hundreds of ‘food desert’ studies since 2000, ranging from academic studies, government-sponsored assessments, health assessments, and GIS analyses . These studies tend to use different definitions of what food deserts are and entail- some tend to define food deserts in terms of the number of grocery stores or lack thereof, while others focus on the type of quality of foods . The most widely cited early study on food deserts emphasized the connections between food access, wealth, and racial make-up of neighborhoods, noting that supermarkets abound in higher income areas while convenience and fast food stores dominate in low-income areas . Subsequent studies found similar trends regarding the distribution of stores and their impacts: poorer residents tend to pay 3-37% more for food items at small stores compared to residents shopping at suburban supermarkets and available food is often processed and of poor quality . Residents living in areas without a grocery store or supermarket tend to be of ethnic minority groups and with higher rates of obesity, diabetes, and diet-related diseases . In light of these findings, researchers continued to suggest that increase access to supermarkets might lower prevalence of obesity, improved fruit and vegetable consumption, and better diet quality among African Americans, low income households, and pregnant women .