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I think my initial interest in public policy originated from this blog. The first conversations we had here focused on two main things: access to grocery stores and the use of public assistance programs like SNAP/food stamps.
Over the years, thousands of comments were left on posts by people discussing a common thread; none of us had good grocery stores in our neighborhoods. Only a few of us who grew up in predominantly black neighborhoods had sidewalks that were not only sure keep walking, but passable at all. Imagine not even having sidewalks, because much of the land had been ceded to drivers.
I mean, if you drive, you might appreciate it. I stopped driving years ago.
And even with that, you might be saying to yourself, «Yes, but you live in a city with expansive public transportation.» Yeah-type of. But that’s also part of what I’m suggesting with this post: public transportation, like grocery stores, was controlled by public policy. And public policies have never been controlled by those who live in our communities.
I picked up a book titled Grocery by Michael Ruhlman, literally about the business of buying and selling food in the United States. I expected it to be mostly about marketing (and, admittedly, that’s a lot), but it contained this:
So in the 1960s and 1970s, Saturdays at the supermarket meant lines and lines of shoppers, their overflowing carts, clogging the aisles to the meat department at the back of the store. As
When I was a kid, I would join Dad and ride the cart until it got too full and then push the second cart when the first one was overflowing with the week’s food. And then we’d load the car (an invention that turned out to be critical to the supermarket’s growth) for the short drive to our suburban neighborhood to fill the refrigerator and back pantry with our loot.
Ruhlman, Michael. Groceries: the buying and selling of food in the United States (p. 13). Harry N. Abrams. Kindle Edition.
Now, maybe I’m getting older here, but I’d never considered what life was like. before the invention and proliferation of the automobile. When I think about my time in the suburbs, the grocery store was so far away that there’s no way I could have walked that distance. I would have had have a car
And what does that mean for him? amount How much food can you buy on a given trip? In my city, it is so common to see people shopping with a cart or other type of cart that grocery store carts come with specially made hooks to hold them while you shop. But in a car? That doesn’t worry you at all.
That Grocery What he does, however, is make an implicit accusation: the invention of the automobile accelerated white flight.
After World War II, the United States entered its economic boom years. Its gross domestic product would quintuple, from $100 billion before the war to $515 billion at the end of the 1950s. White flight had begun and middle-class families were moving out of cities in large numbers, something made possible by the ubiquity of the automobile and the large tracts of undeveloped land that surrounded most cities. The Grandview Avenue shopping center, built in 1928 outside Columbus, Ohio, was apparently the first “mall” in the United States to include parking in its design. But now, with booming populations on abundant land, developers could create large retail complexes with oceans of parking space.
In these new spaces, grocery stores could expand to ten and twenty times the size they had when they occupied stores built in commercial areas that had been created to accommodate foot traffic and streetcar lines. One of the under-recognized facts of American real estate development is how our modes of transportation are the fundamental determinants of how we create our residential and commercial spaces. The arrival of the streetcar, as noted above, sparked the creation of America’s first suburbs (with sidewalks and shopping districts within walking distance) in the first and second decades of the 19th century. The spaces that developed after the automobile became a predominant feature of American life are far from city centers and are scattered. It was the automobile and highways that led to suburban sprawl. And as the highway system grew, the United States created even more sprawling residential areas and office complexes centered around cloverleaf interchanges.
«From 1948 to 1963, the big chains increased their share of the country’s grocery business from 35 percent to nearly half,» writes Harvey Levenstein in Paradox of Plenty. “As early as 1956, the independent corner grocery store, although still visible, was a relic of the past. Full supermarkets accounted for 62 percent of the country’s grocery sales, while smaller self-service ‘superettes’ received another 28 percent of the food dollar, leaving the 212,000 small grocery stores sharing 10 percent of the market».
Ruhlman, Michael. Groceries: The Buying and Selling of Food in the United States (p. 52). Harry N. Abrams. Kindle Edition.
What happens when large portions of the wealthier public flee a community because they no longer need to live near their jobs? The most profitable companies also leave, especially when given the opportunity to expand their offering into larger, more spacious stores.
In the post-emancipation and Reconstruction period, black business owners in the Jim Crow era were often prohibited from using the front door of their own businesses, because the front doors were always only for whites. Those were the lengths to which blacks had to go to survive in Jim Crow America, but it shows that whites did in fact, they patronize black businesses. But now white people not only didn’t need to live near Black people also did not need to operate businesses that served them. Remember: defending racism was more important than profits.
In those moments, where that void was created in our communities (yes, it’s generations old), one would hope to see Black businesses emerge to fill it. Except now the companies are fleeing, which means employers They are fleeing. Where there are fewer employers, there are fewer people employed. And if there is less money circulating freely in a community because people are losing their jobs (consider also that, as we moved into the 20th century, many manufacturing jobs went overseas), there is now even less guys of companies that can prosper, much less survive. And the companies that can survive? they are exceptionally Simple: everything, even the customer service, is poor. Sometimes you get the feeling that they shouldn’t even be allowed to be open.
Public policy could and should have stopped the bleeding; It wasn’t like that. In many ways, it couldn’t have done it: suburbs across the country did. damned it is difficult to tax suburbanites who work in their neighboring cities; gerrymandering guaranteed that the cities, where in bulk of people lived, they had the fewest representatives in government speaking on their behalf. Before you knew it, entire communities were empty and there were little to no resources available.
There is a direct correlation here between expanded grocery store access and public health outcomes. In communities with access to supermarkets and affordable options, obesity rates and chronic diseases are lower. In communities that don’t have it, they are often left with something called «food swamp”, a veritable wasteland of fast food establishments that offer cheap and easily accessible food that, although it may taste attractive, It is associated with high rates of chronic diseases such as heart disease, high cholesterol, and type 2 diabetes.
Something as simple as a grocery store can increase opportunity and life expectancy, and the overall health of a community has been stripped away from communities across the country, and has lasting effects. In a report published by the Institute for Children, Youth and Family Policy at Brandeis University, researchers have quantified the ramifications of policies that do not consider the inequalities that exist in modern society. The report notes that there is, on average, a 7-year difference in life expectancy between predominantly white and predominantly black communities.
TIME reported on the study:
The problem was that when we found areas with small gaps between neighborhoods, those cities tended to be racially homogeneous. In other words, children in Provo, Utah, and Boise, Idaho, have access to comparatively equal opportunities regardless of which neighborhoods they live in, but those cities are more than 80% white.
[…]
Across the combined 100 metropolitan areas in Acevedo-Garcia’s study, white children live in neighborhoods with a median score of 73, compared to neighborhood scores of 72 for Asian children, 33 for Hispanic children, and 24 for black children. . Black and Hispanic children live with fewer opportunities than their white and Asian peers almost without exception, including in Bakersfield, California, where white children have the fewest opportunities in the United States.
The disparities are especially wide in certain parts of the country. Milwaukee and its surrounding areas have the widest racial disparity in the U.S., despite having a high overall opportunity score. A white child lives in a neighborhood with a median opportunity score of 85. For a black child, the median neighborhood score is 6. [source]
The following sentence from the article makes it very clear: «This situation is frustrating for advocates, especially when high-ranking neighborhoods do not share resources like schools and housing with low-ranking ones right next door.»
Y’all, that’s it on purpose. poverty is on purpose.
Be clear, this is not a rant about how we are. victims* of something: it means that we simply have not identified the problem correctly. This is a conversation about policy and collective investment, and about not being afraid to challenge both policy and policymakers. It has to be about learning politics and holding the people we vote for accountable for improving the community instead of selling it out for money and power. We’ve done it before and we absolutely can do it again.
*Ask me, someday, how one of the quickest ways to avoid holding powerful people accountable is to convince the people they’ve wronged that they should be ashamed to admit it.
