The Great Grocery Squeeze: How a federal policy change in the 1980s created the modern food desert

[mahatmakanejeeves]

The Great Grocery Squeeze
How a federal policy change in the 1980s created the modern food desert

By Stacy Mitchell
December 1, 2024, 7 AM ET

The concept of the food desert has been around long enough that it feels almost like a fact of nature. Tens of millions of Americans live in low-income communities with no easy access to fresh groceries, and the general consensus is that these places just don’t have what it takes to attract and sustain a supermarket. They’re either too poor or too sparsely populated to generate sufficient spending on groceries, or they can’t overcome a racist pattern of corporate redlining. ... But these explanations fail to contend with a key fact: Although poverty and ruralness have been with us forever, food deserts arrived only around the late 1980s. Prior to that, small towns and poor neighborhoods could generally count on having a grocery store, perhaps even several. (The term food desert was coined in 1995 by a task force studying what was then a relatively new phenomenon.)

The high-poverty, majority-Black Deanwood neighborhood of Washington, D.C., is typical of the trend. In the 1960s, the area had more than half a dozen grocery stores, according to a study by the anthropologist Ashanté Reese. These included a branch of the local District Grocery Stores co-op, a Safeway supermarket, and independent Black-owned businesses such as Tip Top Grocery on Sheriff Road. By the 1990s, however, the number of grocery stores in Deanwood had dwindled to just two, and today the neighborhood has none. ... A similar story played out across rural America, following the same timeline. Up until the 1980s, almost every small town in North Dakota had a grocery store. Many, in fact, had two or more competing supermarkets. Now nearly half of North Dakota’s rural residents live in a food desert. (The USDA defines a food desert as a low-income census tract where the nearest grocery store is more than 10 miles away in a rural area or more than one mile away in a city.)

A slew of state and federal programs have tried to address food deserts by providing tax breaks and other subsidies to lure supermarkets to underserved communities. These efforts have failed. More food deserts exist now than in 2010, in the depths of the Great Recession. That’s because the proposed solutions misunderstand the origins of the problem. ... Food deserts are not an inevitable consequence of poverty or low population density, and they didn’t materialize around the country for no reason. Something happened. That something was a specific federal policy change in the 1980s. It was supposed to reward the biggest retail chains for their efficiency. Instead, it devastated poor and rural communities by pushing out grocery stores and inflating the cost of food. Food deserts will not go away until that mistake is reversed.

{snip}

[UpInArms]

1. The last paragraph made me laugh at the naivete

The Biden administration has begun to connect the dots. Alvaro Bedoya, a member of the Federal Trade Commission, has been an outspoken proponent of Robinson-Patman enforcement, and the FTC under Chair Lina Khan is widely expected to file its first such case in the coming months. But Donald Trump’s election casts doubts on the long-term prospects for a Robinson-Patman revival. Although the law has garnered support among some GOP House members, powerful donors are calling for corporate-friendly appointments to the FTC. Hopefully the incoming Trump administration realizes that the rural and working-class voters who propelled him to power are among those most affected by food deserts—and by the broader decline in local self-reliance that has swept across small-town America since the 1980s. A powerful tool for reversing that decline is available. Any leader who truly cared about the nation’s left-behind communities would use it.

[slightlv]

2. As cynical as I am, the author of that paragraph is living in

PollyAnna land! Trump care about food deserts? The man who has never known what "hungry" feels like? What not having enough change in your pocket to buy even a single apple affects a person's emotional and mental state? "A Man and his Dog," indeed.

When I was growing up, we had two corner grocery stores within walking distance of our home. These weren't full-blown stores... closer to what you'd find at a Quick Trip or Casey's. But the staples were there, and so was candy and sweet pastries - things we kids would walk to get after school. It also got us out from Mom's eye for maybe 30 minutes. These types of institutions were integral in the small town. They were community. We've lost so much in the way of "community" no wonder no one knows how to act civil anymore.

[LymphocyteLover]

3. Yes, I'm sure the Trump admin will get right on this, to rectify this!

[appalachiablue]

4. In addition to food deserts, the US is seeing more hospital/ ER deserts too.

[FakeNoose]

5. What has happened since the 1980s is the small family-owned stores have been crushed by conglomerates

... and the same thing has happened in pretty much every industry, from auto repairs to bakeries, offset printing to clothing manufacturing. There's no small family-owned business that can compete with Walmart or Target (or eventually, Amazon.) Many of the small companies sold out and left the industry long ago. Or they just closed up and retired.