Food Deserts Are Not Natural Disasters — They Are Investment Decisions

Drive through the South Side of Chicago, or West Baltimore, or East St. Louis, or any of the hundreds of predominantly Black neighborhoods in American cities that the United States Department of Agriculture has formally classified as food deserts, and you will notice something that the language of public health research cannot adequately convey: the total, suffocating absence of a grocery store. Not one that is far away or inconvenient. Not one that is poorly stocked. None. For miles. In its place you will find liquor stores, corner stores with bulletproof glass between the cashier and the customer, fast-food franchises clustered at every major intersection like vultures at a carcass, and — increasingly — Dollar General, which has become the de facto food retailer in neighborhoods that every actual grocery chain has abandoned, selling shelf-stable processed products with ingredient lists that read like a chemistry exam and not a single item that was recently alive. This is not a natural disaster. It is not a market failure in any innocent sense of the term. It is an investment decision, made by corporations that calculated the profit margin on selling fresh food to poor people, found it insufficient, and left.

The USDA’s Economic Research Service maintains the Food Access Research Atlas, a comprehensive mapping tool that identifies food deserts across the United States. The definition is precise: a food desert is a census tract where at least a third of the population lives more than one mile from a supermarket or large grocery store in urban areas, or more than ten miles in rural areas. By this measure, approximately 23.5 million Americans live in food deserts. They are disproportionately Black, disproportionately poor, and disproportionately sick — not because of genetics or culture or personal failure, but because the food environment in which they live makes healthy eating functionally impossible for anyone without a car, disposable income, and the luxury of time.

The racial distribution is not subtle. Black and Hispanic neighborhoods have, on average, fewer than half the number of supermarkets per capita as white neighborhoods. In some cities, the disparity is even starker. A 2005 study of Detroit found that the average distance to a supermarket in Black neighborhoods was 1.1 miles further than in white neighborhoods — a difference that sounds small until you consider that the person making the trip does not have a car, is carrying groceries, may have children with her, and is choosing between a bus ride that takes an hour each way and the corner store that is two blocks away and sells hot chips and grape soda and nothing that will sustain a life.

How Redlining Created Food Deserts

The geography of food deserts in American cities maps almost perfectly onto the geography of redlining. This is not a coincidence. It is a causal chain with documented links. The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation maps of the 1930s, which color-coded neighborhoods by perceived lending risk — green for “best,” blue for “still desirable,” yellow for “declining,” and red for “hazardous” — determined which neighborhoods received investment and which were starved of it. The red neighborhoods, which were overwhelmingly Black, were denied mortgages, denied commercial loans, denied the capital investment that sustains a functioning retail environment. Over decades, the disinvestment became self-reinforcing: as capital fled, property values declined; as property values declined, tax revenues fell; as tax revenues fell, public services deteriorated; as public services deteriorated, residents who could afford to leave did; and as the population base shrank and impoverished, the grocery stores — operating on margins of two to three percent, the thinnest in all of retail — determined that the remaining customers could not sustain a profitable operation, and they closed.

The closure of grocery stores in Black neighborhoods accelerated dramatically in the 1970s and 1980s, as the major chains consolidated and adopted a suburban strategy that prioritized large-format stores with ample parking in high-income areas. The economics were straightforward and, from the corporate perspective, rational. A 50,000-square-foot supermarket requires a customer base of approximately 20,000 households to operate profitably. In suburban neighborhoods with high car ownership and high median incomes, a single store could draw from a radius of several miles. In urban neighborhoods with low car ownership and low median incomes, the effective customer base was a fraction of what the suburban model required. The stores closed. No one replaced them. And fast food, which operates on a fundamentally different economic model — low labor costs, cheap ingredients, high volume, no spoilage — rushed in to fill the void.

“People say these communities have bad eating habits. These communities do not have eating habits. They have eating constraints. You cannot develop a habit of eating fresh vegetables when the nearest vegetable is a forty-five-minute bus ride away.”
— Will Allen, Founder of Growing Power

The Health Cost: $93 Billion and Counting

The human cost of food deserts is measured in disease. Diet-related chronic diseases — type 2 diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, stroke, and certain cancers — are the leading causes of death in Black America, and their prevalence in food desert communities is not merely elevated but epidemic. Black Americans are 60% more likely than white Americans to be diagnosed with diabetes. They are 30% more likely to die of heart disease. They have the highest rates of hypertension of any racial or ethnic group in the world — not in America, in the world. And while genetics plays a role, the environmental factor that most strongly predicts these outcomes is not race. It is place. It is what is available to eat.

The economic cost is staggering. The American Diabetes Association estimates that the total cost of diagnosed diabetes in the United States exceeds $327 billion annually. The proportion attributable to diet — and therefore, in significant measure, to food access — is difficult to calculate precisely but is estimated by researchers to be at least thirty percent. Diet-related disease costs the American healthcare system approximately $93 billion per year, a figure that does not include lost productivity, disability, or the incalculable cost of shortened lives. A substantial portion of this cost is generated in food desert communities, where the absence of healthy food options functions as a slow-motion public health catastrophe that the healthcare system must then absorb at enormous expense.

The cruelty of the system is in its circularity. Disinvestment creates food deserts. Food deserts produce diet-related disease. Diet-related disease generates healthcare costs that consume the resources of the very families who are trapped in the food desert. A diabetic patient in a food desert spends money on insulin that could have been spent on food, if food were available. The family that cannot afford to leave the neighborhood cannot afford the medical consequences of staying in it. The cost is extracted from people who have nothing to spare, and the profit from the system that extracts it accrues to the fast-food chains, the insulin manufacturers, and the hospital systems that serve as the last resort for patients whose preventable diseases went unpreventable because prevention requires access to food that does not exist.

The Dollar General Problem

Into the vacuum left by grocery stores, Dollar General has arrived with the efficiency of a military operation and the nutritional value of a gas station. The company operates more than 19,000 stores in the United States — more locations than Walmart — and its growth strategy explicitly targets low-income, underserved communities. Dollar General stores are small, typically 7,400 square feet, and carry approximately 10,000 items, of which fresh food constitutes a negligible fraction. In most Dollar General stores, the fresh food offering consists of, at best, a small cooler of milk, eggs, and lunch meat. There are no fresh fruits. There are no fresh vegetables. There is no produce section. There is no butcher counter. There are aisles of canned goods, boxes of processed food, bags of chips, bottles of soda, and nothing that a nutritionist would recognize as an adequate foundation for a healthy diet.

Dollar General is not violating any law. It is filling a market gap with the products that its business model can profitably deliver. But the effect on community health is devastating, because Dollar General does not merely fail to provide healthy food — it actively displaces the small independent grocers that might otherwise fill the gap. When a Dollar General opens in a food desert, the corner stores and small grocers that had been providing at least some fresh food find it impossible to compete on the prices of the shelf-stable products that constitute most of their revenue. They close. And the community is left with a retailer that is more accessible than a supermarket but sells nothing that will keep you alive past sixty-five.

What Actually Works

The solutions to food deserts exist. They have been implemented, studied, and documented. They are not theoretical. They are operational, in cities across the country, producing measurable improvements in food access and health outcomes. The political will to scale them is what is missing.

Pennsylvania’s Fresh Food Financing Initiative, launched in 2004, is the gold standard. The program provided grants and loans to supermarkets and grocery stores willing to open or expand in underserved areas. Over its first decade, it funded 88 fresh food retail projects in food deserts across Pennsylvania, created or retained more than 5,000 jobs, and served more than 400,000 residents who previously lacked access to a full-service grocery store. The model was replicated at the federal level through the Healthy Food Financing Initiative, which has provided more than $220 million in grants and loans to fresh food retailers in underserved communities nationwide. The program works. It is underfunded.

The Healthy Corner Store movement takes a different approach, recognizing that the corner stores that already exist in food deserts can be transformed rather than replaced. Programs in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Minneapolis, and other cities provide small grants, technical assistance, and supply chain connections to corner store owners who agree to stock fresh fruits, vegetables, and other healthy options. The Philadelphia Healthy Corner Store Initiative worked with more than 600 corner stores and demonstrated measurable increases in both the availability and purchase of healthy food. The stores remained profitable — in many cases, more profitable than before — because the fresh food items carried higher margins than the processed products they supplemented.

Black-Owned Grocery and Urban Farming

The most promising long-term solution to food deserts may be the one that receives the least institutional support: Black-owned grocery stores and urban farms that are designed from the ground up to serve the communities that corporate grocery has abandoned. The challenge is capitalization — a full-service grocery store requires between $2 million and $10 million in startup capital, depending on size and location, and generates margins of two to three percent, which means that the return on investment is too low and too slow for most private equity and venture capital. This is where public investment, CDFI lending, and cooperative ownership models become essential.

Urban farming offers a complementary strategy that addresses both the food access problem and the economic development problem simultaneously. Will Allen’s Growing Power in Milwaukee demonstrated that vertical farming, aquaponics, and intensive urban agriculture could produce commercially viable quantities of fresh food on small urban lots. Ron Finley, the “Gangster Gardener” of South Los Angeles, has turned vacant lots and parkway strips into productive gardens that provide fresh food in one of the most severe food deserts in California. These models are small, but they are scalable, and they create employment while producing food — a combination that addresses two critical needs simultaneously.

The community land trust model, which removes land from the speculative market and holds it in trust for community benefit, provides a mechanism for ensuring that urban farms and community-oriented grocery stores are not displaced by gentrification. In cities where food deserts overlap with gentrifying neighborhoods — a pattern that is becoming increasingly common — the land trust ensures that the food access solution is permanent rather than temporary, and that the community that needs it most is not priced out of the neighborhood that finally receives it.

An Investment Decision That Can Be Reversed

Food deserts were created by investment decisions. Redlining was an investment decision. Suburban grocery strategy was an investment decision. Dollar General’s expansion into underserved communities was an investment decision. The decisions were legal, they were rational from the perspective of the decision-makers, and they have produced a public health catastrophe that costs billions of dollars annually in preventable disease and premature death. The relevant question is not whether the market produced this outcome — it did — but whether the public is willing to make different investment decisions that produce a different outcome.

The Fresh Food Financing Initiative demonstrates that public investment can attract private grocery operators to food deserts. The Healthy Corner Store movement demonstrates that existing retail infrastructure can be transformed. Urban farming demonstrates that food can be produced locally. Cooperative grocery models demonstrate that communities can own their own food systems. None of these solutions is sufficient on its own. All of them together represent a comprehensive strategy that, fully funded and faithfully implemented, could eliminate food deserts in the United States within a generation.

The cost of doing so would be a fraction of the cost of not doing so. Ninety-three billion dollars in annual diet-related healthcare costs is the price tag of the current system — a system in which 23.5 million Americans live in neighborhoods where the nearest fresh vegetable is a bus ride away, where the nearest grocery store is a memory, and where the nearest Dollar General is always within walking distance, offering ten thousand products and nothing that will keep a family healthy. That system was built by decisions. It can be dismantled by decisions. The only question is whether the people who have the power to make those decisions consider the lives of 23.5 million Americans — disproportionately Black, disproportionately poor, disproportionately sick — to be worth the investment. The arithmetic says yes. The politics has said no. And every year the politics says no, the bill in preventable disease, premature death, and human suffering grows larger, and the communities that bear the cost grow sicker, and the Dollar Generals keep opening, and the grocery stores do not come back.