Disparity by design

Hunger is not evenly spread across the US, nor within its cities.

Even in the richest parts of urban America there are pockets of deep food insecurity, and more often than not it is Blackand Latino communities that are hit hardest.

As an urban planning academic who teaches a course on food justice, I'm aware that this disparity is in large part through design. For over a century, urban planning has been used as a toolkit for maintaining white supremacy that has divided U.S. cities along racial lines. And this has contributed to the development of so-called ‘food deserts’ – areas of limited access to reasonably priced, healthy, culturally relevant foods – and ‘food swamps’ – places with a preponderance of stores selling "fast" and "junk" food.

Both terms are controversial and have been contested on the grounds that they ignore both the historical roots and deeply racialized nature of food access, whereby white communities are more likely to have sufficient availability of healthy, reasonably priced produce.

Instead, food justice scholar Ashanté M Reese suggests the term ‘food apartheid’. According to Reese, food apartheid is “intimately tied to policies and practices, current and historical, that come from a place of anti-Blackness.”

Regardless of what they are called, these areas of inequitable food access and limited options exist. The US Department of Agriculture estimates that 54.4 million Americans live in low-income areas with poor access to healthy food. For city residents, this means they are more than half a mile from the nearest supermarket.

The development of these areas of limited healthy food options has a long history tied to urban planning and housing policies. Practices such as redlining and yellowlining – in which the private sector and government conspired to restrict mortgage lending to Black and other minority homebuyers – and racial covenants that limited rental and sale property to white people only meant that areas of poverty were concentrated along racial lines.

In addition, homeowner associations that denied access to Black people in particular and federal housing subsidies that have largely gone to white, richer Americans have made it harder for people living in lower-income areas to move out or accrue wealth. It also leads to urban blight.

This matters when looking at food access because retailers are less willing to go into poorer areas. A process of ‘supermarket redlining’ has seen larger grocery stores either refuse to move in to lower-income areas, shut existing outlets or relocate to wealthier suburbs.

Excerpted: ‘Disparity by Design: How Urban Planning and Housing Policy Helped Create 'Food Apartheid' in US Cities’

Commondreams.org