The Grocery Gap Part II

More news today on the Kroger situation in West Dayton..it looks like there is some community activism springing up around the issue. Good to hear this.

A grass-roots group of West Dayton clergy, civil rights and community leaders are calling for an immediate boycott of all Kroger stores.

The call to action came Monday night at a community meeting of about 130 residents at the Westwood Center, where Kroger Company officials answered questions about the closing of their Gettysburg Avenue store.

I also like how they are going to try to quantify the amount spent on food. Though ad-hoc this is conceptually in line with what some of the national retail redlining activists are trying to do:

To prove the buying power of West Dayton residents, all were asked to make copies of their grocery receipts and pass them on to their church secretaries. The receipts will be collected and tabulated at the Wesley Center.

I've been looking at groceries in the area, and there is a dearth of chain supers in West Dayton.

In fact, north to south, between Wolf Creek and German Township, and west of the river to probably New Lebanon….all of West Dayton, Jefferson Township, and the southern parts of Trotwood…. the only national grocery chain (once Kroger closes) is Aldi, in West Town (ironically this is not even a US chain: Aldi is based in Germany).

There are, however, roughly around 30 stores listed in the yellow pages as "groceries" for that area, but I suspect few are true supermarkets with a good selection of produce, meats, etc. A lot are called "carry-outs", which sounds like another name for liquor store.

Another way of looking at this is at the lack of transportation. Here is a map of census tracts where there is a substantial lack of vehicle availability (based on 2000 census SF 4 data available Amercian Factfinder custom tables).

Note that these numbers are very high, higher than one would expect, but explainable in some cases via elderly housing concentrations. Yet also, even at the lower %s, nearly a quarter of some tracts are transit-dependent.
...the next step is to overlay grocery locations on this map.

(The odd way the census looks at this is by connecting vehicle viability to occupied dwelling unit. I guess they could just use vehicle per household and wonder why not)

Here's a few more links on what's happening at the national level. The International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC) sees this as an emerging issue. One of the urban affairs think tanks, Brookings, is apparently doing some policy analyses on the issue:

Check out the ICSC page, with a link to a member survey: what retailers see as issues with urban markets.


The Brookings white paper is a .pdf in the San Francisco Fed’s “Community Development Investment Review”page (if you surf in, check the link list to the right for “Brookings Urban Markets Initiative...”


I think it's appropriate that this issue, one about access to food, is coming up during the Thanksgiving season.