Fellow HPP blogger Elizabeth Fama passed along a Tribune article that I missed earlier this spring, detailing the success that Peapod.com is having in inner-city areas known as 'food deserts.'* The dearth of mainline grocery stores otherwise so common elsewhere in the city and suburbs is proving to be a boon for the online delivery service. What the article finds surprising is that Peapod has experienced its biggest growth in pockets of affluence in the South Side, an area usually thought of as mostly poor and therefore not worth servicing.
My guess is that the negative experience of living in a food desert is probably the single biggest shared concern of people living in Hyde Park-Kenwood. What's more, it's probably one of the biggest concerns that Hyde Parkers share with the folks in Woodlawn, Englewood, Bronzeville, and Oakland, and other adjoining South Side neighborhoods. For Hyde Parkers, the lack of accessible and competitive groceries is primarily a hassle. For lower-income folks in Hyde Park and surrounding neighborhoods, the problem can be much more serious. The lack of cheap, fresh food -- especially produce -- has been linked to a host of public health issues that afflict inner-city populations, from skyrocketing rates of obesity, early-onset diabetes, to low birth-weight from inadequate prenatal nutrition.
So the problem of the 'food desert' isn't just a question of middle class inconvenience in Hyde Park and the gentrifying parts of surrounding neighborhoods. It's a public health problem for a big chunk of the City populace, one that will affect us all one way or another, through lost productivity and higher burdens on the health care system as new generations incur all the health problems associated with obesity and poor nutrition.
"Food desertification," as it were, is not a new problem, neither in Hyde Park nor the rest of the City. If you pull out any of the Chicago Community Area Fact Books, starting in the late 40s, you can see that the number of small grocery stores was once far larger than it is now in each of the 77 designated community areas. So was the number of taverns. Both went into precipitous decline after 1960, though the drop was faster and went farther on the South Side. The suburbs were booming, people were leaving the City, and the spatial configuration of commerce was evolving more towards malls, large-format supermarkets, and the "big boxes" of today.
One thing stands out, though: small retail, including groceries, dropped with population. And no parts of Chicago were depopulated in the Post-War era like the South Side. The small retail is notoriously hard to get back -- hence the proliferation of suburban-style big box retail in an urban setting. But even the large-format supermarkets like Dominick's and Jewel will need a certain minimum market area, and in an urban context the only way to get that is to achieve higher residential densities.
So how do we get practical grocery shopping back into the area?
An experiment like the Hyde Park Co-Op only makes sense in the context of urban disinvestment and depopulation, in which an abandoned group seeks to fend for itself. This may have made some sense in the 50s and 60s. But certainly those aren’t the conditions that we’d like to see prevail over the long term. The goal should not be to figure out how to make institutions like the Co-Op work, it should be to establish conditions that make institutions like the Co-Op unnecessary.
In concrete terms, what that means is enlarging the market area by bringing in more people. And only so many of those people are going to fit into new construction in Hyde Park. Ultimately Hyde Park’s market area will have to blend with that of surrounding neighborhoods – as it already does for the restaurants at 53rd and Harper, and for the University's labor pool.
Beyond the economics, however, is the moral issue of fairness: how fair is it that some are able to prepare and eat healthier foods in part because of where they live? The desire to ban grocery chains of any kind from Hyde Park only abets this structural inequality, and is itself a function of social privilege.
*"Delivery is oasis in food 'desert'".
Chicago Tribune - Chicago, Ill.
Author: Johnathon E Briggs
Date: Apr 1, 2007
Start Page: 1
Section: Metro
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6 comments:
Very thoughtful piece.
Are there any supporters of the Co-Op left? There were, as recently as one, two, or three years ago. Now it's hard to find even older residents who are verbally loyal (some have to remain loyal in their shopping habits because of limited transportation, and the fact that Peapod is really most efficient and cost-effective for multi-person families).
There's another piece in the population-density puzzle, regarding how a good grocery store could survive here, and it's not a pretty thought, but we need to talk about it:
Good grocery stores DO need to draw on a large population to survive, and Hyde Park is not big enough, especially with its transient student population (witness the fact that it's a ghost town right now). But even if there were, let's say, a Trader Joe's on 47th Street -- a location that SHOULD attract folks from those thousands of new-south loop condominium units -- the fact is that downtown and north side residents are AFRAID of Hyde Park. Whether it's a perceived (but statistically fictitious) higher crime rate, or the presence of faces with color in the neighborhood, they just won't shop here.
So...how do we change hearts and minds when it comes to good old-fashioned prejudice?
Why SHOULD a Trader Joe's at 47th Street attract South Loop residents? They have a Whole Foods, a Dominicks, a Jewel and a Target within a mile of their door steps.
The noodle packs are good, but how far will you drive out of the way for one?
Good point about the transient student population and how that might affect businesses(the reason I can actually grab a seat at Istria once in a while!)
It's true that lots of people -- rightly or wrongly -- are afraid of HP, or more specifically the neighborhoods that they need to go through to get here. The only way to change that is to change those neighborhoods. That's why I think it's important to think about HP's immediate environs as much as its core -- like Preckwinkle's project at Cottage Grove and 47th, and about not blocking projects that would add purchasing power to the neighborhood, like residential towers (or hotels!) We're surrounded by some of the poorest census tracts in the United States. Whether crime on those tracts is up or down, people don't like to deal with it if they don't have to.
How to do all that and preserve racial balance, housing at a mixture of price points, etc., is a huge question. Getting another major employer (besides the University) in the area would help. Some models do exist, like the Dominick's/mixed-income housing development at Clyborn and Divsion.
It is with great interest that I read HPP and in a way find it amusing the concerns of my neighbors to the north.
While I understand that what matters most to people is usually local, I'd be remiss if I didn't remind you that a majority of the good folks of Woodlawn don't even have a reasonably priced grocery store with FRESH items within walking distance of their homes.
So while the Co-Op may not be everyone's first choice, at least you have a choice in your neighborhood.
I, unfortunately, live between the Co-Op & the Jewel on 76th Street---both a little too far for a person with no car to do major grocery shopping. Don't even get me started on how difficult it is to get over $100 worth of groceries home on the bus when it's over 80 degress. Melted frozen food is no fun.
If I run out of a staple, my joke of a corner grocery store barely has an inventory much less FRESH inventory.
In fact, I also wrote a post about food concerns (http://ihatemydeveloper.blogspot.com/2007/04/oasis.html)so I feel your pain.
In short, I know these concerns are important to Hyde Parkers, but I can only say I wish my neighborhood had your problems.
It is with great interest that I read HPP and in a way find it amusing the concerns of my neighbors to the north.
While I understand that what matters most to people is usually local, I'd be remiss if I didn't remind you that a majority of the good folks of Woodlawn don't even have a reasonably priced grocery store with FRESH items within walking distance of their homes.
So while the Co-Op may not be everyone's first choice, at least you have a choice in your neighborhood.
I, unfortunately, live between the Co-Op & the Jewel on 76th Street---both a little too far for a person with no car to do major grocery shopping. Don't even get me started on how difficult it is to get over $100 worth of groceries home on the bus when it's over 80 degress. Melted frozen food is no fun.
If I run out of a staple, my joke of a corner grocery store barely has an inventory much less FRESH inventory.
In fact, I also wrote a post about food concerns (http://ihatemydeveloper.blogspot.com/2007/04/oasis.html)so I feel your pain.
In short, I know these concerns are important to Hyde Parkers, but I can only say I wish my neighborhood had your problems.
Woodlawn Wonder is right that things are much worse for our neighbors to the south. All the more reason to get a good affordable supermarket in the area that will serve all of us, because we're all in this together!
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