Addressing Food Desserts- What is the Answer?

What are "food desserts" and why are they getting larger in our urban centers?  A food dessert is a area in an urban city where food retailers are not readily accessible.  Why are food desserts growing?

In the early 1990s a survey of city shoppers found that more than half left the city at least once a month to shop at stores not available in the five boroughs. Large swaths of the city, including Harlem, home to 100,000 residents, lacked a local supermarket. Crime was bad enough to sink promising ventures, including U.S. Athletics, a 13-store footwear chain that closed its outlets in the city after suffering some 1,000 shoplifting incidents. In a 1989 survey conducted by Interface, one-fifth of businesses reported having lost sales because of crime.

The key to the comeback was the restoration of order, beginning with the declines in crime that characterized the mayoral administration of Rudolph Giuliani and continued into the administration of Michael Bloomberg. Those gains unlocked whole neighborhoods, attracting both local entrepreneurs and national chains that had previously shunned the city. In 1993, the year New York elected Giuliani, there were 234,000 retail jobs. During his eight-year tenure, the city added 38,000 store positions, followed by another 78,000 in Bloomberg’s 12 years—a net gain of nearly 50 percent in retail employment over two decades.

With the growth of soft on crime policies, New York has committed the same mistakes that created the original situation that existed at the start of the 1990s.

Currently, in New York City and nationwide, retailers have struggled to respond to waves of shoplifting prompted by revisions to laws that raised the value of goods a shoplifter must steal before getting charged with a felony, and by bail reforms that result in the quick release of those committing nonviolent crimes. In 2021, to take one example, the NYPD arrested one individual 57 times, including 46 times for shoplifting; he never went to jail. In several instances, cops arrested the man twice in the same day. “This guy comes here every day stealing, every single day,” one Walgreens store manager told the New York Post.

The issue of how to address food desserts is front in center in the race for mayor in New York.  However, repeating the successes of the past get little attention.  There’s little evidence that Zohran Mamdani’s agenda as mayor would address these problems.  Mamdani suggests that city owned grocery stores combined with reducing enforcement by the police department is the solution.  Mamdani is not looking to the successes of the past which was fighting crime.  Also, creating city owned groicery stores without addressing shoplifting itself does not address the problem.

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