Gotham's Supermarket Shortage: A Public Health Crisis?
The city’s recent building boom has had at least one noticeable deleterious effect on a cross-section of New Yorkers, but especially poorer ones: It’s played a large role in supermarkets closing as owners sell out developers, according to an article published a few weeks ago in the Washington Post. (The story zooms in on a…
The city’s recent building boom has had at least one noticeable deleterious effect on a cross-section of New Yorkers, but especially poorer ones: It’s played a large role in supermarkets closing as owners sell out developers, according to an article published a few weeks ago in the Washington Post. (The story zooms in on a Fort Greene woman who now has to drive in order to get to a supermarket after her local mart was sold off to a developer.) There are now one-third fewer supermarkets in the five boroughs than there were six years ago, says retail consulting company F&D Reports. The Bloomberg administration thinks fewer people having access to fresh produce is a public health crisis, and it’s pushing legislation like the Green Cart law to get more fruit-and-vegetable stands into low-income neighborhoods. There’s also a statewide supermarket commission in the works that will try to come up with new ways to lure groceries to underserved communities. A similar strategy has apparently already been tried in Philadelphia, where a nonprofit organization called Food Trust helped attract 32 new supermarkets. The supermarket shortage, of course, also affects residents of new luxury condos. “How are you going to have million-dollar condos if there’s no place to buy bok choy?” Alicia Glen, the managing director of the Goldman Sachs Urban Investment Group.
Groceries Grow Elusive For Many in New York City [Washington Post]
Yes, We Have No Bananas: More Fruit Stands for Brooklyn [Brownstoner]
Photo by janelbot.
Okay, 11:47, so there is a grocery store 5 blocks away. Perhaps this is not the best example in the article – but help me understand. Are you are arguing that there is in fact no trend toward a dearth of grocery stores in NYC because the focus of this article isn’t a prime example? Do you think F&D Reports has it wrong, even if their focus is more on the “million dollar condo with a side of bokchoy” crowd? If that is so, then why the move by Bloomberg to license more fruit and vegetable carts in lower income areas? I’m not understanding how it is a bad thing for city government to advocate for readily available, reasonably priced, healthy food for all stripes of people, regardless of the opposite being the de facto standard in other parts of the country, in certain parts of the city, or anywhere else. What’s with the hostility toward an initiative that makes sense?
I’m not advocating for knocking down an historic building to put in a glass tower with a Whole Foods at street level – though, honestly 11:42, your point isn’t clear; the exact opposite is happening, according to the article, grocery stores in older buildings are disappearing as developers continue their land-grabbing. I’m talking about incentives to keep extant grocery stores solvent or attract new markets to lower income areas. Why should funds be allocated to remodel and expand the Associated on 5th Avenue and Union streets while another which services Fort Greene is shuttered? Because developers want to land grab without considering the needs of the existing population of a given area, irrespective of income.
I can’t wrap my head around taking a “quit whining!” stance over noting a 1/3 drop in grocery stores in the five boroughs and an ensuing initiative to do something about it.
Some people have to travel to get groceries? Yea, and I am one of them. No big deal. Cry me a river.
THERE IS a grocery store FIVE short city blocks from the one that was torn down. That’s why the article is a joke – when you have a grocery store FIVE short blocks away, that’s not an example of disappearing grocery stores.
Newsflash:
It’s difficult for the disabled to go food shopping!
Crisis!
We should knock down some historic buildings in an effort to repair poor peoples legs.
“because it gives them the ‘urban’ credibility they crave.”
Imagine that. People who live in the largest city in the country want to live in an urban style.
SHAME ON THEM!!!
I am a renter! Yeah for renters! Renters can love brownstone Brooklyn! Welcome, renters!
11:23 – The hipsteratti on this site will inform you that things like quiet, clean, civility, are bourgeois values that they disdain. That’s why they’ll gladly pay $3 million to live in a brownstone shoebox – because it gives them the ‘urban’ credibility they crave.
The woman in the article in question has an injured leg which prevents her from taking the bus to get groceries. She lives on Myrtle Avenue in Fort Greene in a housing project. A friend drives her to get groceries every three weeks. I don’t understand the suppositions being made in this thread about any sense of entitlement on her part. Do you honestly think she moved to a housing project in Fort Greene out of some sort of delusion of neighborhood cache? That’s ridiculous. She’s poor, lives in government housing, and is disabled, and somehow she’s an asshole for wishing she could walk across the street to a now shuttered grocery store and get a decent bunch of broccoli at a decent price. Unbelievable.
Read the article before slinging around your axe-grindy, “my neighborhood’s better’n yours” crap.
Who would want to be at a dinner party and have people ask you where you live and you have to say QUEENS??!!