Northeast News
June 22, 2016

When is a desert not a desert? When it’s in Kansas City’s urban core and dubbed a food desert in order to garner over $13 million in subsidies to make it a so-called food oasis. Last week the city’s Plans and Zoning Committee voted unanimously to advance an already financially flawed proposal to create a taxpayer-subsidized, shining new grocery store at Linwood Boulevard and Prospect. Councilman Jermaine Reed, who represents the area where the new store is slated to be built, played to his base and said that every community deserved a full service grocery store. John Lipari, the person slated to operate the new store, noted that residents had pleaded for years for a “decent grocery store.” Then, both Lipari and Reed verbally torpedoed the already existing “decent grocery” operations, Happy Foods and German grocery giant Aldi, both of which are located within 1.5 miles of the new development. Never let facts get in the way of a good agenda, right?

Interestingly, however, the USDA released a study on May 2nd, 2016 that turns the whole food desert argument on its ear, noting that if you build it, they might come but probably won’t. Additionally, the study noted that dietary habits still won’t change enough to justify the expense of the new store’s construction. Patrick Touhey expertly noted in a column penned for the Show Me Institute that the city’s food desert is mostly a mirage. This news-dog agrees, especially given the proliferation of new, full line Latino grocery outlets that, in this dog’s eyes, more than qualify as “decent grocery stores.” The new Hispanic grocery stores are mostly squeaky clean operations that focus on fresh fruits and vegetables, as well as refrigerated cases chock-full of fresh chicken, beef, seafood and pork. Does this sound like a food desert to you? Yeah. Didn’t think so.

In short, the USDA study points out that location, location, location doesn’t seem to be a driving force in grocery shopping these days, indicating that traveling farther for groceries had only a small impact on diet quality. What that means is that even those who relied on public transportation often bypassed the stores in their own neighborhood in search of competitively priced food at a super center usually located more than four miles away from the home. In essence, pricing plays a more important role in shopping choices than does store location and convenience.

The final analysis? Improving access to healthy foods, which is the whole impetus for building this new grocery palace in the first place, doesn’t affect diet choices. As for payback of that $13.5 million financed in order to make this whole thing go? As this dog has noted in previous columns about this development, over 70% of purchases in urban core grocery outlets are paid for with SNAP or WIC. There is no sales tax levied on those purchases, making the math behind the payback equation championed by the Mayor and Council a complete falsehood, and making the food desert argument, specifically at Linwood and Prospect, a $13.5 million mirage.