The Alameda County Public Health Department found that West Oakland adults are five times more likely to be hospitalized for diabetes, three times more likely to die of stroke, and two times more likely to be hospitalized for and to die of heart disease and cancer . Also similar to Bayview, West Oakland has been the focus of numerous revitalization efforts during the past decade. Plans are underway for the redevelopment of the Oakland Army Base, commercial revitalization along West Oakland’s historic main street, Seventh Street, and the development of artists lofts, condominiums, and affordable housing. Over the next decade, local planners and developers expect that West Oakland will be home to 6,000 new housing units, 200,000 square feet of neighborhood retail, 400,000 square feet of destination retail, and improved transit if plans progress as expected . Like Bayview, recent revitalization efforts have been received equally with enthusiasm and caution. Some argue that new housing has been prohibitively priced, perpetuating gentrification in the neighborhood . This dissertation uses an in depth, comparative case study approach to explore grocery store planning processes. In line with Yin’s criteria for case studies, this dissertation is focused on understanding processes over time and contemporary events where individual and organization behaviors cannot be manipulated .In some ways, this study could be understood as a comparison of two extreme cases—one top down, government-led process and a bottom-up activist driven process . Although one of these cases could be explored as a revelatory or critical case, this comparison of two extreme cases allows for a richer analysis of the factors that might explain their variation . While I am exploring Fresh and Easy and Mandela Foods as illustrative rather than representative cases, my analysis aims to draw out important lessons that might be generalizable to other contexts. As further discussed in the next section,hydroponic grow systems an important aspect of this comparative case study was “tracing and delineating a coherent story but keeping multiple voices .” Because my case studies involve past planning processes, I triangulated across multiple primary and secondary data sources. First, I relied heavily on a number of archival sources to tell the stories of both stores from multiple vantage points. This includes: 1) neighborhood and general plans, 2) neighborhood studies, 3) city council and government agency meeting minutes, 4) videos of public meetings and hearings relevant to both cases, 5) local and national newspaper articles, 6) press releases, and 7) websites and internet sources.
I supplemented these data with fifteen key informant interviews with urban grocery experts as well as government staff, community leaders, and residents associated with Fresh and Easy and Mandela Foods. Urban grocery retail experts were asked about national advocacy efforts around the Healthy Food Financing Initiative and the roles of Fresh and Easy and Mandela Foods. Government staff and community leaders were asked about their involvement with the Fresh and Easy and Mandela Foods projects and various facts about the planning processes, financing plans, and interactions between key actors. Residents were asked about their impressions of both stores.In many ways, the First Lady’s statement is not unique. As vital centers for everyday food and household shopping, grocery stores are cornerstones of neighborhood commercial districts. Therefore, it is perhaps no surprise that the phenomenon of food deserts has seized the attention of policymakers, politicians, and planners in recent years. In this chapter, I situate Fresh and Easy and Mandela Foods in a national policy context by tracing the rise of grocery stores as an urban policy and planning concern. Through a historical review and policy analysis, I find that the federal Healthy Food Financing Initiative reflects normative ideals about urban grocery stores as well as a long history of government interventions and private investment in urban poverty alleviation. At the same time, grocery stores are now part of this shifting federal policy context, where childhood obesity and health disparities are driving local decisions about community reinvestment. As I will discuss further in Chapters 4 and 5, this has implications for grocery development and tools, techniques, and governance patterns of urban revitalization more broadly. First, I show how the current rhetoric around urban grocery stores reflects longstanding normative ideals about the role of food markets in cities. Whether the Greek agora, the “Garden City,” or the neo-traditional neighborhood, food markets became the lifeblood of cities, neighborhoods, and their residents. Second, I show how current federal food access programs trace back to a long history of federal urban poverty programs beginning with the War on Poverty to the Clinton-era federal neighborhood revitalization policies. Community Development Corporations would play a vital role in early experiments in urban grocery development in line with the logic of Michael Porter’s classic campaign for “inner city revitalization.”
Growing evidence of the “urban retail gap” would cast grocery stores as a priority retail development in underserved urban neighborhoods— albeit with mixed outcomes. Third, I discuss how despite the shortcomings of these efforts, public health concerns placed grocery stores back on an urban policy and planning agenda. The community food security movement and growing body of ‘food desert research’ redefined the goals of grocery store development in line with the current Healthy Food Financing Initiative. Finally, I discuss the current context of federal food access policies and neighborhood revitalization, which represents a convergence of previously disparate neighborhood revitalization and public health agendas around grocery stores. The catalyst would become Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move childhood obesity campaign, which shifted national policy discourses around place-based determinants of health. This further elevated the status of grocery stores as a centerpiece of national public health and neighborhood revitalization goals. Be it the agora of Ancient Greece and or the forum of Ancient Rome, the marketplace was the center of social, economic and political life . With the industrialization of cities, central public markets became hubs for the sales of goods. Utopian visions of the city emphasized the role of the marketplace as an organizing element of cities and neighborhoods. For example, for 19th century British town planner, Ebenezer Howard, the “garden city” comprised variety of residential areas connected by rail and accessible to recreational green space, places of work, and basic retail services. Garden cities would be organized along swaths of central green space and the “Crystal Palace” where, “manufactured goods are exposed for sale, and here most of that class of shopping which requires the job of deliberation and selection is done .” Early 20th century urban planner/sociologist Clarence Perry saw a similar role for the marketplace in his vision of the “Neighborhood Unit.” As such, neighborhoods would consist of communities of 5000 to 6000 residents centered around schools and bound by basic commercial facilities on the periphery . Recalling pre-World War I urban neighborhoods, Perry’s concept emphasized physical accessibility and walk ability to institutions that supported the social fabric of neighborhoods, namely schools, churches, and marketplaces. While both the Garden City and Neighborhood Unit concepts would be criticized for prioritizing urban design over the social and economic organization of cities, they articulated particular ideals of neighborhood that maintained in 20th century planning practice. For example, despite being a staunch critic of top-down urban planning and the Garden City concept, Jane Jacobs captured elements of utopian planning ideals in her observations of the livable, mixed-use communities in New York, Boston, and Pittsburgh. Neo-traditional planning of the 1980s and 1990s, captured elements of Jane Jacobs’ vision of the ideal urban neighborhood as a solution to suburban sprawl,vertical grow table wherein cities were designed to be pedestrian-friendly and well serviced with amenities.
For New Urbanist planners, accessible grocery stores contribute to a “balanced mixed of activities-dwelling, shopping, working, and schooling” .For Peter Calthorpe and a related cohort of Transit-Oriented-Development planners, transit stops serve as hubs of dense mixed-use development. Regionally, TODs were to be distributed one-mile apart, a designation determined based on the “market area specifically to support a grocery store within a neighborhood retail center” . Since the late 1980s and early 1990s, New Urbanism, TOD, and related neo-traditional planning principles have been applied to the design of entirely new communities and for the enhancement of existing areas . Initially, New Urbanism was envisioned as a strategy to combat auto-centric, suburban greenfield development. And yet by the early 1990s, neo-traditional planning principles would explicitly inform the Clinton-era HOPE VI housing revitalization program and municipal form based codes, further elevating the role of urban design in land use planning . Overall, normative planning paradigms—be it the Garden City, Neighborhood Unit, New Urbanism and/or TOD—all considered grocery stores among neighborhood amenities essential to the creation of livable, walkable community. As such, grocery stores completed a certain vision of the ideal neighborhood, where the necessities of daily life could be readily accessible. Grocery stores entered more explicitly into urban agendas with the rise of federal urban policies and local institutional practices that developed in response to postwar urban decline. In the 1960s, controversial Urban Renewal plans, rampant social movements around civil rights and economic justice swept cities across the nation. Then President Lyndon Johnson instated a series of programs focused on workforce development or as put by Halpern , “enhancing opportunity and preparing poor children, youth, and to a lesser extent adults to take advantage of opportunities .” Through the enactment of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, the Office of Economic Opportunity funded “Community Action Agencies” primarily for the provision of social services spanning workforce development, early childhood education, and youth services—all considered “people-based” social services. In 1966, then Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Jacob Javits introduced an amendment to the Act, the Special Impact Program, to expand the scope of the War on Poverty to encompass economic development activities that addressed the focused on “place-based” neighborhood concerns. Prior to the instatement of this amendment, non-profit organizations and Settlement Houses dating back to the turn of the century pursued “place-based” revitalization activities spanning housing rehabilitation, infrastructure development, and small business incubation. Chicago’s Woodlawn Organization was among these early CDCs, which primarily focused on business and workforce development and significantly, the development of neighborhood grocery stores among other resident-led businesses . The Special Impact Program further expanded these activities, now reorienting federal monies specifically towards the creation of CDCs. The first of 39 CDCs included Brooklyn-based Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation and Cleveland-based Hough Development Corporation. Both organizations pursued housing assistance, rehabilitation, the provision of business loans for new enterprises, and the development of larger scale projects such as supermarket-anchored shopping center . By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the dismantling of OEO by the Nixon administration, as well as the mixed successes of commercial pursuits reoriented the focus of federally-funded CDCs from economic development to housing and social services primarily . Early evaluations found that despite growing numbers of CDCs nationally, they had limited successes with economic and business incubation strategies . This contributed to the dwindling of CDC funding, but instead, the creation of intermediary organizations who would serve as fiscal agents of federal CDC funds—namely Community Development Financial Institutions such as the national network of Local Initiatives Support Coalition . During the mid 1970s to early 1980s, more established CDCs such as BSRC continued to pursue supermarket-anchored shopping centers even as the large majority of CDCs shifted their focus to housing rehabilitation and social services. In the late 1970s and 1980s, cities across the U.S. experienced deindustrialization and as a result, unprecedented levels of unemployment, urban population decline, and mounting economic segregation. CDCs persisted during this time, even experiencing a net growth by the mid to late 1980s. On the heels of Bill Clinton’s election into office in 1992, grocery stores entered more squarely into neighborhood revitalization practice as a new administration sought new solutions to the old problem of urban poverty. The impacts of urban decline were well known but it was only in the early 1990s, that phenomenon of “supermarket redlining” and the resulting “grocery gap” commanded a national audience. In February 1992, amidst growing concerns about the economic conditions of urban areas across the nation, the U.S. Conference of Mayors issued a report examining urban retail gaps. Through a national survey of supermarket trends, the report revealed that the number of supermarkets in eight major cities experienced a net decrease in a phenomenon they described as “supermarket redlining” . That said, the mass exodus of supermarkets from urban areas well established in previous research.