West Greenville’s food desert more about retail inequality, prof says
For years, residents in Southernside and West Greenville — so-called “food deserts” — have been fighting to get a grocery store in their neighborhoods. But the fight over food deserts is about so much more than food, said Ken Kolb, a Furman University professor.
If residents in an area with limited access to resources get access to healthy food, some experts argue, their eating habits will change for the better.
Local nonprofits tried launching a mobile food market in Southernside and West Greenville, areas historically ravaged by economic decline and segregationist policies. The city has tried recruiting grocery retailers there to little avail.
But Kolb thinks everyone — including himself — had been focused on the wrong thing.
“The fight over food deserts was about much more than food,” Kolb said. “It was a battle over retail, over what can be bought and sold, just like the civil rights movement was not really about the actual lunch counters and the diners.
“We just got a little bit blinded by the healthy-food aspect and grocery stores to realize that this is a much deeper, more entrenched problem that was actually caused by clear city, state and federal policies decades ago.”
The problem with food deserts
In his new book, “Retail inequality: Reframing the food desert debate,” Kolb argues the conversation about food deserts has been flawed from the start.
People like the residents of West Greenville haven’t been asking for help to improve what they eat, Kolb writes. Instead, they asked for help to improve where they live.
The real discussion is about retail inequality, Kolb says — or, as he describes it, “the legacy of public and private sector abandonment of poor Black neighborhoods across the country.”
Kolb gives examples of this inequality through retail’s decline in neighborhoods like Southernside. For decades, Black communities in poor urban areas asked for the same retail options as their wealthier, white counterparts in other areas, he said. Grocers — corner shops, mom-and-pop stores — had closed up and left, beat out by big chain stores that catered to the suburbs. Other retail like pawn shops and liquor stores took their place.
“For better or worse, to be an equal member in American society is to have an equal ability to shop at the same venues and for the same goods as everyone else,” he writes.
Ensuring proximity to healthy food doesn’t mean people will eat it, Kolb said. Many factors influence people’s eating habits, not just access. Eating habits and preferences are tied to other aspects of people’s lives, like their work schedules or even how many people they live with. Building a grocery store won’t fix everything.
But there’s no denying that food deserts are a powerful concept, he said. Some neighborhoods had long struggled with issues like job loss, crime and lack of infrastructure. But when the local problems were framed in terms of health and food, powerful people started paying attention, even rolling out a federal program to address it, he said.
“All these foodie movements that have popped up in the past 15 years, they have political capital because they’re largely white middle-class social movements,” Kolb said. “So when they heard ‘grocery store,’ they decided, ‘Well, this is one way I can help, because it caters to my interest, too.'”
The solutions to food deserts in parts of Greenville
There are multiple potential solutions to the food-desert problem, Kolb said.
One idea is launching collective home meal preparation in local neighborhoods, a method that works well for people who already spend time together, like members of a church bible study. That might require getting some grants to up-fit local community centers or church kitchens, but “I think in collective groups, you could get people who could work together and pool their resources to buy in bulk,” he said.
Another solution is pairing mobile farmer’s markets or farmer’s stands with stores that people are already going to, like gas stations, convenience stores and dollar stores to create one-stop shopping.
But the first step is to reframe the discussion — the problem is bigger than food, Kolb said.
More:Judson Mill ‘robbed’ of access to fresh produce after losing community garden
More:West Greenville is no longer a majority Black neighborhood. Here’s why that matters
In the past, Greenville and other parts of the country passed policies that devastated predominantly Black urban neighborhoods like Southernside, such as “urban renewal” or road and transportation projects, Kolb said. This created pockets of “concentrated poverty” in neighborhoods that did not have the collective buying power to support nice retail, Kolb said.
And if neighborhoods were drained of that buying power, policymakers need to find ways to subsidize retail to return, he said.
Today, the fight in places like Southernside and West Greenville is for the future, he thinks. Local government and the private sector are investing again in these neighborhoods, bringing in new businesses. But they face a difficult balance: how do they reinvigorate communities without displacing the people who live there?
“Gentrification is ‘revitalizing’ these once forgotten communities,” Kolb writes in his book. “But for whom?”
Macon Atkinson is the city watchdog reporter for The Greenville News. She’s powered by long runs and strong coffee. Follow her on Twitter @maconatkinson.
