I. Summary
Established in 2009, the Food Retail Expansion to Support Health (FRESH) program is the product of a multi-agency coalition in New York City (NYC) government aiming to combat issues of food insecurity, hunger, malnutrition, and diet-based diseases.[1] Addressing problems of hunger and food access have been key public health projects in NYC over the past twenty years, leading to the development of a “food movement” among activists and government workers.[2] While many different programs have been developed to ameliorate hunger and poverty, the FRESH program stands out in its approach to issues of access. FRESH represents the culmination of political and ideological trends in government welfare policy and urban planning whose origins are in the 1970s and 1980s. At its core, FRESH is a supply-side economic program which aims at lowering the barriers to entry for supermarkets and full-scale grocery stores.[3] Its goal is to reach a more desirable ratio of supermarket square footage-to-people across all boroughs of NYC. According to the City, this would solve the shortage of adequate sources of fresh food in NYC’s “food deserts.” The addition of new grocery stores would “improve quality of life, improve property values, create jobs, serve as retail anchors, [and attract] foot traffic and complementary retail.”[4]
The FRESH program has enjoyed relative success according to the City’s evaluations and has been lauded on the national level.[5] On the ten-year anniversary of its introduction into city government, FRESH was reevaluated by the Subcommittee on Zoning and Franchises. The review of the program and its accomplishments provide us with the opportunity to assess the policy more thoroughly and make recommendations for its future.[6] This policy report will characterize and situate FRESH within its ideological and political contexts, assess its effects on NYC, and put forward new ideas for the improvement of the City’s anti-hunger public policy.
II. History of Issue
The City measures food insecurity in NYC through the “meal gap,” or, “the meals missing from the homes of families and individuals struggling with food insecurity.” The meal gap totaled 242 million meals in 2014, the most recent year with available data. According to the City, this figure has increased from the previous year. [7] Food insecurity in New York appears in clearly concentrated spaces and neighborhoods. The 16.4% of New Yorkers who experience food insecurity are distributed unevenly throughout the city, with large concentrations of insecurity in areas such as Harlem, North and South Bronx, Eastern Queens, East New York, and the Far Rockaways.[8] These areas present intersections of social and economic phenomena: they are spaces in which race, class, and legacies of disinvestment and austerity coalesce to form highly underserved, deeply impoverished communities where poverty and inequality are reproduced.[9]
According to the City, ease of access to supermarkets is a crucial factor in combating extreme hunger, reducing the meal gap, and improving public health.[10] Thus, the elimination of “food deserts—places where fresh food and full-range grocery services (such as a deli, bakery, or pharmacy) are scarce, low quality, and unreliable—became an active priority of the NYC government. Food deserts in NYC are concentrated in areas of high poverty with large populations of people of color. The City described “high need” neighborhoods such as Harlem, Washington Heights, the South Bronx, Williamsbridge/Wakefield, Pelham Parkway, Jamaica, Far Rockaway, Bushwick, Bedford-Stuyvesant, East New York, Sunset Park, St. George, and Stapleton as direly underserved by large supermarkets. These neighborhoods were also noted to be “areas where concentrations of diet-related diseases, such as obesity, diabetes, and heart disease are high.”[11]
The term “food desert” first appeared in the early 1990s as part of the language used by public-sector housing residents in Scotland. It was developed further and officially defined by the Nutrition Task Force of the Department of Health in the UK.[12] As the term began to gain traction in mainstream discourse in the 2000s, the meaning and application of “food desert” has widened to the point of ambiguity. The metrics for determining whether a location can be designated as a food desert vary based on the lens through which we analyze food insecurity. The organic metaphor deployed in the discussion of food deserts is similar to the language on “urban blight.” Both phenomena are labeled with scientific names that suggest natural, organic causation within an independent urban ecosystem. Rachel Weber argues further that “the discourse of blight appropriated metaphors from plant pathology (…) and medicine.”[13] Not only does “blight” insinuate infection, rot, and death, it also suggests the need for a cure. The effect of this language is the development of an understanding of political, economic, and social phenomenon as natural rather than constructed. Food deserts do not simply manifest within the natural course of urban life, nor do they represent issues of physical space or resource allocation alone. Food access is a complex issue which depends on multiple layers of resources and abilities that differ from household to household.[14] Thus, food deserts are not clearly defined, visible terrains on the urban landscape, nor are they purely organic. They are dynamic, highly varied spaces that are constructed through interactions among the public, private, social, and built environment.
III. History of FRESH
The FRESH system used the model of a similar state-wide program in Pennsylvania that was initiated in 2004: the Fresh Food Financing Initiative (FFFI). This public-private partnership of Pennsylvania state agencies, financial institutions, and advocacy groups finances and locates new supermarkets in high-need areas to alleviate hunger and health issues related to food access. The first program of its kind, the FFFI took advantage of private resources to leverage a “$120 million financing pool for grocery stores and supermarkets.” It then provided loans and grants to support eighty-eight separate grocery store projects throughout the state in urban and rural settings.[15] The requirements for FFFI eligible projects stipulated that the new stores must be located in “a low- to moderate-income census tract and in a trade area that is underserved.”[16]
The program enjoyed great success in its lifespan, ending only after all of its funds were expended in 2010.[17] During this time, it inspired other local and state programs in New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Louisiana and Colorado.[18] It also drew praise at the national level. First Lady Michelle Obama actively supported the FFFI and worked to develop a national iteration of the model as part of her public health campaign. In 2010, Ms. Obama launched the Healthy Food Financing Initiative (HFFI), a joint US Department of Agriculture (USDA), US Treasury, and Health and Human Services (HHS) program that offered financial assistance to private sector partners with the goal of “eliminat[ing] food deserts across the country within seven years.”[19] With the might of these three national agencies behind it, the HFFI leveraged over $400 million in 2011 to deploy in the form of grants and tax incentives.[20] Both the FFFI and HFFI were seen as innovative and popular solutions to the problems of hunger and public health. They forged a strong tradition of a market-based approach to the food movement at the city, state, and national level.
It is during this moment that FRESH is born. The Bloomberg Administration adopted FRESH based on the recommendations of a 2008 New York City Department of City Planning study titled “Going to Market.” This report urged that city officials take note of the “widespread shortage of neighborhood grocery stores providing fresh food options in several communities of New York City.” It recommended the adoption of the supply-side strategy as seen in Pennsylvania. This strategy emphasized lowering barriers to entry for new stores, which included strict zoning regulations, high land costs, and lack of large plots of viable real estate through tax and zoning incentives.
In its conception, the architects of FRESH tailored the program to fit NYC’s unique urban environment. The zoning incentives were a new addition to the Pennsylvania model. These included larger as-of-right stores—stores which require no discretionary action—in light manufacturing districts, additional development rights, and a reduction in required parking.[21] These incentives, as well as the FRESH zones, are important to the overall goal of the program in creating highly localized results. The program would only work if the FRESH benefits were properly spatially allocated. Only certain areas of NYC were made FRESH eligible in 2008. Over the years, FRESH has undergone multiple rounds of expansion to cover portions of “Manhattan Community Districts 9 through 12, portions of Bronx Community Districts 1 through 7, portions of Brooklyn Community Districts 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 16 and 17 and Community District 12 and the Special Downtown Jamaica District in Queens.”[22] The zones eligible for FRESH benefits were established to correlate with zones of high rates of poverty and diet-related disease.[23]
The metrics for determining food access were also adjusted from the national standards. The City “assume[s] that people are willing to walk one-quarter mile ( approximately a five-minute walk) for goods and services.”[24] Furthermore, the City set the Planning Standard Ratio of 30,000 square feet per 10,000 people as the optimal distribution of grocery store area to people.[25] This figure was double the existing ratio at the time of the proposal.
IV. Context and Theory
While FRESH’s bureaucratic origins can be traced to the early 2000s, its ideological roots date further back and can be elucidated through an analysis of the rise of neoliberal governance and policy. Political theorists such as Wendy Brown have defined neoliberalism as “an order of normative reason that, when it becomes ascendant, takes shape as a governing rationality extending a specific formulation of economic values, practices, and metrics to every dimension of human life.”[26] As neoliberalism affirms the logic of free market ideology, the primary goal of actors within society becomes the accumulation of capital. Thus, an economic motive is sought—or is imposed by the state or financial institutions—within everyday life. This ideology directly correlates to how many have approached food insecurity and justice: with financial accumulation as their motivation. Over the the past few decades, the food movements that developed alongside neoliberalism have generally diverged into two groups.The first, comprised mostly of government and industry officials, represents “those who want to preserve the political economy of the existing global food system,” while the second group, comprised of global activists, “seek[s] to change it.”[27]
Government programs like FRESH accept neoliberal principles like individuality and the primacy of capital because the administered aid is for those deemed productive and deserving (companies creating jobs); it is not regarded as a handout for those deemed helpless, poor individuals on the dole (economically unproductive individuals). The creation of new jobs and markets for capital, as well as the shifting of responsibility for people’s wellbeing from the state to the private sector and to the individual, represent a “major transfer of resources from the ‘public sector’ to the ‘private sector,’” that ultimately “contribut[es] to the general fiscal difficulty (crisis) of the state.”[28] Due to such budgeting priorities, tax money that could be allocated to programs that directly aid the purchase of fresh foods instead flows from municipal coffers into the accounts of private developers and corporations. Later, the apparent lack of available funds is used as justification for further slashing of social programs. SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, is one such program that has the potential to materially support people experiencing food insecurity as it addresses the inherent crisis of poverty. However, under policies like FRESH, communities located within food deserts are expected to independently improve their health and improve their standard of living “through individual acts of consumption.” This public-private partnership underscores the City’s subscription to “the prevailing neoliberal economic rhetoric: that unregulated capitalist markets yield the most efficient allocation of resources.”[29]
The language of FRESH explicates this neoliberal ideology; food security becomes an economic problem with an economic solution. Alicia Glen, a former member of the New York Supermarket Commission and head of the urban investment group at Goldman Sachs, and Bill de Blasio’s Deputy Mayor for Housing and Economic Development from 2013-2019, stated that “For a good supermarket to operate successfully, you need big floor plates, you have to do a lot of volume, and you can’t pay a lot of rent. In the current environment, it’s hard to put together a financially feasible deal without a significant amount of subsidy.”[30] It is telling that elite policymakers such as Alicia Glen have direct ties to the financial industry. Her comments reveal the logic that the City employs to explain the existence of food deserts and underserved areas of the city as products of natural market trends and behavior. Policymakers are convinced that, with a little nudge from the city, capital will return to blighted areas and the overall health of the community will rise. This analysis completely ignores the political and social reality that areas of the South Bronx or the Far Rockaways do not have bountiful supplies of fresh food to begin with. Rather than conceiving of the city as an empty canvas over which resources are randomly distributed, it is crucial to recognize that racism, historic segregation, and disinvestment all inform the location of goods and services. The well documented practice of redlining represents just how impactful these histories were on the development of New York. Analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago indicates that the red lines drawn around predominantly non-white neighborhoods in Brooklyn have resulted in “differences in the level of racial segregation, homeownership rates, home values and credit scores” as recently as 2010.[31] Ignoring such premeditated segregation, however, is a trademark of the neoliberal order, wherein highly racialized and otherwise politically charged questions are reduced to those of supply and demand.
This approach to solving complicated social, economic, and political problems through a reliance on the rationality of the market is not exclusive to the food movement. Government entities, corporations, and activists have increasingly dealt with issues concerning education, housing, and transportation in a similar fashion. It is within this political moment where neoliberal policies are the norm that radical food justice work is most necessary. Here, we will turn to the opposition to FRESH and analyze the weaknesses that have arisen within the program over the past ten years.
V. Opposition and Critique
FRESH has drawn extensive critique from academics, special interest groups, activists, and community members. The major opposition to the plan stems from doubt in FRESH’s efficacy. Activists and researchers have raised many questions about the existence of food deserts and challenge the basic premise of the supply-side program. Others analyze and argue against the negative direct and indirect impacts of FRESH on local communities. Not only are vulnerable communities missing out on precious government funds that are diverted to FRESH, they may also face the harms of gentrification.
The first FRESH-sponsored grocery store, a new Western Beef in the South Bronx, opened in 2011. At its opening, Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. declared, “this new supermarket will not only provide a host of healthy, fresh food options to neighborhood residents, it will bring new jobs to the Bronx. This is a win-win for everyone involved.” Part of this major “win” was the creation of 120 jobs at Western Beef. This development, aided by the “approximately $5.6 million” in tax benefits from the city, was lauded as “further[ing] the City’s goal of generating economic investment and job creation in the South Bronx.[32] While this opening was beneficial to the Western Beef franchise, it is worth questioning whether and to what extent South Bronx residents experienced a major transformation in their quality of life and access to healthy and desirable foods. New research from the field of public health suggests that the link between a strong grocery store square-footage-to-people ratio and the improvement in overall health and wellness is not as tenable as it once appeared.
A study conducted by New York University in 2014 analyzed the impact of a FRESH grocery store in the Bronx on the health of children in the area. The study “suggest[s] the FRESH Program supermarket had minimal effect on household food availability and no appreciable effect on consumption habits of Morrisania children within the first year of opening, at least for the community as a whole.”[33] In a 2018 CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute brief that was presented to the Subcommittee on Zoning and Franchises researchers argued that
Diet related health indicators have barely budged. Fruit and vegetable consumption by adult New Yorkers remained inadequate between 2008 and 2015. Moreover, disparities in fruit and vegetable consumption between whites and Blacks increased during this period and decreased only modestly between whites and Hispanics. Disparities in overweight and obesity have also persisted, with about two thirds of Black and Latino adults, half of white adults and about a third of Asian/ Pacific Islander adults reporting they were obese or overweight in both 2008 and 2015.[34]
This research contradicts the City’s “win-win” narrative. Despite the active and expensive effort to eliminate food deserts across New York, none of the metrics of public health show meaningful improvement.
Multiple explanations for this phenomenon exist. First, the FRESH program operates on the theory of “Kevin Costner in the Field of Dreams — ‘If you build it, they will come.’”[35] Physical proximity to food is the only factor addressed. FRESH totally ignores the complicated circumstances and logics that surround food access and diet practices: class status, education, physical ability, and ethnicity are all factors that affect one’s diet and shopping habits. For lower-income individuals, research shows that value supersedes convenience in terms of grocery store preferences and “consumers do not generally shop at the grocer closest to home, but rather have more varied shopping patterns influenced by activity patterns, buying strategies, social networks, and the location of other food (and non-food) retailers.”[36] This idea is fleshed out in interviews conducted with members of FRESH zone communities:
Rolinda Walls […] has lived in the neighborhood for 53 years. But she shops at a number of different stores. “At the beginning of the month I hit all the stores for the sales,” she said. “I get the brochures, and I check what I want, and it lasts me from month to month.” She comes to the Junius Food Bazar for the fish and beans. She goes to Associated for meat—it’s too expensive at the Food Bazar, she says. But she likes the produce here, and the deli.[37]
FRESH offers no explicit effort to support grocery stores that offer affordable goods and there is no attention paid to any of the systemic blocks to acquiring healthy food, such as price. Poor people who do not have the time or training to prepare a wide variety of healthy meals at home are more likely to opt for cheaper, less healthy options, like packaged foods or fast-food.[38]Thus, despite the addition of new stores to the community, costs remains high to both budgets and health, as low-income individuals must either travel great distances to find the best deals on ingredients or rely on unhealthy alternatives.
Not only is it unclear if FRESH is helping underserved communities, there is also concern that FRESH may be gentrifying neighborhoods. With the encouragement of new development and changes in zoning, the City invites gentrifying forces such as real estate developers and corporate chains into poor and predominantly non-white neighborhoods. “The growth of food retailers in gentrifying neighborhoods, often accompanied by higher prices, product selections, and store branding” hurts residents that could potentially be priced out of their homes.[39] Indeed, many New Yorkers are aware of what a new Whole Foods or Trader Joes means for their community: the impending end of small businesses, deterioration of neighborhood character, and threats to affordability and survival. New York City and FRESH have little incentive to curb gentrifying forces, however, as economic development––even at the expense of its citizens––helps to fill the municipal coffers and make the city a more luxurious place to live, all under the guise of aid.
VI. Alternatives
The question of alternatives forces us to determine whether FRESH is a salvageable model that can be improved, or whether it should be abandoned entirely. A crucial component of imagining a better food movement is recognizing the structural issues that create barriers to access in the first place. As the CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute argued at the oversight hearing for FRESH, “food access comes from having sufficient income to pay for food.”[40] While this may seem like a simple statement, it is charged with the political analysis that FRESH lacks. What is the benefit of a newly subsidized supermarket if people can’t afford to shop there? Or if the store does not pay their workers a living wage?[41] These questions represent the concerns of NYC unions, activists, and coalitions that represent poor and underserved populations across the city.
In the words of one activist, “FRESH is a subsidy for supermarket chains, not poor people.”[42] The ways in which the food movement envisions improving FRESH are focused on changing or evening out this relationship. Activists and groups seem to believe that FRESH can ultimately do good for the City, but only in conjunction with a much more active and extensive social and economic justice policy program. Suggestions put forward at the ten-year reevaluation included increasing the minimum wage, improving public housing, and addressing transportation costs as a part of the food access struggle.[43] The City could also work to expand access and funding for conditional cash transfer programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) which address the crux of the problem: a lack of money.
While these policy proposals attempt to solve issues of poverty within the status quo, achieving radical food justice requires sustained struggles against the neoliberal ideology behind programs like FRESH. Should a person’s ability to live hinge on their ability to pay? This is a question that radical activists have taken up in calls for housing as a human right or a universal basic income. The same sort of framework can be applied to food justice as well. As a complete alternative to the cash transfer from the public to the private, let us imagine a system in which wealth is redistributed such that access to healthy food is a right. No longer must the question be whether the subsidies for new grocery stores are too high or too low. Radical food justice movements challenge the conception of food as a commodity, a category of privately-owned goods that must turn a profit when sold. Struggling to de-commodify and reimagine food as a basic right—one that the state must provide for—opens up an entirely new set of questions and ideas about how the city might be organized and run, and who might exist within it.
VII. Recommendations and Conclusions
FRESH is representative of an overall trend in government ideology and policymaking over the past few decades. It approaches complex social, economic, and political problems with a purely economic, neoliberal gaze. While the popularity of this program has led to the opening of forty-four new supermarkets across the city, its tangible effects on the elimination of food deserts and the improvement of public health are slim. Currently, FRESH is being lauded as an overall success story. However, there are concrete policies that the City could pursue to improve the program, such as widening the scope of their welfare, housing, and transportation programs to comprehensively combat the structural dilemmas within food access. Without a more intersectional understanding of poverty and food insecurity, FRESH will continue to be of greater benefit to supermarkets than to underserved communities.
Overall, I recommend a combination of the two alternatives presented in the section above: reforming the present model and slowly working towards a radical dismantling of capitalist structures. Working within FRESH has the potential to actively expand food access to poor neighborhoods across NYC. Calling for food access as a human right would push the conversation even further and could open up new potentialities in social and economic justice.
Expanding SNAP benefits and eligibility is a major policy change that could increase FRESH’s effectiveness. This expansion of benefits would help residents of FRESH zones afford to shop at the subsidized stores. With a larger budget for food, poor people would be able to take greater advantage of the new healthy offerings and the public health goals of FRESH might be achieved.
Acts like insisting that FRESH stores pay a living wage will not change the neoliberal and capitalist framework of program. But they are nevertheless important, actionable policies that have the potential to create positive material change for poor people across New York. Going forward, the NYC food movement must continue to actively work toward improving people’s lives through existing institutions like FRESH, while also working on larger campaigns to fight for food access as a human right. By combatting neoliberalism and food commodification, food justice activists have the potential to radically change society and the city.
***
[1] NYC Food Policy, “2017 Food Metrics Report,” 2017, 21.
[2] Nicholas Freudenberg et al., “Can a Food Justice Movement Improve Nutrition and Health? A Case Study of the Emerging Food Movement in New York City,” National Center for Biotechnology Information, 2011.
[3] NYC Department of City Planning, “FRESH Food Stores.”
[4] NYC Department of City Planning et al., “Going to Market: New York City’s Grocery Store and Supermarket Shortage,” New York City Government, 29 October 2008, 2-7
[5] Terry Pristin, “Fresher Food, with Some Help,” New York Times, 17 June 2009.
[6] Committee on Economic Development, “Oversight – REFRESH: Assessing the Zoning and Financial Incentives of the Food Retail Expansion to Support Health Program,” Oversight. New York City Council, 21 June 2018.
[7] NYC Food Policy, “2017 Food Metrics,” 7.
[8] Ibid., 8.
[9] Brian Elbel et al., “Assessment of a Government-Subsidized supermarket in a High-Need Area on Household Food Availability and children’s Dietary Intakes,” in Public Health Nutrition, 2015, 2281.
[10] Ibid., 2281-2282.
[11] NYC Department of City Planning, “Going to Market,” 20-21.
[12] Hillary J Shaw, “Food Deserts: Towards the Development of a Classification,” in Geografiska Annaler, 2006, 231.
[13] Rachel Weber, “Extracting Value from the City: Neoliberalism and Urban Redevelopment,” in Antipode, 2002, 526.
[14] Shaw, “Food Deserts,” 231-232.
[15] “Report on Key Issues from the House Appropriations Committee: Pennsylvania Fresh Food Financing Initiative,” National Institution of State Legislatures, 2010.
[16] Ibid.
[17] “SUCCESS STORY Fresh Food Financing Initiative,” Reinvestment Fund.
[18] “Pennsylvania Fresh Food Financing Initiative.”
[19] “Obama Administration Details Healthy Food Financing Initiative,” US Department of the Treasury, 19 February 2010.
[20] Ibid.
[21] New York City Economic Development Corporation, “FRESH Impact Report,” 4.
[22] NYC Department of City Planning, “FRESH Food Stores.”
[23] NYC Department of City Planning, “Going to Market,” 15-16.
[24] Nevin Cohen, “REFRESH: Modifying the Food Retail Expansion to Support Health Program to Improve Healthy Food Access,” CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute.
[25] NYC Department of City Planning, “Going to Market,” 7.
[26] Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, (New York: Zone Books, 2015), 30.
[27] Eric Holt-Giméénez and Yi Wang, “Reform or Transformation? The Pivotal Role of Food Justice in the U.S. Food Movement,” in Race/Ethnicity, 84.
[28] Peter Marcuse, “The Targeted Crisis: On the Ideology of the Urban Fiscal Crisis and Its Uses,” in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 339.
[29] Holt-Giméénez and Wang, “Reform or Transformation,” 86.
[30] Pristin, “Fresher Food, with Some Help.”
[31] Emily Badger, “How Redlining’s Racist Effects Lasted for Decades,” New York Times, August 24, 2017, sec. The Upshot. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/24/upshot/how-redlinings-racist-effects-lasted-for-decades.html.
[32] New York City Economic Development Corporation, “City and Local Elected Officials Open the First Supermarket Built Using Targeted City Incentives to Bring Fresh Food to Underserved Neighborhoods.”
[33] Elbel et al., “Assessment of a Government-Subsidized Supermarket in a High-Need Area on Household Food Availability and Children’s Dietary Intakes,” 2887.
[34] Cohen, “REFRESH: Modifying the Food Retail Expansion to Support Health Program to Improve Healthy Food Access.”
[35] Sarah Corapi, “Why It Takes More than a Grocery Store to Eliminate a ‘Food Desert.’” PBS News Hour, 3 February 2014.
[36] Cohen, “REFRESH: Modifying the Food Retail Expansion to Support Health Program to Improve Healthy Food Access.”
[37] Batya Ungar-Sargon, “Have City Subsidies to Supermarkets Made NYC Healthier?” City Limits, April 5, 2016.
[38] Shaw, “Food Deserts: Towards the Development of a Classification,” 232.
[39] Cohen, “REFRESH: Modifying the Food Retail Expansion to Support Health Program to Improve Healthy Food Access.”
[40] Testimony for Oversight Hearing on FRESH, Pub. L. No. T2018-2071, § Committee on Economic Development, 2018, 21
[41] Ibid., 23-24.
[42] Freudenberg et al., “Can a Food Justice Movement Improve Nutrition and Health? A Case Study of the Emerging Food Movement in New York City.”
[43] Testimony for Oversight Hearing on FRESH, 21.