The city is widely expected to soon introduce new zoning and financial incentives aimed at encouraging supermarket development in neighborhoods with few grocery stores. The Department of City Planning last week would confirm only that the city is working toward announcing the details of the plan – but details have been emerging.
Update: The city released its "FRESH" plan on May 16.
Meanwhile, a report released recently by the Harlem Food & Fitness Consortium, a coalition of community and advocacy groups, also proposed providing subsidies and incentives for supermarket developers – with a caveat. “Community residents should have a say in this,” said James Subudhi, sustainability coordinator for WE ACT for Environmental Justice, a member of the consortium. “Let’s say there’s a supermarket operator who applies for this [subsidy]. What are the sorts of contractual obligations that they should meet to receive this money? They should require some sort of community input in this.”
The Harlem consortium’s report is based on input from neighborhood residents. It recommends that stores receiving subsidies be required to provide fair wages for employees and fair prices for the neighborhood's shoppers; stock high quality, fresh foods; and accept the federal food subsidies WIC (for Women, Infants and Children) and SNAP (formerly called food stamps, requiring an EBT or electronic benefits transfer card). It also proposes opening supermarkets in public housing projects and subjecting new fast food restaurants to a review process similar to that which new liquor stores undergo.
A new initiative proposed by Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer could support both advocacy groups’ and city policymakers’ efforts on these issues. Announced last week, Stringer’s “FoodStat” would produce ratios of the number of unhealthy vs. healthy food retailers in each city neighborhood.
Like the NYPD’s CompStat program, which maps crimes for targeted policing, FoodStat could help policymakers, medical professionals, and community groups zero in on neighborhoods where healthy food is particularly scarce. East Harlem, for example, has 15 fewer supermarkets – and 24 more fast food outlets – than the Upper East Side, according to Stringer's analysis. (Though East Harlem also has about 100,000 fewer residents.) But, he stipulated, FoodStat is only a partial solution to the city’s food access woes. “This doesn’t work unless you have a comprehensive plan for incentives to supermarkets, healthy bodegas, getting young kids to go to farmers markets,” he said in an interview. “It’s part of a larger initiative.”
Such proposals are only the most recent efforts to improve New Yorkers’ access to healthy food. Previous city initiatives have added salad bars to some public school cafeterias, installed EBT card machines for food stamp use in the farmers markets, encouraged bodegas to stock healthier food, and boosted the number of food carts selling fresh fruits and vegetables on city streets. Gov. David Paterson has also set aside $10 million to provide loans to grocery stores that locate in the state’s “underserved” communities.
