Inner Cities Ache for Food Markets

Suburbs and supermarkets have fed off each other for nearly half a century, but Dorothea Mitchell and other inner city residents haven’t been able to get good deals on food for years.

“We just don’t have the stores, and the ones we have are closing,” said Mitchell, a 52-year-old widow who lives in Boston’s Dorchester community.

“I can’t get on the bus and go out to the malls. And I can’t afford a car.” Instead, Mitchell is left the option of shopping at expensive convenience stores.

It’s a problem in cities around the nation. In Boston, 34 of 50 chain supermarkets have closed since 1970. Los Angeles County had 1,068 supermarkets in 1970. By 1990, the number dropped to 694, according to industry figures.

The drain isn’t over. A 28-city survey by the U.S. Conference of Mayors found eight cities lost supermarkets last year. Only two cities reported an increase in supermarkets in low-income neighborhoods.

Observers said supermarket chains began leaving the cities years ago as they followed mostly white, middle-class shoppers into the suburbs. Federal policies boosted the exodus, said Mayor Raymond L. Flynn, immediate past president of the mayors group.

“From the (Dwight D.) Eisenhower Administration up to the present, federal money has gone for building highways into the suburbs,” Flynn said. “With that came shopping malls and supermarkets, which took more people out to the suburbs, as well as a lot of jobs.”

The market migration takes its heaviest toll on the urban poor. In New York City, residents of low-income neighborhoods pay an average of 10% more for groceries than middle- and upper-income residents, according to the city’s Department of Consumer Affairs.

If the poor don’t fork over more for food, they must pay cab or bus fare to reach the supermarkets. In New York’s outer boroughs, poor people so routinely hire private car services to reach supermarkets that car companies have begun charging shoppers by the bag.

“We’ve found stories of people who were spending 90 minutes on buses or trains just to get to and from supermarkets,” said Pam Fairclough, project manager of the New York Community Food Resource Center, an advocacy group. “People either shop locally, pay high prices and don’t have the selection, or they travel a big distance.”

Mitchell catches a bus to a farmer’s market in Boston’s Mattapan section to buy most of her food. To purchase meat, she catches another bus to a butcher’s shop in Jamaica Plain.

The trips are arduous; sometimes she pays a neighbor youth to help her carry the groceries home. Still, it’s better than relying on local convenience stores.

“You might buy some milk or a banana there, but it costs an arm and a leg,” Mitchell said. “You can’t pay your bills and shop there.”

Some cities are bucking the trend.

Six years ago, community leaders working with the Associated Grocers chain got a 42,000-square-foot supermarket built in central Kansas City, Mo., on a site left so devastated by riots in 1968 that a film about a nuclear holocaust was shot there.

Other stores as well as apartments have sprung up in the area, and there are plans to build an even larger supermarket 10 blocks away.

“It was a totally blighted community,” said Don Maxwell, president of the Community Development Corp. of Kansas City. “Now it’s like an oasis in the middle of the community.”

More recently, the Vons Co. pledged to build up to 12 supermarkets in riot-torn areas of Los Angeles. In Boston, city officials and the Purity Supreme food chain set in motion plans to build a 50,000-square-foot store in ethnically mixed Jamaica Plain.

Purity Supreme President Peter Sodini said many supermarket chains, having saturated the suburbs with outlets, may see commercial opportunities in low-income neighborhoods, though they remain wary of problems such as land costs and crime.

“Urban areas have been stigmatized as being hard to operate in,” Sodini said. “Quite frankly, stores in the suburbs have been easier to operate.”