By Matthew Cameron

Yesterday, The Washington Post reported Michelle Obama is teaming up with Wal-Mart, Walgreens, Supervalu, and a number of regional supermarkets to build stores in what are known as “food deserts,” low-income areas that have little-to-no access to fresh fruits and vegetables. The logic behind this initiative is that it’s tough for poor people to eat healthy if the only places in their neighborhoods that sell food are convenience stores and corner markets. Therefore, building supermarkets that are stocked with a variety of fresh produce ought to improve the health of the people who live in these neighborhoods.

Now, there’s plenty of research out there that would appear to validate this assumption. This study, for example, found that people who live near supermarkets have better health outcomes than those who live closer to convenience stores or small-scale grocers. Another suggests that individuals who regularly shop at supermarkets consume more fruits and vegetables than those who purchase food elsewhere.

But arguably these studies are just showing that poor people are both unhealthy, and tend to live in neighborhoods that lack grocery stores. Would more supermarkets, as such, actually make a difference?

A study by Donald Rose and Rickell Richards of Tulane University comes closer to answering this question. It looks at whether easy access to supermarkets correlates to fruit and vegetable consumption. Importantly, the study’s sample consists solely of food stamp recipients, who are overwhelmingly low-income. This controls for the various socioeconomic characteristics that confound the other studies. Additionally, the authors’ calculations accounted for other factors such as nutritional awareness, employment status and parental status that could have skewed their findings. The result:

After controlling for confounding variables, easy access to supermarket shopping was associated with increased household use of fruits (84 grams per adult equivalent per day; 95% confidence interval). Distance from home to food store was inversely associated with fruit use by households. Similar patterns were seen with vegetable use, though associations were not significant. [...]

Nationally representative studies show that fruit consumption is low in the USA, with an average of only 1.5 servings consumed per person per day. Given this panorama, our results, suggesting a 1 serving size difference in fruit consumption due to store access, mean that store access is an important issue, even if only for the limited portion of the Food Stamp population with an access problem. While our results on the relationship of store access to vegetable consumption are less certain, the latter continues to be a dietary problem.

Obviously, improving access to fresh produce isn’t a panacea for all of the disadvantages — time and budget constraints, lack of nutritional education, etc. — that the poor face. But Rose and Richards’ report should encourage supermarkets and the Obama administration to press on with this initiative as a plank in the broader fight against health inequality.

That blockbuster story comes via Dave Alpert:

Line said the Mall is covered by the same laws as other national parks such as the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and Yosemite. Putting a bike station on the Mall would violate the National Historic Preservation Act because a station would be seen as going against the historical purpose of the Mall and its monuments.

“The National Park Service reflects an American heritage and what a particular park means to American citizens, not (necessarily) at (the) convenience of select individuals,” Line said.

Oh, wait, they’re talking about a Capital Bikeshare station not about the highway ramps and automobile-only asphalt. That stuff’s there because of American heritage rather than the convenience of select car owning individuals.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, responding to me on the case of a Washington, DC landowner “forced” to sell her property because her investment has massively increased in value and she now needs to pay high taxes on it does, I think, hint at a real alternative to progressive neoliberalism:

I actually think it’s fairly easy to understand Johnson’s beef. She likes her neighborhood as it is. She may well be able to “sell high,” but the fact is she doesn’t want to sell at all. She probably would love to see her property values rise, but the neighborhood isn’t simply, for her, a financial instrument–it’s an emotional one. In that sense, Johnson isn’t very different than millions of other humans who invest in neighborhoods.

Her contention that the city is “driving us out of here.” is very much debatable. But it’s worth noting that a class of owners with a commitment to something more than a naked financial return is a good thing. When Matt asserts that the city is trying to make H Street a “desirable place to live,” I am compelled to ask “desirable for whom?” I’m not being obtuse here–I understand, in the aggregate, his larger point. But very often people find a kind of value in their living condition that eludes socioeconomic data.

That makes perfect sense. But I do think it’s worth saying that the alternative being put on the table here is a conservative one, and the mere fact that the successful investor who doesn’t like high property tax rates is black doesn’t change that fact. After all, what concrete policy steps could the DC government take to avoid more people being stuck with the problem of rising property values that lead to higher property taxes. Well, I see two:

1. The city could stop investing in improved public services and public safety.
2. The city could reduce property taxes, especially on well-heeled property owners.

That’s not a wild-eyed or insane policy agenda by any means. Indeed, it’s the fiscal agenda of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. And I think it’s good for progressives to pay attention to things like Johnson’s story, since she can perhaps help people to better understand why an agenda of spending cuts and property tax cuts can appeal to a broad group of people and not just a tiny cabal of Koch-funded conspirators. That said, here in the DC context, we should recognize this kind of communitarian critique of liberalism for what it is — a conservative critique.

(cc photo by electronavalanche)

My baseline view is that American population will grow over the next 50 years, so we’ll need more of all kinds of housing. Big cities, small towns, whatever. More. But it’s interesting to speculate about the balance. Karl Smith describes his “growing interest in radical exurbanism”:

The idea that developments in telecommunication will allow people to live far away but still have business relationships.

We might then imagine living arrangements evolving solely around being near family and friends. A sort of extensive network of small towns, each containing people highly sorted to wanting to live within the norms of that small town and with the people of that town.

I think that’s very appealing in many ways. But I doubt it will predominate. In the future, the trend toward increased mechanization of manufactured goods production will continue. And the trend toward digital goods being extremely cheap and plentiful will also continue. That means, more or less necessarily, that the majority of people will be involved in selling face-to-face services to each other. What kind of services? I’m not sure. Cops, yoga instructors, chefs, and preschool teachers all seem like plausible candidates. And there will necessarily be some advantages to scaling that kind of thing up. In a radical exurban community there might only be the population base for a Papa John’s. A larger community that supports a Papa John’s, a Pizza Hut, and a Dominoes will be better able to match idiosyncratic customer preferences with available variety of crappy national chain pizza. Consequently, the larger community has higher productivity in the crappy chain pizza sector (for the record, Papa John’s is the right choice).

And this same dynamic applies to a wide range of face-to-face services in a way that militates in favor of some kind of metropolitan living.

Georges Tanguay and Ian Gingras give us “Gas Price Variation and Urban Sprawl: An Empirical Analysis of the 12 Largest Canadian Metropolitan Areas.” The results are about what you would expect—cheap gas inspired gasoline-intensive development patterns: “On average, a 1% increase in gas prices has caused: i) a 0.32% increase in the population living in the inner city and ii) a 1.28% decrease in low-density housing units.”

Conversely, higher incomes make gasoline more affordable and are associated with increased sprawl.

Roderick M. Hills, Jr. and David Schleicher have a new paper:

The politics of urban land use frustrate even the best intentions. A number of cities have made strong political commitments to increasing their local housing supply in the face of a crisis of affordability and availability in urban housing. However, their decisions to engage in “up-zoning,” or increases in the areas in which new housing can be built, are often offset by even more “down-zoning” or laws that decrease the ability of residents in a designated area to build new housing as-of-right. The result is that housing availability does not increase by anywhere near the promises of elected officials.

In this essay, we argue that the difficulty cities face in increasing local housing supply is a result of the seriatim nature of local land use decisions. Because each down-zoning decision has only a small effect on the housing supply, citywide forces spend little political capital fighting them, leaving the field to neighborhood groups who care deeply. Further, because down-zoning decisions are made in advance of any proposed new development, the most active interest group in favor of new housing – developers – takes a pass on lobbying. The result is an uneven playing field in favor of down-zoning.

Drawing on examples of “extra-congressional procedure” like federal base closing commissions and the Reciprocal Trade Act of 1933, we argue that local governments can solve this problem by changing the procedure by which they consider zoning decisions. Specifically, they should pass laws that require the city to create a local “zoning budget” each year. All deviations downward from planned growth in housing supply expressed in the budget should have to be offset by corresponding increases elsewhere in buildable as-of-right land. This would reduce the degree to which universal logrolling coalitions can form among anti-development neighborhood groups and would create incentives for pro-development forces to lobby against down-zonings in which they currently have little interest. The result should be housing policy that more closely tracks local preferences on housing development.

That sounds about right. The basic pattern is that on any individual question, we over-weight the preferences of the immediate neighbors which leads to a citywide equilibrium of less new development than we collectively want. The proposal here is for a kind of statutory PAYGO for zoning to halt that undershooting process.