“The margins are pretty thin on grocery stores,” she said. More communities are asking for help attracting or retaining grocers, Max said, with local governments and community non-profits gathering funds rather than waiting for companies to open stores on their own. It can be hard for a grocery store to make a profit even in affluent communities, so getting companies to stick around low-income neighborhoods is a challenge, said Connie Max, executive vice-president for lending with the Local Initiatives Support Corp, a non-profit that helps fund community projects. “They don’t build them in the neighborhoods where we need them.” “Our large grocery stores have a business model that’s built on education and income,” said Wheeler, who noted Washington DC plans to use American Rescue Plan funds to add smaller grocery stores to underserved neighborhoods this year. The grocery model is broken and the federal funding offers new ways to fix it, said Beverley Wheeler, director of DC Hunger Solutions, which runs nutrition programs in the nation’s capital. “Sometimes those habits become embedded.”īlack and Latinos are more likely to live in areas without grocery stores than white people, as are low-income people. “When you have been an oppressed resident of our country in some of these disadvantaged neighborhoods, you develop some habits related to survival,” he said. Healthier food would help alleviate high obesity, cholesterol and blood pressure problems among Toledo’s Black population, said the Rev Donald Perryman, president of the Toledo advocacy group United Pastors for Social Empowerment. In Toledo, Ohio, local activists have urged the city to use $1m of the federal infrastructure funds to help attract a grocery store to a low-income neighborhood. A slew of other areas are looking at ways the funds could ease food insecurity. It plans to use federal stimulus funds to expand its fresh produce offering this year.Īt least five other communities have proposed using money from the American Rescue Plan – the $1.9tn package approved by Congress in 2021 to help the country recover from the pandemic’s effects – to open or revive grocery stores, according to the US Treasury Department. “Our berries fly off the shelves,” said Eddie Moore, a business development officer who runs the store for the Island Mountain Development Group, which bought the business last year. The combination gas station and convenience store closed briefly after it was bought and then reopened in December selling apples, bananas, potatoes, onions and berries.
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