A Fresh Oasis Thrives in a Chicago Food Desert

My latest article at the Chicago News Cooperative, published in Sunday's New York Times.

Willie Montgomery and his well-worn Ford Crown Victoria have become an unlikely sign of progress in solving Chicago’s long-standing problem of so-called food deserts.

Mr. Montgomery charges grocery shoppers up to $8 for rides home from the Food 4 Less, a full-service grocery store that opened four years ago in Englewood. He rests on a handicap cart at the front of the store, waiting for cashiers to send him shoppers who traveled there without a car.

Mr. Montgomery, a retiree who will not give his age, said patrons rode with him because they did not want to worry about having their grocery bags stolen on the bus, and because they couldn’t buy what they needed from corner stores closer to home. They live in food deserts, poor areas that are dotted with vacant lots, dollar stores, and liquor marts, but bereft of fresh-food grocers.

“Shopping at a corner store is too expensive,” said Shirley Slatton, a student at nearby Kennedy-King College, who had piled a half-dozen bags of food and toiletries into the trunk of Mr. Montgomery’s car. “And they don’t sell stuff every day, so you have to check the dates on the cans to make sure you get fresh items.”

When food deserts became a public-policy issue five years ago, few retailers had developed big stores in poor neighborhoods. Chad Broughton, a researcher at the University of Chicago, said shoppers felt getting to the stores would take too long and be unsafe. Although a few grocers have opened in city food deserts, it is still common for Chicagoans in some rough neighborhoods to travel several miles to buy produce.

But steady traffic and revenues at the 63,000-square-foot Food 4 Less at 7030 South Ashland Avenue — as well as Mr. Montgomery’s thriving transportation business — are providing city officials and researchers with new clues about how far residents are willing to travel to stores and how much grocery chains are willing to spend to do business in poor neighborhoods.

Food 4 Less’s foray into Englewood also adds a new dimension to the political debate surrounding Wal-Mart’s effort to build a second store within city limits. The giant retailer has submitted proposals for stores in Pullman Park and Chatham on the South Side, but those efforts have been stalled by negotiations with labor unions, which want workers to be paid more than the minimum wage.

Mr. Broughton, a senior lecturer at the university who just released a survey of food access in four South Side neighborhoods, including Englewood, said that the ideal grocery store for food-desert residents is a large, chain supermarket, because such stores can stock fresh food more readily than corner stores, and at lower prices.

“For residents the obvious answer is a big supermarket with inexpensive items and more variety,” he said. If fresh produce does not sell before it rots, he added, “then it’s not profitable, and there isn’t much incentive for corner stores to stock it.”

But some community organizers balk at seeing profits and better-paying jobs leave their neighborhoods.

“To get into the grocery industry is probably one of the hardest things to do,” said LaDonna Redmond, an urban farmer and founder of the Graffiti and Grub restaurant and community center in East Englewood. “Aldi can purchase food and sell it for pennies on the dollar. Myself, if I open a grocery store, I can’t move that kind of volume.”

Ms. Redmond is a proponent of efforts to make fresh food more available, like accepting food stamps at farmers’ markets and providing grants to help corner stores stock fresh produce.

“If we have entrepreneurs from the community working with the community, I think we’d see something a little bit different,” Ms. Redmond said.

As one of only two full-service grocery stores within the nine square miles of greater Englewood — whose borders extend from 55th Street south to 75th Street, and from Western Avenue east to State Street — the Food 4 Less benefits and suffers from doing business in a food and retail desert. The store boasts the third-highest profit margin of the 15 Food 4 Less outlets in the Chicago region, but also has the highest security expenses, said Carrie Cole, the store director.

Englewood is one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. In East Englewood, 43.8 percent of residents live below the federal poverty level, according to the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission. In West Englewood, 32.1 percent live below the poverty level. The Chicago Police Department ranks East Englewood sixth and West Englewood eighth in robberies among city community areas.

Safety concerns “limit the window in which people can feel comfortable going out and getting food if they don’t have a car,” Mr. Broughton said. “People will re-arrange their work schedules just so that they can have a window during a safe time of day to get food.”

But Ms. Cole said the relative success of the store sends a message that it can pay to develop in Chicago’s low-income communities, which generally suffer most from a lack of fresh-food grocers. The store opened almost four years ago, and was followed by an Aldi store at 76th Street and Western Avenue.

“A lot of these stores do quite well because there’s not a lot of competition,” said Mari Gallagher, a food policy consultant and researcher who wrote a landmark study on Chicago food access in 2006 and a follow-up study in 2009. But the majority of areas labeled as food deserts by Ms. Gallagher’s study do not mirror Englewood’s growth.

“These stores are really important for public health,” Ms. Gallagher said, particularly because residents of communities without green grocers have higher risks of developing heart disease, cancer and kidney failure. “But the grocer has to make a profit, too.” She said the key for the city will be understanding what is going to help make the market place stronger and attract other types of stores.

The Englewood Food 4 Less sees close to 19,000 customers per week, Ms. Cole said, and each spends an average of $30 per visit. Those numbers have remained steady despite the recession. Although the company’s corporate office did not respond to questions about average store traffic in the Chicago area, four other Food 4 Less outlets in various city neighborhoods said they attracted between 16,000 and 20,000 customers a week.

Ms. Cole said that her store had done well because more people shop at discount food marts in hard times. “The recession has done us a lot of justice,” she said. “We’re probably one of the only chains to have seen an increase in sales.”

That is encouraging for the city, which has been financing new programs to increase fresh-food options in food deserts since Ms. Gallagher’s research group released its study on the correlation between residents’ health risks and distance from grocery stores, said Chris Raguso, acting commissioner of Chicago’s Department of Community Development.

The department has been giving grocers “every incentive we possibly can,” she said, to develop in these blighted areas by waiving required commercial inspections and streamlining the process for them to request building permits.

“It’s no secret that it’s an economic issue for grocery stores,” she said, “and it takes a long time to bring these large-scale developments into order.”