The Food Desert: A Thing of the Past?
What can past redlining tell us about food deserts today?
According to the Food Access Research Atlas, there are 21 food deserts (by census tract) in and around Winston-Salem. These are areas where a significant portion of the tract population lives beyond a certain distance from the nearest supermarket (1 mile, if urban; 10 miles, if rural).
In light of the increasing grocery store concentration we’ve been seeing in some parts of town (no names need be mentioned), the contrast with other food deserted areas around Winston-Salem is only becoming all the more unmistakably stark. While that contrast itself might be head scratching, it’s not without some historical context (which is always nice in making situations seem less random, mysterious, and beyond intervention).
To better understand the heritage of some of our 21 food desert tracts, take a look at the Food Access Atlas map data juxtaposed with your 1937 copy of the Winston-Salem Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) map. It’s hard not to notice some alignment.
What was this Home Owners’ Loan Corporation? “During the Depression, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, a New Deal agency, refinanced mortgages for over a million struggling homeowners. As part of this work, the agency sent out assessors who rated neighborhoods based on several factors: housing stock, sales and rental rates, physical attributes of the terrain, and ‘threat of infiltration of foreign-born, negro, or lower grade population.’” [Slate]
So these maps were lending tools that showcased areas designated as prime for loans (along essentially race-driven criteria) and propelled city development into the high- and low-access regions along the largely racial lines that we’re still seeing today.
Ta-Nehisi Coates explored this government-sanctioned, nation-wide lending process further in a provoking piece published back in 2014:
In 1934, Congress created the Federal Housing Administration. The FHA insured private mortgages, causing a drop in interest rates and a decline in the size of the down payment required to buy a house. …The FHA had adopted a system of maps that rated neighborhoods according to their perceived stability. On the maps, green areas, rated “A,” indicated “in demand” neighborhoods that, as one appraiser put it, lacked “a single foreigner or Negro.” These neighborhoods were considered excellent prospects for insurance. Neighborhoods where black people lived were rated “D” and were usually considered ineligible for FHA backing. They were colored in red. …Redlining went beyond FHA-backed loans and spread to the entire mortgage industry, which was already rife with racism, excluding black people from most legitimate means of obtaining a mortgage.
The “A” through “D” ratings to which Coates refers correlate with the “first” through “fourth” gradations we see on WSNC’s HOLC map.
The effects of this intentional redlining of neighborhoods have been well documented. As Evan Tachovsky highlighted in Belt Magazine, “African Americans living in these areas were excluded from the mortgage market and targeted by predatory lenders, creating a cycle of insecurity and poverty.”
Digging a little deeper into those effects, Coates quotes the work of Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro in their 1995 book, Black Wealth/White Wealth:
Locked out of the greatest mass-based opportunity for wealth accumulation in American history, African Americans who desired and were able to afford home ownership found themselves consigned to central-city communities where their investments were affected by the “self-fulfilling prophecies” of the FHA appraisers: cut off from sources of new investment[,] their homes and communities deteriorated and lost value in comparison to those homes and communities that FHA appraisers deemed desirable.
It’s worth (over)emphasizing that redlining was far from a phenomenon unique to Winston-Salem, but a nationwide manifestation. As redlining’s effects are well documented, tracing our current realities to historical policy (that is, identifiable and intentional decisions made at particular points in history) helps dispel some of the mystery in which contemporary poverty and its symptoms (e.g. food deserts) are too often shrouded.
I can’t say this makes our grocery store concentration any less peculiar. Regardless, hopefully highlighting some of the effects of long-standing policy decisions pushes us to acknowledge that there are new choices to be made, better policies to pursue, and more equitable ways of doing community development that work for everyone.
Ok then, so what? This begins to stress the need for what these communities have historically been denied: real, equitable investment toward wealth-building, community-driven projects and businesses, equitable economic development, and the municipal support to help homegrown community assets thrive (as well as watchful eyes keeping contemporary redlining and predatory lending at bay).
A couple of developing examples as to what could be attempted in terms of combating the food desert situation in particular could look like what Greensboro has been piecing together with the Renaissance Community Food Co-op, or what Oakland is working on with their People’s Community Market. (Speaking of Oakland, some brilliant high school students recently pieced together an excellent short video tracing their food deserts back to historic redlining — worth checking out).
Side thought: In terms of combating broader social inequalities (of which food deserts are merely symptomatic), there’s the option of pushing holistically for more socially solidaristic economic outcomes as well. That is, looking more into supporting a multifaceted local climate of mutual support and smart interconnectivity in the sense of seeing things like (as the recent North American Social Solidarity Economy Forum highlighted) worker-owned cooperatives, community land trusts, credit unions, local currencies, community-supported agriculture (CSA) programs, time banking, peer lending, social investment funds, participatory budgeting, eco-industrialization, and an increase in public/common spaces flourish interdependently. There’s a lot of good development work bubbling in this area through initiatives like the Democracy Collaborative, the New Economy Coalition, and the US Solidarity Economy Network.
Lastly, two quick facts:
- In 1929 (less than 10 years before the HOLC map was published), Winston-Salem had 128 black-operated grocery stores (making up 30% of grocery stores in the city at the time).
- As of 2012, there were 662 farms in Forsyth County, but reading the fine print on the HOLC map, there were 3,340 in 1937.
— Marcus Hill
Originally published at Forsyth Community Food Consortium.
