Whereas William Kent may have ‘leaped the fence, and saw that all nature was a garden’, to jump or destroy the wall of a horticultural expo is to typically find the periphery of a city, complete with its own implied social delineations. It is in this context that the dissolution of the physical and psychological frame of the institutionalized expo itself— rather than the frames of the individual gardens within—that is the more potent force in contemporary landscape and urbanism.During the past decade, grocery stores have expanded into underserved urban communities with growing awareness of ‘food deserts’ and their associations with urban health disparities and economic disinvestment.Even though scholars contest whether physical access to grocery stores truly improves food accessibility and health , policy advocates continue to promote grocery stores as the ultimate solution to urban food deserts. Federal, state, and local governments have followed suit with the creation of incentives and tax breaks for food retailers that locate in underserved urban communities.Despite numerous studies on food deserts and their potential impacts, there are few explorations of the prescribed “solution” of grocery stores. Moreover, recent studies on the impacts of new and recently closed urban grocery stores tend to focus on resident behavioral changes . Thus, scholars and policymakers alike have limited understandings of the broader neighborhood implications of grocery stores newly introduced into underserved urban communities. This dissertation addresses this gap by analyzing how local organizations and agencies pursue grocery development in response to neighborhood issues. By exploring local processes, I aim to understand whether governments should continue to incentivize urban grocery stores and if so, under what conditions. As such, the ultimate goal of this dissertation is to understand the conditions for successful grocery development across contexts. Using a comparative case study approach, I analyze the historical drivers, planning processes, and outcomes of recently completed ground-floor grocery stores in two distressed San Francisco Bay Area communities: a Fresh and Easy Neighborhood Market in San Francisco’s Bayview Hunters Point and the Mandela Foods Cooperative in Oakland’s West Oakland. Despite their marked differences, both stores were cited in national advocacy efforts around the federal Healthy Food Financing Initiative . In 2005, British supermarket magnate, Tesco created the Fresh and Easy chain primarily for untapped urban markets and health and cost-conscious consumers in California, Arizona, and Nevada.

In 2006, amidst massive grocery closings citywide, former San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom,flower pot wholesale the Office of Economic and Workforce Development, and the Department of Public Health coordinated Fresh and Easy’s entry into San Francisco’s distressed Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood. As the first new grocery store in the neighborhood in decades, Fresh and Easy represented a convergence of previously disparate efforts around public health, economic and workforce development. As such, the City’s vision of grocery development was consistent with the rhetoric of federal food access programs. Yet ultimately, national and global capitalist forces led to the store’s demise. In September 2013, Tesco sold the Fresh and Easy chain to a private equity firm, following two years of massive profit losses. The Bayview Hunters Point location was one of numerous stores that were closed as a result. Despite similar underlying socio-economic conditions, West Oakland’s first coordinated grocery store efforts took a markedly different form. Beginning in the late 1990s, West Oakland residents and activists created farmers markets, mobile grocery stores, and community gardens—all with the goal of establishing a full service cooperative grocery store. For the next decade, environmental justice activist Dana Harvey led efforts to realize this vision. Following financial hurdles and disputes with developers over retail space, Harvey and her team of consultants negotiated a 2300 square foot ground floor retail space. In June 2009, the worker-owned Mandela Foods Cooperative and café opened for business. As of 2013, Harvey is exploring possibilities for expansion with funding support from the California Fresh Works program. Through an institutional analysis of the planning processes, I find that both Fresh and Easy and Mandela Foods reflect distinctive neighborhood revitalization legacies, critical moments of institutional capacity building, localized versions of national policy narratives, and the role of charismatic leaders in grocery store implementation. While national narratives shape the rhetoric of urban grocery development, ultimately local context dictates how food access issues are defined, who addresses them, and how. In Bayview, a city-led grocery agenda entailed top-down planning processes that aligned with the corporate model of the Fresh and Easy store. Ultimately, collaborations across government agencies and a systematic role of the Department of Public Health failed to sustain the community’s first new grocery store. In West Oakland, an activist-defined grocery agenda produced grassroots planning processes consistent with the community-based model of the Mandela Foods Cooperative. Conflict and community protests eventually won out—albeit for a scaled-down version of West Oakland activists’ original vision. These findings suggest that federal grocery incentive programs should: 1) maintain a broad framework that enables local communities to define food access problems and their solutions on a case-by-case basis, 2) encourage diverse solutions not limited to grocery stores and supermarkets, and 3) emphasize community reinvestment goals.As mentioned in the beginning of this chapter, urban grocery stores are now on federal, state, and local policy agendas. Much of this current momentum is the result of an expansive body of research on ‘food deserts,’ which has pointed to urban grocery stores as a comprehensive solution to food access, health disparities, and economic disinvestment.

As early as the 1970s, government agencies and researchers profiled the phenomenon of “supermarket flight” due to deindustrialization and the consolidation of the grocery industry . The combined impacts of these trends contributed to the continued “suburbanization” of grocery stores with that of housing and employment centers. Already since the 1960s, Community Development Corporations helped reintroduce grocery stores and other urban retail into underserved areas with expanding federal programs for neighborhood revitalization . Urban grocery stores entered more squarely into federal policy agendas with the push for “inner city revitalization” beginning in the 1990s and new evidence of the “urban grocery gap” . By the late 1990s and early 2000s, researchers conducted the first detailed accounts of the socio-economic and health impacts of lacking urban grocery stores in the UK. This research had a resounding impact on domestic research, recasting the “urban grocery gap” as the phenomenon of food deserts. In the U.S., the visceral metaphor of the ‘food desert’ effectively shifted discourses on the function of urban grocery stores from economic reinvestment to health promotion. The greater extent of food desert research that followed suggested a positive correlation between the lack of grocery stores and poor health outcomes in poor urban communities . A separate but related body of literature linked food environments more generally to growing rates of childhood obesity in the U.S. . These studies directly informed the first comprehensive federal efforts focused dually on health promotion and retail revitalization, namely First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move childhood obesity initiative and the Healthy Food Financing Initiative discussed at the beginning of this chapter. Already since the 1990s, community-based organizations nationwide addressed urban food access issues through “community food security” initiatives—alternative modes of food production and consumption ranging from farmers markets, produce stands, mobile grocery stores, and community gardens. Overall, policy and practice were built on similar assumptions about the contributions of new food retail outlets on the health and livelihoods of disenfranchised urban residents. However, researchers, policymakers, and journalists—with varied technical backgrounds and political leanings—continued to contest the claims of research and policies that purported the promise of urban grocery stores. For example,berry pots some researchers found that areas defined as food deserts are not devoid of food stores as the term would suggest. Others found that areas otherwise defined as food deserts can in fact be replete with corner markets and ethnic food stores that meet culturally preferred food needs .

Even in spite of this evidence, scholars have agreed that poor communities tend to lack stores that provide greater fresh food options . Furthermore, disinvested communities become targets for fast food establishments, convenience stores, and liquor stores, which may contribute to poor diets and health disparities . As such, some prefer to characterize underserved communities as ‘food swamps’ as opposed to food deserts to emphasize the ubiquity of “low quality” food options . These debates came to a head in late 2011 and early 2012, when The Economist and The New York Times highlighted several longitudinal studies claiming that the introduction of grocery stores into poor communities had no effect on health outcomes and that cost was more of a barrier to healthy food access than physical access . While these suffer from methodological shortcomings, even proponents of urban grocery stores urged policymakers to fully consider non-physical means of improving urban food access. This includes greater attention to nutrition education, food affordability and the role of food assistance programs, and efforts to expand healthy food offerings at corner markets and liquor stores in underserved areas . This raises the question—should grocery stores be developed in poor communities at all? Even the critics say yes. It is an undisputed fact that poor communities tend to lack grocery stores, by their very nature of being under-resourced, disinvested areas. The issue is the definition of the problem and how it points to a rather simple solution that is ultimately inconsequential to the broader issues faced by poor communities. For example, community activists and researchers argue that perhaps the root of the problem is the use and operationalization of the term ‘food desert,’ a term that may not fully capture food access issues as experienced by disenfranchised residents. Along these lines, researchers argue that a purely spatial definition of food deserts fails to capture the broader political-economic factors that contribute to inequitable access to resources in poor communities. For example, Donald argues that singularly “built environment solutions” to food access issues fail to consider the problem of food cost—healthier food items cost more due to agricultural subsidies that favor the production and distribution of low-cost, highly processed, “unhealthy” food. argues that the mere designation of food deserts constitutes ‘neoliberal paternalism’—the assumption that the plight of urban communities are ultimately only solved through top-down market solutions .Scholars cast urban grocery stores as either a normative solution or a faulty “build-it-and-theywill-come” approach that requires redefinition and reassessment. Still, the practical reality is that grocery incentive programs continue to expand at local and state levels. Leading corporate retailers such as Walmart, Target, Kroger, and SuperValu continue to reenter urban markets by creating “urban format” versions of their largely suburban supermarket chains. Community based organizations are pursuing their own alternatives to chain supermarkets through corner store conversions, food cooperatives, mobile grocery stores, and farmers markets. In sum, urban grocery stores will continue to be developed in under served urban areas if not for current policies but due to industry and urban trends. What does this mean for future research? Shannon argues for research that “questions the naturalizing language of market relations that positions low-income communities as just another emerging market” . On a practical level, Donald calls for studies that explore: 1) before/after assessments of communities where new grocery stores are introduced, 2) how the changing grocery retail environment shapes local implementation, and 3) the institutional context and “localized geographies” of food access issues. In line with planning scholars and critical geographers, this dissertation reinforces the idea that future research must account for the complexity of food access problems and its solutions. First, this dissertation provides a detailed account of grocery planning processes to complement spatial and quantitative studies of food deserts. The greater extent of literature on urban grocery stores has involved assessments of the phenomenon of food deserts—namely evaluations of the “problem” of lacking food deserts and its possible impacts. In light of recent critiques, scholars have made strides in redefining food deserts and how food accessibility more generally might be measured. While there is ample evidence to suggest the “problem” of lacking grocery stores exists, there are few detailed accounts16 of how local communities and municipalities themselves define the problem and choose to address it through grocery development. Second, this dissertation explores grocery store development as a set of processes instead of as a finite solution.