Oasis in a Food Desert

Press Coverage: Kansas City Star, 2013; Kansas City Business Journal, 2006; Kansas City Call, 2001

Try this exercise. Drive east from downtown Kansas City, through the Third District neighborhoods I represented on the Council. Count the full service grocery stores. When I started this fight in the early 2000s, the answer in large stretches of the East Side was zero.

Residents in my district had to travel miles to buy fresh food. Not because they chose to live far from grocery stores. Because grocery chains had decided their neighborhoods were not worth investing in. The market had spoken, and it said these families did not deserve fresh vegetables within walking distance.

I rejected that verdict. And then I spent years fighting to reverse it.

The Problem

A food desert is not a natural phenomenon. It is a business decision compounded by decades of disinvestment. Grocery chains follow rooftops and income. When a neighborhood's population declines and incomes drop, the grocers leave. When the grocers leave, residents are left with convenience stores and fast food. When your primary food options are processed snacks and drive-through meals, the health consequences are predictable: diabetes, hypertension, obesity, and shortened lives.

This was the reality in multiple neighborhoods across Kansas City's East Side. Not a theoretical problem discussed at urban planning conferences. A daily reality for families trying to feed their children.

The economics of grocery retail work against low income communities in ways that most people do not understand. Grocery stores operate on razor thin margins, typically 1 to 3 percent net profit. That means a grocery operator needs high volume to survive, and high volume requires a customer base with sufficient purchasing power. When household incomes are low, the per-transaction revenue is lower, and the store needs even more volume to make the numbers work. Add higher insurance costs, higher shrinkage rates, and the increased security expenses that come with operating in high-crime areas, and the financial model becomes challenging.

None of that excuses the outcome. The fact that the economics are difficult does not make it acceptable for entire neighborhoods to go without fresh food. It means that the market alone cannot solve this problem. Public intervention is required.

What We Did

As a city councilman representing the Third District, I made grocery access a priority. This was not a popular cause with other council members. Grocery stores are not glamorous. They do not generate the kind of headlines that downtown sports arenas produce. But they are the most basic infrastructure a neighborhood needs, and my constituents were living without them.

The work started with the campaign to save Leon's Thriftway at Seven Oaks Shopping Center. Leon's was the grocery store that served one of the most underserved areas of the East Side. When a redevelopment plan threatened the shopping center, it was not just a business decision. It was a community lifeline being cut. I introduced an ordinance to preserve the grocery and the shopping center, using every legislative tool available to create the conditions for the store to remain viable.

Local outlets covered the fight. This was not abstract policy. This was a community fighting to keep its only source of fresh food. The headlines documented each phase: "Ordinance Introduced to Save Seven Oaks Shopping Center and Leon's Thriftway." "Ordinance Introduced to Save Local Grocery Store." The coverage put public pressure on the city to act, and it worked.

We also worked to bring an ALDI grocery store to the East Side. ALDI's expansion into urban core neighborhoods was a strategic opportunity that we pursued aggressively. ALDI's business model, with its lower operating costs and discount pricing structure, was better suited to low income markets than traditional full-service grocers. But getting a national grocery chain to commit to a location that other retailers had written off still required persistent advocacy, public incentive packages, and proof that the market demand existed.

The Kansas City Business Journal covered the campaign to land the ALDI in 2006. "Supporters work to bag Aldi grocery for East Side." Earlier, in 2001, the Kansas City Call covered the grand opening of the Save-A-Lot we brought to 34th and Troost: "Celebrating New Grocery Store." These were not just headlines. They were documentation of what happens when a community and its elected representative refuse to accept that they do not deserve fresh food.

I first approached ALDI about building in the neighborhood in 2004. The tax incentive plan was approved in 2006. Then came years of delays: land acquisition that required condemnation of two parcels, the recession, environmental remediation of underground petroleum storage tanks, and amendments to the TIF plan when officials realized many customers would use food stamps exempt from sales taxes. The broader effort culminated in a groundbreaking for the 16,850 square foot ALDI grocery store at 39th and Prospect on July 30, 2013 — nine years after I first proposed it. By then I had left the Council, and my successor in the Third District, Councilman Jermaine Reed, carried the project across the finish line. The Kansas City Star covered that groundbreaking with the headline "Oasis in a food desert finally has groundbreaking." ALDI invested $3.5 million, with tax incentives bringing the total project to about $5 million. That headline says everything about how long this fight took and how important the outcome was.

Why It Took So Long

Bringing grocery access to underserved neighborhoods is harder than it should be. National chains use site selection criteria that systematically screen out low income neighborhoods: household income thresholds, population density requirements, traffic counts. These criteria are race neutral on paper but discriminatory in practice, because they filter out exactly the neighborhoods that need grocery access most.

Breaking through those criteria requires a combination of public subsidy, community advocacy, and a developer willing to take on the risk. You have to prove to a grocery operator that the demand is real, that the public support is in place, and that the neighborhood will support the store once it opens.

That takes years. It requires patience that most elected officials and most developers do not have. I had it because I was not doing this for a press conference. I was doing it because families in my district were going hungry.

The Lesson

Affordable housing without food access is incomplete. You can build the most beautiful affordable housing development in the city, but if the nearest grocery store is four miles away, you have not solved the problem. You have just relocated it.

The Nash Group thinks about development holistically. Housing, transit, food access, healthcare, education — these are not separate policy silos. They are interconnected systems that determine whether a neighborhood works. The grocery access fight taught me that lesson early, and it has informed every project we have done since.

When we evaluate a development site today, one of the first things we assess is the food environment. What is available within walking distance? What retail anchors already exist? What gaps need to be filled? Because a home is not just four walls and a roof. A home is a place where a family can live a full life. And a full life requires fresh food on the table.

The oasis we fought for in Kansas City's East Side was not a luxury. It was a correction of a decades long injustice. And it took a city councilman, a community, and years of persistent effort to make it happen.