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Tag food

Food deserts and zoning

by Stephen Smith The other day I put up a post detailing the restrictions that small-scale restaurants and food carts face, but I should mention that grocery stores and supermarkets also face similar restrictions.  Like restrictions on restaurants, they end hitting poor, urban, black neighborhoods the hardest, creating the phenomenon known as “food deserts.”  Aside from traditional Euclidean zoning that forbids building commercial structures like corner grocers in residential neighborhoods, developers also face a raft of minimum parking regulations and mandatory reviews.  NYC’s FRESH initiative has been trying to overturn some of these restrictions (although it also offers developers a bunch of subsidies and tax breaks), but the restrictions they describe are still applicable in much of the city and in cities around the US: Other regulations can drive up the cost of developing grocery stores. The Zoning Resolution currently applies a higher parking requirement for food stores over other types of neighborhood retail and service uses. The current regulations also restrict grocery stores to 10,000 square feet in M1 Districts. These regulations have cost implications and reflect outdated assumptions about the impacts of new food stores.  New grocery stores may be required to purchase more land to accommodate parking than would be justified by the demand, in commercial districts where prevailing market rents are high and larger tracts of land are scarce. In M1 Districts where development costs are lower than commercial districts and larger tracts of land are more available, full-line grocery stores are subject to a time-consuming and costly public review process at a very low size threshold. These M1 Districts encompass light manufacturing areas in Mixed Use Districts where residential uses are permitted and light manufacturing areas directly adjacent to underserved residential districts. Supermarkets are difficult to build even in more suburban areas – zoning approval […]

Deregulating food

by Stephen Smith Urban planners like to discuss heavy things – roads, buildings, cars, trains. Food, though an integral part of humans’ lives, generally doesn’t enter into the equation as more than a footnote. This may be because food service is governed by different departments than buildings, streets, and vehicles, or perhaps because the regulation of food has acquired a quasi-scientific veneer that planners are afraid to impinge on. But that might be a mistake, considering how strongly food fits into the urban fabric of cities and how unlivable a place can be if it lacks the kind of food that people can afford and pick up on a whim. Though cheap and filling and an integral part of cities, towns, and villages around the world, street food in the United States has traditionally been thought of as dirty and backward. Twin Cities food magazine Heavy Table traces Minneapolis’ lack of street food to turn-of-the-century local regulations which regulated vendors out of existence with onerous fees and requirements, and outright bans in many high-traffic areas. The magazine ties the demise of street food in the Midwest to “the advent of automotive culture,” and notes the “uncomfortable whiff of pervasive institutional racism” that dogged the mostly-immigrant peddlers of bratwurst and tamales. Street food’s reputation has been on the mend, though. Urban foodies have embraced it, Anthony Bourdain has championed it on his Travel Channel show, and Top Chef contestants have been challenged to cook it. Cities across America are throwing street food festivals – an urban take on the quintessentially-American county fair. In the late ’90s, formidable public opposition forced Rudy Giuliani, who was supported by established restauranteurs and local business groups, to reconsider plans to ban food vendors from hundreds of blocks of Manhattan streets. Even urban planners are getting […]

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