Could your tax dollars fund a grocery store in west Louisville?

Bailey Loosemore | Courier Journal

Barbra Justice spent 80 cents and 20 minutes on a bus ride Friday to reach the Central Station Kroger, where she pointed to a section under construction.

It's part of an expansion — a good sign, said Justice, 64. It means the store won't be closing anytime soon.

That consistency is what Justice, who lives in low-income senior housing, needs.

Just like hundreds of other people living in Old Louisville, Justice had to change her grocery shopping patterns this year when the Second Street Kroger closed, and she doesn't want to have to change them again.

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In January, the Old Louisville Kroger was the fifth of sixth grocery stores to close within Jefferson County's urban center since April 2016.

It's a pattern that's caused former customers of those stores to either compile their goods at scattered locations or take the long trip to the next nearest supermarket.

It's also a pattern that city officials didn't expect to deal with. But as grocery companies continue to pull out of lower-income areas in favor of expanding stores along cities' outer rims, leaders from both metro government and local nonprofits are having to put their heads together to return food access through traditional and non-traditional means.

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'LEFT BEHIND'

4 ideas for solving Louisville's food deserts Four ideas for solving food access issues in lower-income neighborhoods.

Food access issues are not an easy topic to comprehend and there's no single solution to creating a balance food system citywide.

But for the most part, that doesn't matter to the people living in an unbalanced system .

"It's something that impacts people on a daily basis," said Mary Ellen Wiederwohl, chief of Louisville Forward, the city's economic development department. "It's very personal, and they don't understand why it's happening to them because they live in a neighborhood where they've always had a grocery store and all of a sudden they don't."

As of 2015, 13 census tracts in Jefferson County were designated food deserts by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, meaning at least one-third of the population in those areas lived more than one mile from a full-service grocery store.

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Most of the areas are located within western or southwestern Louisville, in neighborhoods like Shawnee, Chickasaw, Shively and Pleasure Ridge Park. Outliers like Old Louisville and Newburg are also in the mix.

The federal government shined a light on the issue of food deserts — which studies have linked to increased health problems — when former First Lady Michelle Obama launched the Healthy Food Financing Initiative in 2010 with the goal of eliminating food deserts by 2017.

In Jefferson County, the percentage of the population living in a food desert has decreased since then — falling from 8.3 percent in 2010 to 6.1 percent in 2015, according to Healthy Louisville.

But numbers can be deceiving.

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Changes in the grocery business model have accelerated food access issues within the past year and a half, Wiederwohl said. Lower-income neighborhoods with poverty rates between 16 and 47 percent, according to USDA data, have fewer full-service grocery options than ever.

"You can't have a thriving city and neighborhoods of choice if you don't have access to food in your neighborhood," Wiederwohl said. "And we now have several neighborhoods that have serious problems. ..."

"Human beings are getting left behind."

FROM QUICK STOP TO FRESH STOP

Justice, the Old Louisville resident, grew up poor in Eastern Kentucky.

Her mom was a farm girl who spent years caring for an ailing husband and four children — putting homemade meals on the table each night before learning of frozen TV dinners.

The new, quick meals were a lifesaver; Justice's mother was all about them. But her lessons in gardening rubbed off on her youngest daughter, and the now-retired factory inspector still craves good, fresh produce she often can't afford.

That's why when Justice, a Navy veteran, heard about a Fresh Stop Market launching at her church on Fourth Street a couple years ago, she jumped at the chance to get involved.

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The Fresh Stop Market program was started by Portland nonprofit New Roots in 2009 as a way of getting local organic produce into the hands of low-income residents — and sharing with them what to do with it.

The goal for the markets is to be community-driven, where neighborhood leaders take over their individual locations and make the program self-sustaining, co-founder Karyn Moskowitz said.

Currently, New Roots has trained community leaders to operate 15 Fresh Stop Markets statewide, including 11 in Metro Louisville.

The markets sell shares of produce on a sliding scale, with limited resource families paying $12 per bi-weekly share while higher-income families pay $25 to $40 per share. The average cost of the 10 items included with each share is $19 at wholesale, which translates to $40 retail at farmers' markets.

The Fresh Stop Markets have attracted buyers from 1,600 families this year mainly through word of mouth. But Moskowitz said she'd like city officials to put more money behind the program so that it can reach more families in dire need of fresh food.

"We believe we have an impact beyond the dinner table," Moskowitz said. "We can organize families to advocate for themselves to have better communities. ... If they feel like they don't have any power because they're all alone, they're less apt to say something."

Theresa Zawacki, a senior policy adviser to Louisville Forward, said New Roots and the Fresh Stop Markets have received external agency funding from the city's budget in the past. But outside of funding, the city can provide support for the nonprofit — and others like it — by sharing their progress with potential investors.

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However, Wiederwohl said, the government has only a limited amount of money to spend in general. And while supporting nonprofits is important, working toward large-scale solutions can take precedence.

"It's about making it work for the families," Zawacki said. "... It's about providing a spectrum of choices in communities where the spectrum isn't complete right now."

Story continues after podcast.

GETTING CREATIVE

Justice isn't holding out hope for a new grocery store in her neighborhood.

Despite a developer promising a grocery store's return in a vacant Fourth Street building and Spalding University's flirtation with the grocery business at the old Kroger, Justice said it doesn't seem to her like anyone cares.

"Nobody seems particularly interested," Justice said. "It looks like the city doesn't want to provide incentives unless it's a hotel or bike lane or something."

Wiederwohl, however, is adamant that a grocery store will return to Old Louisville. There's too much traffic along the Fourth Street corridor for one not to.

Outside that neighborhood is where city officials have to get creative.

They've already purchased two former grocery properties — the First Link building in Phoenix Hill and a vacant grocery on 28th Street in Parkland. And they successfully found a new operator to take over the closing First Choice market in Park DuValle last September.

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They hope to find more business owners who will be willing to take the risk of running a grocery store in a lower-income neighborhood. But if they can't, they'll have to turn to other options like a co-operative or nonprofit market.

Currently, city leaders are leaning toward the latter.

A community group led by local food justice activists has already formed to develop a co-op with community input in a neighborhood to be determined.

The co-operative grocery would ideally organize member shoppers to share ownership of the business and make decisions about what items are sold and how the store would run.

Wiederwohl said the model could work, but it could come up against conflict in satisfying all members.

Instead, Wiederwohl seems interested in helping develop a nonprofit grocery store connected to a food bank, similar to Fare & Square near Philadelphia.

That store was founded by the Philabundance food bank, which subsidized the nonprofit enterprise until it could eventually sustain itself through sales, Zawaki said.

"I think one of the big asterisks at the end of all of this is what will it cost the taxpayer; will it cost the taxpayer anything," Wiederwohl said. " ... The start-up cost for a grocery can be as much as $3 million. We don't have $3 million.

"How much can a Metro budget sustain to support this, and how much should it?"

Reach reporter Bailey Loosemore at 502-582-4646 or bloosemore@courier-journal.com.

BY THE NUMBERS

In 2015, 13 census tracts in Jefferson County were designated as food deserts by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, meaning they did not have adequate access to full-service grocery stores. Five of those tracts are home to predominantly black populations.

Here's are a few demographic details of the tracts, compiled by the USDA:

Shawnee, tract 1 — population 2,076; poverty rate 23.9 percent

Shawnee, tract 2 — population 2,099; poverty rate 22.5 percent

Chickasaw, tract 1 — population 3,373; poverty rate 23.9 percent

Chickasaw, tract 2 — population 2,811; poverty rate 31 percent

Old Louisville — population 3,375; poverty rate 30.3 percent

Newburg — population 7,219; poverty rate 34.3 percent

Shively — population 5,245; poverty rate 18.3 percent

Lake Dreamland — population 2,089; poverty rate 22.1 percent

Pleasure Ridge Park — population 6,069; poverty rate 21.8 percent

Valley Station — population 4,002; poverty rate 16.4 percent

Okolona/Fairdale — population 1,040; poverty rate 47 percent

Okolona, tract 1 — population 2,670; poverty rate 19.5 percent

Okolona, tract 2 — population 2,870; poverty rate 22.4 percent

In 2015, Jefferson County was home to more supermarket and convenience stores than any of the past 10 years, with both rebounding after the economic depression.

2015 — 159 supermarkets; 53 convenience stores

2010 — 137 supermarkets; 35 convenience stores

2005 — 138 supermarkets; 50 convenience stores

Source: American FactFinder

LISTEN IN

Hear more about New Roots and the Fresh Stop Markets from executive director Karyn Moskowitz on the Mighty Fine Farm & Food podcast, presented with Kertis Creative at courier-journal.com and soundcloud.com/cj-mighty-fine-farm-food. Find out more about the markets at newroots.org/fresh-stop-markets.html.