As ever, planners fail the reverse Chesterton’s
Chesterton’s Fence is the idea that before tearing down a fence it’s worth working out why it was built. For only if you know why it was can you work out whether the reason for it is still valid - or not. The Reverse Chesterton’s is to ask why something doesn’t exist before deciding to create it. It may be - may - that there’s a good reason it doesn’t exist.
So to this idea of food deserts. Places where there just aren’t the shops with the good, fresh, food that we should all be righteously eating.
Over the past decade, state and federal governments have invested millions of dollars in creating grocery stores in food deserts — defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as any low-income urban neighborhoods without a grocery store within a mile, and any rural communities without one within 10 miles. These programs continue to expand.
But the Reverse Chesterton’s was never grappled with properly. Vague claims that profit seeking grocery chains just wouldn’t do it therefore….
Many stores that receive subsidies shutter their doors soon after opening or fail to open at all. Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica examined 24 stores across 18 states, each of them either newly established, preparing to open or less than five years old when they received funding through the federal USDA Healthy Food Financing Initiative in 2020 and 2021. As of June, five of these stores had already ceased operations; another six have yet to open, citing a variety of challenges including difficulties finding a suitable location and limited access to capital.
Illinois’ record is similarly disappointing. In 2018, Illinois officials highlighted the opening of six grocery stores that had received startup funds over several years from a $13.5 million grocery initiative of former Gov. Pat Quinn’s. Four of them have closed.
Not enough attention was paid to why profit seeking companies wouldn’t open stores. For the answer is that profit is the value added to the resources needed to open a store. These stores continually make losses - they’re not adding value. Which is why the profit seeking companies wouldn’t and didn’t open them.
The reason the stores didn’t exist, the reason they go bust when they do, is that there’s no good reason to have food stores in such places.
Asking the right questions before doing something - why is it that planners never do bother to do that?
Tim Worstall