Keywords
CDFI, Low-income, Grocery operations
Description
Reinvestment Fund’s LSA analysis is designed to help investors and policymakers identify areas in the lower 48 states and the District of Columbia with both inequitable and inadequate access to healthy food as well as sufficient demand for new or expanded food retail. First developed for the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI) Fund in 2010, the LSA analysis looks at income, distance to existing stores and car ownership rates to identify places where households do not have reasonable access to supermarkets. An LSA area is a cluster Census block groups with a population of at least 5,000 where residents must travel significantly farther to reach a supermarket than residents in well-served block groups with similar population densities and car ownership rates. The LSA analysis defines ‘well-served’ block groups as those where the median family income is at least 120% of the area median income.
The LSA analysis is unique in that it goes beyond simply identifying areas with limited access to supermarkets; the analysis also measures the extent to which LSA areas can support new or expanded food retail options. Reinvestment Fund estimates “retail leakage” for all LSA areas, i.e. locally unmet demand for food, and then compares that amount to the demand necessary to support a new supermarket, approximately $14 million annually. In LSA areas with less than $14 million in leakage, there may be opportunities to finance new small stores, to expand existing stores, or to support alternative models of providing healthy food like farmers markets or community-supported agriculture programs.
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Searching for Markets: The Geography of Supermarket Access in the United States
Reinvestment Fund’s LSA analysis is designed to help investors and policymakers identify areas in the lower 48 states and the District of Columbia with both inequitable and inadequate access to healthy food as well as sufficient demand for new or expanded food retail. First developed for the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI) Fund in 2010, the LSA analysis looks at income, distance to existing stores and car ownership rates to identify places where households do not have reasonable access to supermarkets. An LSA area is a cluster Census block groups with a population of at least 5,000 where residents must travel significantly farther to reach a supermarket than residents in well-served block groups with similar population densities and car ownership rates. The LSA analysis defines ‘well-served’ block groups as those where the median family income is at least 120% of the area median income.
The LSA analysis is unique in that it goes beyond simply identifying areas with limited access to supermarkets; the analysis also measures the extent to which LSA areas can support new or expanded food retail options. Reinvestment Fund estimates “retail leakage” for all LSA areas, i.e. locally unmet demand for food, and then compares that amount to the demand necessary to support a new supermarket, approximately $14 million annually. In LSA areas with less than $14 million in leakage, there may be opportunities to finance new small stores, to expand existing stores, or to support alternative models of providing healthy food like farmers markets or community-supported agriculture programs.
