Urban food deserts exist because of a reinforcing cycle: grocery chains follow suburban growth, historical disinvestment hollows out inner-city retail infrastructure, and the physical and economic barriers to opening new stores in dense, low-income neighborhoods keep replacements from filling the gap. About 53.6 million Americans live in census tracts that are both low-income and more than half a mile from the nearest supermarket, and a disproportionate share of those tracts are in cities.
What Counts as an Urban Food Desert
The USDA defines a food desert using two overlapping criteria: income and distance. A census tract qualifies as low-income if at least 20 percent of residents live in poverty, or if the tract’s median family income falls at or below 80 percent of the statewide or metro-area median. It qualifies as low-access if at least 500 people, or 33 percent of the population, live more than one mile from the nearest supermarket or large grocery store. A stricter half-mile threshold captures even more people, bringing the national total to 53.6 million, or about 17 percent of the U.S. population.
In practice, one mile in a city is a very different experience than one mile in a suburb. Without a car, that distance means a bus trip, a long walk carrying bags, or reliance on the corner store. Residents in these tracts often end up buying food from convenience stores, gas stations, or dollar stores where fresh produce is scarce and shelf-stable, processed options dominate.
Supermarkets Followed Suburbanization
The roots of urban food deserts trace back decades. As car ownership rose and suburbs expanded in the mid-20th century, grocery chains discovered that cheap suburban land let them build the large-format stores their business model demanded. In Los Angeles, this pattern was already visible by the 1930s: high rates of car ownership accelerated suburbanization, and grocers followed the customers and the affordable real estate outward. By 1989, researchers were documenting a persistent lack of retail food access in South Los Angeles, a pattern that had been building for half a century.
This migration wasn’t passive. It reflected a practice researchers call spatial supermarket redlining: chain grocers actively chose to locate new stores in wealthier suburbs rather than invest in inner-city neighborhoods, and in many cases pulled existing stores out of lower-income urban areas entirely. The result was a retail vacuum. When a neighborhood’s only full-service grocer closes, the replacement is rarely another supermarket. It’s more often a fast-food outlet or a convenience store, because those businesses require less space, less capital, and simpler supply chains.
It’s Not That Urban Stores Are Unprofitable
A common assumption is that supermarkets avoid low-income neighborhoods because the economics don’t work. USDA research tells a more nuanced story. Stores in areas with the highest rates of food assistance redemption do carry a higher median cost of goods sold (76 percent of sales, compared to 73 percent in higher-income areas), which means their markup on products is thinner. But those same stores have significantly lower payroll costs as a percentage of sales: 8.5 percent versus 12 percent in wealthier areas.
When you combine the two largest operating expenses, the total is essentially identical: 84.5 percent of sales for stores in the lowest-income areas versus 85 percent in the highest-income areas. Overall operating costs don’t clearly rise with the poverty level of the surrounding neighborhood. The barrier to entry isn’t that these stores bleed money once they open. It’s that the upfront investment, the risk perception, and the structural hurdles make chains reluctant to open them in the first place.
Zoning, Space, and the Cost of Building
Opening a full-service grocery store in a dense urban neighborhood is physically harder than opening one in a suburb. A typical supermarket needs thousands of square feet of floor space. Philadelphia’s zoning code, for instance, defines a qualifying fresh food market as needing at least 5,000 square feet of customer-accessible area, with at least 750 square feet dedicated just to fresh fruits and vegetables. On top of that, conventional zoning often requires dedicated parking, which in a city means either a surface lot (expensive land) or a parking structure (expensive construction).
Some cities have started chipping away at these barriers. Philadelphia created a Healthy Food Overlay District mapped directly onto USDA-identified food desert tracts, relaxing parking requirements and allowing larger floor areas for stores that commit to stocking fresh food. But these policy workarounds are the exception. In most cities, a grocer looking at an inner-city site faces higher land costs per square foot, smaller and irregularly shaped lots, older buildings that need renovation, and zoning rules designed around suburban retail formats.
Getting There Without a Car
Even when a supermarket exists within a few miles, reaching it can be a serious obstacle for residents who don’t drive. Transit trips to grocery stores take roughly three times longer than trips by car, and reliable public transit service to food retail is often limited to downtown corridors. A 10-minute drive becomes a 30-minute bus ride, sometimes requiring a transfer, and the return trip with heavy bags is harder still.
This transportation gap turns a manageable distance on a map into a real barrier in daily life. It pushes people toward the closest available option, which in a food desert is typically a small store with limited fresh inventory and higher prices per unit. Over time, that consistent lack of access shapes diet patterns across entire neighborhoods.
Health Consequences Are Measurable
Living in a food desert doesn’t just mean inconvenience. A geospatial analysis of food access and health outcomes in Texas found that people living in food deserts were 1.7 times more likely to be obese than those with adequate food access. That elevated obesity risk feeds directly into higher rates of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and metabolic syndrome. These are conditions that develop over years of dietary patterns, and they cluster in the same neighborhoods where fresh food is hardest to find.
The connection isn’t mysterious. When the nearest option for dinner is a fast-food restaurant or a convenience store stocked with chips and soda, calorie-dense, nutrient-poor diets become the default. It’s not a matter of individual willpower. It’s a reflection of what’s physically available.
What Policy Efforts Look Like
The federal government’s main tool for addressing food deserts is the Healthy Food Financing Initiative (HFFI), which provides grants and financing to bring grocery retail into underserved areas. To date, HFFI has awarded over $25 million directly to 162 food retail and supply chain projects. In 2024, an additional $40 million went to 16 public-private partnerships designed to create or expand local food financing programs.
Some of these projects look different from a traditional supermarket. One HFFI grant, for example, is supporting the development of a community-owned grocery store called People’s Harvest, which will combine affordable groceries with cold storage space for local Black farmers and a community learning space. Models like this reflect a growing recognition that the standard chain-supermarket approach may not be the only, or even the best, solution for neighborhoods that have been without a full-service grocer for decades.
Still, the scale of the problem dwarfs the investment so far. With roughly 18.8 million people living more than a mile from the nearest supermarket in low-income urban tracts, $65 million in cumulative grants is a starting point, not a solution. Meaningful change likely requires a combination of zoning reform, transit investment, creative retail models, and sustained public funding that together lower the barriers grocery chains have used to justify staying away.