Institute For The Future

Mapping how Foods can Improve Communities

Edible Geography points toward a great blog post by Jim Davenport mapping where Americans live in relation to Starbucks. Among other things, he found that more than 80 percent of Americans live within 20 miles of a Starbucks, which is approximately equal to the number of Americans who live in urban settings. Or, as he put it, "One might define urbanization in the modern era as the distance to the nearest Starbucks." Separately, Davenport noted that higher rents correlate closely to one's proximity to a Starbucks--though the word "correlate" is key here. By design, Starbucks targets high income areas. But Davenport's observations reminded me of something I read about a few months ago about another upscale food chain - the idea of something called the Whole Foods effect. The idea here is that when Whole Foods enters a community, it "can set into motion a series of events that change neighborhoods." As Salon described it:

This “seal of approval” quality is Whole Foods’ Midas touch; as with streetcar tracks, potential gentrifiers see it as something tangible that certifies a neighborhood as a quality buy. And not just residents; businesses, too, look to Whole Foods as a disciplined pioneer that does its homework…. But it’s not just what Whole Foods signifies — it’s the evidence of success that it generates.

And much later in the article

“What something like a movie theater or a Whole Foods does is it creates an extended-hours district,” says Reid. “Lots of downtowns close up shop at 6, but there are certain amenities that can make a downtown go from being a 10-hour thing to a 16-hour thing.” When this happens, evening foot traffic arrives, and new types of business can thrive. When Whole Foods moved onto P Street in Washington, D.C., 13 years ago, the only nightlife on the block was a divey (and awesome) rock club called the Vegas Lounge. The Lounge is still there, but it’s since been joined by a popular burger joint called Stoney’s, a “food-to-fork” locavore restaurant called Logan Tavern that owns a farm 30 miles south of the city, a Starbucks (open till 8 p.m.), a coffeehouse-slash-bar called Commissary and several retail stores, all squeezed onto the same block as Whole Foods. Once evening-oriented development starts attracting people from outside the neighborhood, the area acquires what realtors call the “dwell factor,” a fancy way of saying it gets used in multiple ways. When we talk about the value of mixed-use neighborhoods, we’re often thinking of physical attributes — housing, retail, parks — but you could just as easily think of “mixed-use” in terms of time: school and work during the day, shopping in the afternoon and evening, restaurants, bars and entertainment well into the night.

What's fascinated me about the analysis involved in the Whole Foods effect is the granularity of the analysis. Researchers haven't just linked Whole Foods to high rents; they've identified discrete factors, including the store's hours as well as more qualitative factors such as its brand identity, that seem to influence community development. And they've done this by linking incredibly specific but critical data sets--correlating geo-location data with information like store hours--to identify some of the causal factors that enable the simple construction of a supermarket to catalyze something as messy and complex as community development.

Which is what struck me as missing in the Starbucks analysis--it's interesting, but incomplete (which one might expect from a blog post, to be fair.) Starbucks obviously doesn't drive urbanization, of course. But the correlation to rent prices could be more than statistical noise--and it could be more than statistical noise for a variety of reasons, ranging from the same kinds of factors that drive the Whole Foods effect to the possibility that having third spaces--in effect, semi-public places we can go to relax--actually influences a community in a variety of positive ways. It's telling that McDonald's is consciously redesigning their stores to be more like Starbucks, that is to say, to become third spaces, in part because it will enable them to credibly sell higher priced items.

Which is a long way of making a relatively straightforward point: We know that factors, such as living far away from a supermarket, make communities less likely to be healthy. But we're just starting to understand the much more complex set of geographic and social relationships to food that can make individuals, and communities, healthier.