'A very big inconvenience'

Saturday, October 04, 2003

By Michelle K. Massie, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

While residents of communities such as Squirrel Hill and Lawrenceville have the option of walking to a supermarket, former Hill District resident LaTonia Edwards didn't have it so easy.

"We had to get on that 84A and travel all the way to the South Side and back with all our bags on the bus," she said.

"For the elderly people, they couldn't buy as many groceries because of the trip. It was a big hassle, a very big inconvenience. The Giant Eagle on the South Side is beautiful but why should we have to go there instead of having a store in our own community?"

Supermarket scarcity in some urban neighborhoods was the subject of a public hearing yesterday that was hosted by State Rep. Jake Wheatley Jr., D-Hill District. Testimony at the hearing, held in the Hill House Association's Kaufmann Auditorium, indicated that many urban communities in the city, county, state and country have no supermarkets.

Edwards, 29, said that many people are forced to take expensive jitney trips because they can't take a bus.

Yesterday's hearing, sponsored by the Pennsylvania House Health and Human Services Committee, was a part of an investigation authorized by House Resolution 13, which directed the committee to gather information about the problem to present to the House later this month.

The hope is that the state government will take action to encourage more supermarkets to locate in urban areas, said Stanley Mitchell, general counsel for the Health and Human Services Committee. He said the committee would like to see potential developers aided by tax incentives, loans, grants and other approaches.

State Rep. Don Walko, D-North Side, said he would like such an initiative to become a component of Gov. Ed Rendell's proposed economic stimulus program.

Erin Dalton, a Coro Center for Civic Leadership fellow working in the office of the county chief executive, cited a study done by herself and eight other Coro fellows found that only 3 percent of supermarkets in Allegheny County were located in the low-income neighborhoods. The study also found that predominately black communities had fewer grocery stores than mostly white neighborhoods.

"Race is a much better predictor than income to determine where supermarkets are located," Dalton said.

Wheatley said the problem was much the same across the country: Philadelphia, Atlanta, Charlotte and Detroit are grappling with the same issue.

He said the problem began in the 1960s, when developers and businesses began to abandon urban centers for suburban markets.

In her testimony, DaNita-Ouija Solomon, a community organizer with the Hill Community Development Corp., cited a 2002 study done by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Public Health that found that nationally, black neighborhoods average one supermarket for every 23,582 people while white neighborhoods average one supermarket for every 3,816 people.

Solomon and other presenters, including city Councilman Sala Udin, also called attention to the health impact a lack of supermarkets could have on residents of the communities. Udin said residents of such areas might be prone to shop at convenience stores, which often sell food high in fats and sugars and low in nutritional value.

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