Study Finds Dearth of Mainstream Supermarkets in Metro Detroit

LYNNE MILLER

DETROIT — Cigarettes, booze and lottery tickets are far more abundant than healthy, fresh food at most of the stores that sell groceries in metropolitan Detroit, according to a new study which describes the area as a “food desert” that threatens public health.

In fact, about 550,000 people in Detroit live in so-called deserts — areas that require them to travel twice as far or more to reach the closest mainstream supermarket vs. the closest “fringe” food outlet, such as a gas station or liquor store, researcher Mari Gallagher told a group of more than 200 community leaders at the Detroit Athletic Club.

“You have very few chains,” said Gallagher, who visited about 200 stores over the course of 10 months of research for the study, which was commissioned by LaSalle Bank and released last month.

Nearly all of the 1,073 food outlets in the area are fringe locations — liquor stores, convenience stores, dollar stores, party stores, fast food restaurants, bakeries and gas stations. The outlets offer a small assortment of canned and packaged foods, specializing in nonfood items such as alcohol, money orders, cigarettes and lottery tickets, noted Gallagher, who is principal of Chicago-based Mari Gallagher Research and Consulting Group. Researchers covered a 50,000-block area that included the city and suburbs.

“We found that the greatest contributor to the heavy concentration of fringe food options and to the negative diet-related health effects of food imbalance in Detroit is not fast food, as we originally suspected, but USDA food stamp retailers,” she said.

In fact, only 8% of the stores that accept food stamps are mainstream supermarkets. Ninety-two percent of the stores that take food stamps are fringe outlets. “These are not places you'd want to shop [for food],” she said.

Detroit is not the only big city struggling to attract a supermarket chain, said Michael Curis, president of Curis Enterprises, a Detroit-based developer of urban neighborhood retail centers. For example, Curis pointed to Las Vegas, where city officials reportedly are offering up to $5 million in incentives to attract a supermarket to one urban neighborhood.

The problem is common in blighted urban areas, which present more hurdles for developers and retailers, he said.

“There are many, many urban issues you have to tackle that you don't have if you buy farmland [to develop],” said Curis, who has been working with Aldi, the limited-assortment chain, to open stores in the Detroit area.

Not having access to nutritious food appeared to put people at higher risk for diet-related diseases like diabetes, heart disease and certain cancers. In fact, as a group, residents in food deserts are statistically more likely to suffer or die prematurely from diet-related disease than residents who live in areas with healthy food options, according to the study, which analyzed three combined years of incidences of deaths in the targeted area and took into account the distance between residents and supermarkets.

In the metropolitan area, several of the 66 Farmer Jack stores are expected to close this week, after the chain's parent company, Montvale, N.J.-based A&P, sold 20 locations to Kroger and a handful of others to independent operators.

“We'll have to recalculate the impact that'll have,” said Gallagher, whose study didn't take the pending changes into consideration. “Certainly it's going to have an impact.”

Gallagher's company conducted similar research in Chicago, where researchers also found more than half a million city residents living quite a distance away from conventional supermarkets. The problem is more critical in Detroit, however.

“In Chicago, it's clustered on the South and West sides,” Gallagher said. “The city of Detroit is almost in and of itself a food desert.”