Race-Neutral Decisions, Racially Unequal Results: A Spatial Test for Retail Redlining in the Supermarket Industry in Chicago, 1970-2000.

Anjanette M. Chan Tack, University of Chicago
Chris Graziul, University of Chicago

This article investigates the underlying causes of retail deprivation in urban minority neighborhoods through the case of supermarket access in Chicago. It utilizes a unique longitudinal census of geocoded, address-specific supermarket locations in Chicago from 1970 to 2000, archival data, GIS mapping, and Random Intercept Cross-Lagged Panel spatial regression models to test several competing hypotheses about the underlying causes of “food deserts” – including the racial discrimination, segregation, spatial mismatch, and infrastructural exclusion theses. Prior studies of retail deprivation rely on spatially aggregated cross-sectional data, which make it difficult to properly investigate the underlying causes of neighborhood inequalities in amenity access. This study advances literatures in public health, sociology, and urban geography that wrestle with the retail access question by taking a longitudinal approach that also accounts for spatial interdependencies. It finds evidence of racial discrimination by supermarkets in 1970, when supermarket access was relatively high, but none in subsequent years. However, countering the discrimination hypothesis, it finds that plummeting supermarket access in majority Black neighborhoods from 1980 resulted from two interacting forces operating at multiple spatial and temporal scales: 1) Retail industry competition, operating at the metropolitan and national levels that dramatically reduced the number of supermarkets in Chicago as a whole; and 2) race and class-based segregation in the housing market that concentrated poverty at the neighborhood- and city-level, creating large swathes of the city that could not support large stores operating on the razor-thin profit margins that became the new industry standard.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 104. Urban Renewal and Its Discontents