A packed house of city officials, food industry representatives and nutrition advocates gathered at SoBRO’s central office near the Hub on March 24 to consider strategies to bring a supermarket and other new food retailers to the area.
Doing so, they said, would combat the soaring obesity rate and the heart disease and diabetes associated with it.
“People in this neighborhood are dying for the opportunity to have fresh food,” said SoBRO CEO/president Phillip Morrow.
The panel discussed the importance of tax credits and special loan programs to bring in new businesses, as well as zoning changes to increase the size of food stores.
A Mayoral task force on food policy in 2008 found that the South Bronx and other low-income neighborhoods around the city lack access to healthy food, prompting Mayor Bloomberg to launch the Food Retail Expansion to Support Health (FRESH) initiative.
At the same time, momentum has been growing to provide business incentives for supermarkets to open in low-income neighborhoods around the country, food industry groups and city planners say.
“Sometimes the stars align themselves,” said Patricia Brodhagen of the Albany-based Food Industry Alliance of New York State, a trade association. “Groups work together and then something changes.”
Still, she pointed out, supermarkets make such limited profit on the food they sell that financial incentives are necessary to encourage them to open.
“Supermarketing is a tough business,” she continued. “You have to have a significant population that will shop there, keeping costs down.” But, she added, “there are incentives that have not been there before.”
The Lower Concourse Rezoning plan, passed last spring, calls for a supermarket in Mott Haven, but the first neighborhoods to benefit from the FRESH program are in the North Bronx. A Western Beef will open in the Tremont section of the borough and a Foodtown in the Norwood section.