Empowering Cities with the Housing Ready Toolkit

In this Upzoned episode, Abby is joined by Strong Towns Chief Technical Advisor Edward Erfurt to discuss the emergence of food deserts in the United States. In the 1980s, the U.S. government stopped enforcing price discrimination laws, letting large supermarkets use their size to leverage better prices from suppliers. This led to the closure of many small, independent groceries and helped create today's food deserts.

Abby and Edward discuss the shift from grocery stores being neighborhood assets to regional destinations and how that extracts wealth from communities. Then they share bottom-up ways that everyday people can address these food shortages in their communities.

• “The Great Grocery Squeeze: How a federal policy change in the 1980s created the modern food desert” by Stacy Mitchell, The Atlantic (December 2024).

• Abby Newsham (X/Twitter).

• Theme Music by Kemet the Phantom.