GGWash Picks of 2023: Premium grocery stores are missing from the region’s high-income Black neighborhoods

During this holiday season, we’re sharing our favorite posts from 2023: “This research out of Brookings shines a bright light on how majority-Black areas in the Washington region (and beyond) are systemically devalued. It should be required reading for anyone who works in or cares about economic devlopment. DW’s unflinching summary of the research she and her colleagues conducted got a lot of well-deserved attention when we first published it. The piece also gave rise to this hard-hitting conversation between Andre M. Perry, Senior Fellow at Brookings, Angie Rodgers, Deputy Chief Administrative Officer for Economic Development, Prince George’s County, and Dan Reed, Regional Policy Director at GGWash.” — Chelsea Allinger, Executive Director

For decades, Prince George’s County leaders have noted that the county suffers from a shortage of high-end and premium retailers compared to the rest of the Washington region, despite being home to the majority of high-income Black-majority Census tracts in the US. In a recent report, my Brookings Metro colleagues and I analyzed the locations of premium grocery stores in ten metro areas across the country and found that the absence of high-end grocers from Black-majority neighborhoods is part of a broader trend of divestment.

The devaluation of Black neighborhoods in the US is most commonly associated with historical practices such as redlining and mid-20th Century “urban renewal” projects that demolished Black neighborhoods in the guise of “slum clearance.” Devaluation, however, is an ongoing problem across the country today, spanning residential and commercial properties.

Owner-occupied homes in Black-majority neighborhoods are undervalued. The recent release of Federal Housing Finance Agency appraisal reports has confirmed that homes in Black-majority neighborhoods are both appraised at lower values and nearly twice as likely to appraise below the contracted selling price as homes in non-Black neighborhoods.

Similar patterns of devaluation have been found for commercial property in Black-majority neighborhoods, and for customer reviews of retailers located in Black-majority neighborhoods. Retail disinvestment in Black-majority neighborhoods reduces the amenities available to residents of these neighborhoods.. It also forms part of a self-reinforcing cycle. The presence of assets such as premium retailers — or, conversely, of retail options associated with poverty, such as dollar stores — signals to investors and developers that a community either is or is not worthy of further investment.

While the problem of retail under-investment in Black-majority communities is present across all retail sectors, chain food retailers are particularly convenient to study. They have many locations across many metro areas and the USDA’s database of stores participating in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, often called “food stamps”) provides a publicly available record of their locations.

In our recent Brookings Metro report, my colleagues and I analyzed the locations of both premium grocery stores and dollar stores in ten large metro areas and compared the share of non-rural Census block groups by income and share of Black residents that were near stores of each type.

The results were quite similar across metro areas. As might be expected, premium grocery stores were more likely to locate in high-income neighborhoods, while dollar stores were more likely to locate in low-income neighborhoods. However, we also found a substantial difference in the shares of high-income block groups located near premium grocers based on the racial make-up of the neighborhoods. High-income neighborhoods with less than 10% Black residents were much more likely to be located near premium grocers than those with Black-majority populations.

The reverse pattern was present for dollar stores. Dollar stores were generally more common in low-income neighborhoods, and also much more common in Black-majority neighborhoods at all income levels. While chain dollar stores, a rapidly expanding segment of grocery retail in the US, can fill a need in low-income neighborhoods, they are increasingly regarded as predatory and as harming communities more than they benefit them by displacing other grocery options, failing to sell fresh food, having store designs and operating practices that increase the rate of armed robberies, and being serial violators of OSHA and FDA food-safety regulations.

The Washington, DC region, with its median annual household income of $110,000, is one of the richest metro areas in the country. Correspondingly, it has substantially fewer chain dollar stores than the other metro areas we studied. However, it also has an especially high concentration of premium grocery stores, and the largest concentration of high-income Black-majority neighborhoods in the country, making it a particularly good testing ground for whether high-income Black-majority neighborhoods are neglected by premium grocers.

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As shown in the table above, we analyzed five grocery chains in the Washington region: the national premium chains Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, the local organic chains MOM’s Organic Market and Yes! Organic Market, and Harris Teeter, a Kroger-owned regional chain that has focused on the high-end market since it expanded into the Washington region.

We found that Harris Teeter, Whole Foods, and Trader Joe’s all substantially underserved Black-majority communities, with far-fewer Black-majority block groups near a store in all but the lowest income quartile. The two local chains show a much less-pronounced pattern, given their significantly lower number of stores and the fact that all but one of Yes! Organic Market’s stores are located in the District.

Where are premium grocers located in the Washington region?

As shown in the table above, the three large premium grocery chains we analyzed in the Washington region — Harris Teeter, Whole Foods, and Trader Joe’s — are all much more commonly found in neighborhoods with few Black residents than in Black-majority neighborhoods. In fact, all three chains show a similar pattern of locations in the District and its western and northern suburbs, while largely ignoring the Black-majority and Black-plurality areas in the eastern half of the region.

Harris Teeter, which now has the third most locations of any grocery chain in the region after Giant and Safeway, is particularly concentrated in Northern Virginia inside the Beltway, but also has a number of locations in western Fairfax and eastern Loudoun Counties, as well as Prince William County, downtown DC, and western Montgomery County. However, it only has two stores in Prince George’s County, both right on the Anne Arundel County border, in Bowie and Laurel.

Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s have substantially fewer locations than Harris Teeter, but they show similar patterns, with locations in DC (but none East of the River), Northern Virginia (though none south of the Occoquan), and mostly western Montgomery County, but few stores in the eastern end of the region. Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s locations are, in fact, very often paired in the same areas, suggesting that the two chains are using very similar approaches for locating their stores.

Given this similarity in locations, it is perhaps not surprising that the only Trader Joe’s and the only Whole Foods store in the region’s two Black-majority jurisdictions — Prince George’s and Charles Counties — are located less than a mile apart. It is notable, however, that they are both located on the section of Baltimore Avenue just south of the University of Maryland campus, in the heart of the part of Prince George’s County with the fewest Black and most white residents.

As discussed in my colleagues’ and my recent report, the problem of premium grocers failing to serve Black-majority communities, even high-income ones, is not just a Washington region problem: we found similar patterns in the location of stores in all ten metro areas that we analyzed. Furthermore, it is not just a matter of Black residents having to travel further to buy groceries: it is a symptom of a more general issue of disinvestment in and devaluation of Black communities across the US.