Explaining Neighborhood Inequalities in Amenity Access: Firm Discrimination, Retail Business Models and Residential Segregation Patterns

• In Event: 127 - Section on Community and Urban Sociology Paper Session. Neighborhood/Residential Inequalities

Abstract

Studies have documented that minority neighborhoods suffer from a range of inequalities in access to essential amenities. These are believed to arise from firms' racially discriminatory location decisions. However, previous work has been unable to explain how and why neighborhood inequalities in amenity access emerge. This paper uses the case of supermarket access in Chicago to examine this fundamental question. Supermarkets are essential amenities. Poor supermarket access is linked to disproportionate rates of dietary disease within minority populations and to higher spending on the dollar for a lesser or equal basket of grocery goods. I use GIS to create a census of supermarkets in Chicago from 1970-2000. Using spatially-weighted, longitudinal regressions, I test for race effects on neighborhood supermarket access. Supermarkets discriminated against minority communities in 1970. However, they ceased to do so after 1980, despite dramatically widening racial inequalities in supermarket access. Results, combined with data from industry archives indicate that increasing neighborhood-level racial inequalities in supermarket access arose due to the interaction between persistent, large-scale patterns of race- and class-based residential segregation in Chicago, and changing business models in the supermarket industry. The latter made supermarkets a rarer event city-wide, and heightened pressure on individual stores to capture large profits. My findings debunk the widespread belief that inequalities in amenity access are driven by racially discriminatory retail location decisions. It is also the first to highlight the powerful role that changing business models within retail industries can play in shaping neighborhood amenity access.

Author

• Anjanette Marie Chan Tack, University of Chicago