Too many Louisiana families live on the edge of hunger. Since beginning our partnership with UrbanFootprint, we’ve uncovered sobering data around the impact of COVID-19 on our state’s food security crisis. Our most recent analysis reveals that, since the start of the pandemic, the number of food-insecure households in Louisiana have increased by 44%. Of these households, 69% have not had access to nutritionally adequate food in the past week. And this crisis is disproportionately affecting communities of color, in low-income neighborhoods -- families that are already living on the margins of poverty and limited socioeconomic opportunity.
Key insights from the Food Security Insights report:
1 in 7 urban households (which includes Jefferson, Orleans, and East Baton Rouge Parish) are food insufficient. That number rises to 1 in 5 for rural families (such as households in East Carroll Parish.) “Insufficient” is defined as sometimes or often not having enough to eat. When there is enough, the food is not nutritionally adequate.
23% of Black Louisiana households reported not having enough food in the past week, compared to 7% of white households.
Nationally, 16% of households are food insecure, and 10% are food insufficient. In Louisiana, those numbers are significantly higher -- 21% of households are food insecure, and 15% are food insufficient.
Food Insecurity and Neighborhoods
As community planners, we find the concentration of need exposed through UrbanFootprint’s data mapping especially striking. In Baton Rouge alone, food insecurity has increased by 35% over the past year, and the vast majority of affected households are located in North Baton Rouge -- a majority Black area of the city that has long been recognized as a food desert. Even prior to the pandemic, 20-30% of households located in North Baton Rouge census tracts were food insecure, compared to 8-10% of households in South Baton Rouge census areas. Food insecurity is a place-based problem, exacerbated not just by the pandemic but by long-term disinvestment that has resulted in neighborhoods that are disconnected from mainstream economic life in the city.
“Food insecurity” is an important measure of socio-economic vulnerability. In communities that are food insecure, families are forced to make tradeoffs between basic needs like food, medical care, and paying rent and utilities. At the neighborhood level, we recognize that this represents a failure of planning to create resilient places where people don’t face structural barriers to staying healthy and a high quality of life.
At the intersection of food security and community design, those barriers include inadequate mobility options and lack of access to stores stocked with fresh produce and healthy foods; a cycle of disinvestment and perceived risk that discourages large food retailers from locating in certain neighborhoods; and the legacy of practices like redlining that have concentrated poverty in urban communities of color. Food insecurity is one result of these barriers; related outcomes include poor health, lack of access to jobs and economic opportunity, and increased anxiety and stress. Residents of these communities have to work much harder and overcome more in order to live healthy, secure lives.
Healthy Community Design in Action
Planners can be a part of the solution by applying healthy community design principles that help connect people to the things they need to be healthy, such as nutritious food, and create places that support healthy behaviors such as regular exercise.
Improving walkability, bikeability and access to quality public transportation increases mobility and gives people more options for getting to grocery stores and other essential destinations. On the regulatory side, adopting codes that let mobile food markets circulate in high-need neighborhoods reduces barriers for people who can’t travel far. And we can advocate for targeted community interventions like distributing food from schools and religious sites. Food Security Insights specifically found that using these sites in North Baton Rouge would increase food security for around 3,000 households.
Combating sprawl is another way that planners can help eliminate food deserts. This means directing resources to support, maintain and revitalize existing residential and urban areas, instead of stretching those resources past the point of sustainability, forcing people to live further away from jobs and other essential services and rely on cars to reach everyday destinations. In most cases, it actually costs cities less to build or improve pedestrian and bike infrastructure where it already exists, versus extending into new developments that may one day themselves become disconnected food deserts.
Closing the food equity gap between high- and low-income neighborhoods reduces the burden of poverty and removes a huge barrier to health and wellbeing. With the data analysis and mapping resources developed from our partnership with UrbanFootprint, planners, policy-makers, and state agencies are empowered to better target resources and relief to the communities that need it most.