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As Dollar Stores Proliferate, Some Communities Push Back [1]
['Wesley Brown', 'Michael Prado', 'Celina Mahabir', 'Anne Marshall-Chalmers', 'Twilight Greenaway', 'Lee Van Der Voo', 'Dana Cronin', 'Mecca Bos', 'Lisa Held', 'Lynn Fantom']
Date: 2022-04-13
Lorraine Cochran-Johnson, a county commissioner in DeKalb County, Georgia, knows precisely how many “small box” discount stores there are in her 360-mile, suburban county outside Atlanta.
“There are 70 dollar stores, and more than half—41—are in my district,” says Cochran-Johnson, who took her oath in 2019. During the 2018 election campaign that swept her into office, a constituent quizzed her about the spread of dollar stores and the lack of healthy food choices in her district, where the residents are more than 80 percent Black.
“I am against the proliferation of dollar stores in our communities because there is a direct correlation between their presence and food deserts.”
That conversation stuck with the commissioner, who introduced a resolution to establish a yearlong moratorium on so-called small box discount retailers (SBDRs) in DeKalb County’s seven districts and unincorporated areas in her first week of work. “In part, this moratorium was put in place because of concerns about how SBDRs may be negatively influencing public safety, food availability, and property values in unincorporated DeKalb County,” reads the resolution.
“I am not against the existence of dollar stores—I am a dollar store shopper,” says Cochran-Johnson. “I am against the proliferation of dollar stores in our communities because there is a direct correlation between their presence and food deserts.”
The commissioner points to the fact that Black people in the U.S. face increased rates of several diet-related health disparities, including hypertension, heart disease, and diabetes. DeKalb County, where the population of 758,000 is nearly 55 percent African American, is no different.
If you were to map the dollars store in DeKalb County, Cochran-Johnson says, the areas where they are most prevalent would overlap with maps that show the neighborhoods with the lowest median incomes and the most residents of color. For example, the two mostly white districts in north DeKalb County with the highest median income earners are only home to three such dollar stores.
After the DeKalb County Commission easily approved Johnson-Cochran’s resolution to put a moratorium on new dollar stores in early 2019, it defined a SBDR store as less than 16,000 square feet in size. The county’s ban, which also affects some convenience store operators, has since been extended four times, blocking any new applications or permits for the smaller-than-Walmart discount stores.
Those extensions are tied to another part of the resolution that called for a comprehensive evaluation of the effects of small box retailers on the health, safety, and welfare of county residents and businesses, says Cochran-Johnson. Now, the seven-person Commission will consider “next steps,” to address the potential influence SBDRs have on obesity, food availability, food quality, crime, and land value.
“[Dollar store owners] are very clear on their target audience. So, we have to be very clear on what we will and won’t accept,” says the county commissioner.
DeKalb county is just one of a number of municipalities responding to the rapid spread of dollar stores in this way. Kansas City, Kansas was the first to create such an ordinance in early 2016 and in the years since similar bans and moratoriums have taken root in Tulsa, Oklahoma and Mesquite, Texas, as well as larger cities, such as Cleveland, Fort Worth, Oklahoma City, and New Orleans.
The DeKalb evaluation identified 25 cities that instituted these kinds of policies in 2019 and 2020. And while many are drawing a connection between the stores and neighborhood economics, food access is also at the center of the conversation. Yet, despite this backlash, the companies behind the nation’s small box discounters have aggressive plans to continue expanding despite an array of recent, documented health and safety violations.
Fighting ‘Food Deserts’ or Helping Create Them?
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[1] Url:
https://civileats.com/2022/04/13/dollar-stores/
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