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For Release Sunday, August 2, 2009
© 2009 Washington Post Writers Group

Is the Obama administration’s urban policy ready for prime time?

In Philadelphia July 23, it looked that way. White House Urban Affairs Director Adolfo Carrion led an impressive entourage of federal officials–two Cabinet officers included–to visit a rarity: a shining new inner-city supermarket.

Then, with local officials and activists, the federal officials held a town hall meeting celebrating the idea of strategic government public intervention to bring fresh and healthy foods to the “food deserts” of low-income city neighborhoods (and some small towns).

Every major national grocery chain, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter told the gathering, had been offered the West Philadelphia Parkside site. Not one had accepted.

It’s a familiar story across America. Big supermarket chains, leery of higher security costs and focused on more affluent buyers, increasingly redline such areas. Local residents are left reliant on fast-food and convenience stores that sell mostly high-sugar, high-fat processed foods. The result: communities exposed to seriously higher rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease.

On top of that, notes the national nonprofit PolicyLink, communities lose the benefits that come with a full grocery store, including creation of steady jobs at decent wages and the sparking of complementary retail stores and services nearby.

So how did Jeffrey Brown, a fourth-generation grocer with 10 other stores around Philadelphia, “crack the code” to open a $14.5 million, 69,700-square foot market, offering fresh and regionally grown produce, and providing 130 union jobs in the struggling Parkside neighborhood?

The answer: the boost of a $1 million grant and $7 million in federal New Market Tax Credits for invesors, arranged through the Pennsylvania Fresh Food Financing Initiative.

The state program idea was Philadelphia-born. First, a local nonprofit, the Food Trust, documented the nexus between the lack of supermarkets and high rates of disease. Then a city council task force suggested a financing program for grocery stores. Jeremy Nowak’s Philadelphia-based but nationally-recognized Reinvestment Fund for poor neighborhoods helped devise the specifics. State Rep. Dwight Evans of Philadelphia successfully championed the idea in Harrisburg.

Since 2004, the state has allocated $30 million to the effort. But the Reinvestment Fund, tapping bank investments plus federal New Market Tax Credits, has amplified the total to $120 million, financing 69 projects statewide including 23 in Philadelphia (and half in rural towns). Programs based on the Pennsylvania model have now been proposed in New York, California, New Jersey and Ohio.

So it’s small wonder the Obama crew would pick Philadelphia as #1 stop in its planned nationwide road show (soon to include Denver, Kansas City and other locales). It’s all based, says Carrion, on the president’s Chicago-born conviction that communities, not Washington, create the best solutions. “We’re shopping around,” Carrion told me, “for good ideas to bring back to the public policy discussion” –figuring out how the federal government can help, whether in transportation, education, health care, economic development or healthy foods.

What’s important about the Pennsylvania Fresh Food Initiative, Carrion added, is not its specifics but “the model, the integration, the partnering of the public and private sector.”

But what also bubbled up in the Philadelphia gathering was local leaders’ sheer elation that after years of official Washington disinterest, there’s now active Washington outreach and focus on tough problems communities face.

For fresh food availability, that could either lead to a direct federal grant program, or perhaps even more constructive, federal “matches” to get more states to deal creatively with the nutrition challenges of their low-income communities.

If there was a shortcoming of the Philadelphia event, it was a missing metropolitan factor–few specific examples of regional fresh food supply chains and the role of such extraordinarily fertile food-producing counties such as nearby Lancaster.

But the audience responded enthusiastically to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack saying “It’s important to give farmers a market that’s not 1,500 miles away, not through a series of middle men, but a direct relationship that allows consumers to know precisely where their food is coming from.”

Or Commerce Secretary Gary Locke: “I want to go back and advertise to (my department in Washington) how to support initiatives like this rather than just industrial parks and manufacturing.”

Or Housing and Urban Development Deputy Secretary Ron Sims: “We can predict the illnesses people have, the morbidity rate anywhere in the U.S., by zip code. The country has to stop those disparities so that every child, every parent can be healthy.”

At the end of the day, Carrion said, he and Sims were “out of our suits into our jeans and t-shirts, digging our fingers into the ground” at a working urban farm in North Philadelphia that sells to local restaurants–its workforce “mostly black and brown kids” and “reentry program” ex-offenders.

If that doesn’t mark official Washington’s return to the grassroots, what could?

For reprints of Neal Peirce’s column, please contact Washington Post Permissions, c/o PARS International Corp., WPPermissions@parsintl.com, fax 212-221-9195. For newspaper syndication sales, Washington Post Writers Group, 202-334-5375, wpwgsales@washpost.com.