Daily Score Blog

The conventional wisdom is that food access issues are greatest in urban wastelands where there are high concentrations of low-income families. This, the argument goes, is because grocery stores and supermarkets abandoned the “inner cities” along with the mass exodus of many white middle-class residents. In their place grew up smaller convenience stores focused on selling beer and cigarettes.  And there is lots of good data that make this case. (A National Housing Institute paper on the topic lays this out quite well and we have written about it here at the Daily Score as well.) But could farm country be a food wasteland too?

A recently released study from the Washington State Budget and Policy Center concludes that rural communities face the biggest barriers to healthy food:

Many rural residents in Washington must travel long distances to grocery stores and therefore have less access to affordable fruits and vegetables. By contrast, people who live in more metropolitan areas or in higher income communities are more likely to have access to stores that offer a greater variety of fruits and vegetables.

Federal stimulus funding has allocated more dollars to support the goals of low income weatherization programs and create green jobs. Agencies in the Northwest now have to figure out the most effective way to mobilize those resources to meet those goals.

To learn more about how the dollars are affecting the work of community action agencies in the region I spoke with Chuck Eberdt of the Opportunity Council in Bellingham and Rand Berke of the Community Action Program of Oregon, a community action agency in Salem. Neither Eberdt or Berke come across as pessimists about their programs or the stimulus money. Instead they both talk about these challenges like the professionals that they are; looking under the hood thinking about ways to make it run better.

Both Eberdt and Berke are looking for ways to fix the bottleneck created with the doubling of funds in their budgets and a short time to spend the money. As an article in today’s New York Times agencies are scrambling to ensure funds intended to support more production and more savings for low income families get where they are needed most.