Hacker News Reader

Comment by ako | Hacker News Reader

Not sure if healthy food is accessible to everyone: if you're juggling 2 or 3 low-paying jobs you neither have the money nor time to buy and prepare healthy food. In the US fastfood is often cheaper than healthy food.

View on HN

This is a feel-good trope that doesn’t remotely reflect the typical situation facing lower income people. Fast food is cultural, not economic. If you go to poor Asian and Latino neighborhoods in urban areas, you’ll see ethnic grocery stores underpinning a food culture that is independent of fast food. My poor Bangladeshi immigrant relatives don’t eat fast food; they buy food from the halal grocer and cook. What’s been destroyed among native born American poor people is that food culture.

Fast food is both cultural and economic. Many immigrant households are very traditional and the woman take on the duty of buying and preparing foods. If you are single American, or single parent, working multiple jobs economically it's more convenient to eat fast food. I have rarely seen immigrant men from non-western countries in any type of grocery store shopping for fresh produce.

I have rarely seen immigrant men from non-western countries in any type of grocery store shopping for fresh produce.

https://i.redd.it/h4plv5xwq4861.jpg

Being single for an extended time in adulthood, or being a single parent, are cultural as well.

And I think the jury is out on “fresh produce” being the key differentiator. It’s hard to find real science that backs that theory up.

There's something to this, but one has to ask: were your poor Bangladeshi immigrant relatives redlined out of home ownership? I live on a redline boundary street in Chicago and there is a reason that the grocery stores that serve the Black community across that street are on my side of the line.

No, during the era of redlining they were living in a third world country, where even an upper middle class family’s apartment looked something like this: https://www.bproperty.com/en/property/details-1890101.html. The low income NYC and Toronto housing they moved to when they got here wasn’t much of a downgrade. (And of course whatever equity they had wasn’t worth much converted to USD when they came here.)

Rayiner, there is no "era of redlining". De jure redlining is over, but de facto redlining obviously lives on, as you can immediately discern from a 10 minute walk in the west side of Chicago. The point, of course, is that there's a commercial infrastructure in many ethnic neighborhoods that doesn't exist in the redlined neighborhoods due to decades of overt systematic disinvestment. It's why you'll see Mexican groceries every couple blocks in Belmont-Cragin, but only Food and Liquors in Austin. Economic path dependence is a hell of a drug!

I don't know if redlining is the only reason for this gap, or even one of the most important, but it's obviously a part of the story. If you're going to make generalizations about entire cultures this way, I think the onus is on you to engage with the history, even if only to say why you think it's not playing a part here.

> De jure redlining is over, but de facto redlining obviously lives on, as you can immediately discern from a 10 minute walk in the west side of Chicago.

Why does "de facto redlining obviously lives on"? How do you know that the areas with less investment in the west side of Chicago suffer race-based discrimination in investment (i.e. "redlining") as opposed to data-based, rational investment decisions?

Path dependence means that the "data-based, rational investment decisions" you're talking about were determined long ago (the early 1970s) by overtly racist policy. It's like making building and investment decisions about a superfund site.

But the current decisions were not determined long ago. They are made now. And everything indicates that they are made rationally based on data that actually affects the probability of investment returns. That is not race-based discrimination, and that is not redlining.

Yes, but they're made based on economic conditions that were set in place decades ago. This is a point Rayiner has made about other equity issues (for instance: about the need to explicitly correct for the underrepresentation of women and minorities in the professions); this is simply another instance of that.

You can raise the standard of living in the redlined neighborhoods, and that does happen at the margins, but it happens slowly and only when economic conditions across the city are good.

So no, it's not the case that Whole Foods or Pete's is just going to spontaneously site a new store in K-town. They're not avoiding that area because they're racist, but they are avoiding it because of racism.

It's disingenuous to say they are "avoiding the area because of racism". They are avoiding that area because it provides less return of investment than other areas. Part of the reason why that area provides less return of investment than other areas is because of racism that happened 50 years ago. Part of the reason is *not* due to racism.

Regardless, it is not "de facto" redlining, as redlining is race-based discrimination in investment, and that is not what is happening now. If you are criticizing rational, data-based, non-discriminatory investment, then you should not caracterize it as redlining, as the defining characteristic of redlining (i.e. race-based discrimination) is lacking in the current situation.

It provides less return on investment... because of redlining. It's not rocket science. If you think redlining isn't a factor, the onus is on you to provide evidence to back up your argument that the almost 1:1 correspondence between redlining boundaries and disinvestment has nothing to do with redlining policy.

I didn't say that. I didn't say anything close to that. I don't know how someone could have interpreted what I said as what you wrote in good faith. I believe you are arguing in bad faith; so I will stop engaging.

The path dependence argument runs in the other direction. Houses in redlined Black neighborhoods might be worth less than in equivalent white neighborhoods. But they’re worth a lot more than houses in Guatemala or Bangladesh. Likewise, inner city American schools may be worse than schools in affluent suburban neighborhoods in America. But the school in my dad’s village literally had no walls.

But we're not talking about why they had whatever food culture they had in Bangladesh. We're talking about what they end up building when they get here. I'm saying one reason why Austin and Lawndale are food deserts, but Belmont-Cragin isn't, is because Belmont-Cragin was regulated differently from Austin and Lawndale.

Redlining is a huge big deal; despite ending in the early 1970s, it literally defines the neighborhood boundaries across much of Chicagoland in 2021. And grocery stores are scarce in redlined neighborhoods, but not as much in working class Mexican neighborhoods.

Or look at a place like south-suburban Olympia Fields, which is majority Black but wasn't redlined (presumably, it's where a lot of upwardly-mobile families locked into Lawndale and Englewood fled to). Plenty of grocery options.

Do you really think redlining has nothing at all to do with this? That seems like an extraordinary claim.

You don't need extra time to eat less. Regardless of how much time someone has, you can only _gain_ time in your day by spending less time eating.

You're first sentence points out there are multiple budgets at play (time, money) so it's hard to dispute the ambiguous conclusion. I would guess that your conclusion is true by definition everywhere including the US in terms of time budget. I'm skeptical of its truth for any other budget.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com