On Monday, Councilmembers Mary Cheh and Kwame Brown held a public hearing on the “Food, Environmental, and Economic Development in the District of Columbia Act of 2010″, also known as the “FEED DC Act.” The primary goal of the legislation is to improve access to healthy foods in DC neighborhoods, by encouraging full-service grocery stores to locate in under-served areas and by helping corner stores offer more fresh produce.
We here at the DC Fiscal Policy Institute enthusiastically support this goal and believe that the FEED DC Act takes some important steps towards achieving it. Ed Lazere testified at the hearing to express DCFPI’s support and to lay out some recommendations to improve the bill’s effectiveness.
First and foremost, the geographic targeting in the bill should be reconsidered to better focus on neighborhoods with limited access to healthy food. The bill currently designates Enterprise Zones as targets for development. However, these zones cover wide swaths of the city. Moving forward, the bill should establish narrower criteria that target low- and moderate-income neighborhoods, and should further limit incentives to areas with below-average access to healthy food.
This would allow city officials to consider food access options that are unique to specific neighborhoods. While some neighborhoods might need a new full-service supermarket, others might be well served by upgrading existing retail options. This approach also would help city officials recruit stores that are able to provide healthy food at an affordable cost, which is critical to making sure that residents can take advantage of new options.
The FEED DC Act should also establish more clearly the types and levels of subsidies that will be available to businesses that qualify under the legislation. As we have written about before, the District has a history of providing economic development subsidies often with little attention to costs and benefits. Even in the name of improving access to healthy food, the District should provide such incentives carefully. Along those lines, we recommend that DC’s current supermarket tax incentives ‘ which offer 10 year-property tax breaks and other tax subsidies ‘ should be modified as part of the FEED DC Act to apply only to the areas identified by the bill as under-served.
Providing access to healthy, affordable food in underserved, low-income neighborhoods will go a long way towards improving health outcomes in DC. The FEED DC Act forms an important component towards achieving this goal.
