California
13 articles
Renters vs. Owners: Housing Tenure and Grocery Access
Renter-dominated tracts have better grocery access: shorter distances (0.58 vs. 0.94 mi), lower food desert rates (8.4% vs. 18.2%). But this reflects urban geography, not housing policy—and renters have higher vulnerability despite better access.
Who Gets Left Behind: Transit Access and Race in California
Majority-minority tracts have shorter distances to grocery stores (0.72 vs. 0.85 miles) but higher mobility desert rates (13.2% vs. 11.1%). Stores are closer, but transit access to reach them is worse. This disparity persists after controlling for income and density.
Better Access, Higher Vulnerability: What 9,033 California Tracts Reveal
The USDA's food desert framework assumes that distance to grocery stores is a primary barrier to food access.[1] Federal policy has directed resources toward bringing stores closer to underserved communities, from the Healthy Food Financing Initiative to state-level incentive programs.[2] Our earlier analysis of 7 Bay Area and major metro counties suggested this framing may be backwards: the most vulnerable communities already had closer stores, not farther ones. But that finding was limited to
Scaling Up: From 7 Counties to Statewide
Expanding from 2,000 to 9,039 census tracts reveals what scales linearly (Census API, KD-trees) and what requires adaptation (transit aggregation, memory management). Here's what the statewide data shows that county-level analysis missed.
Building a Better Metric: The Residualized Accessibility Index
81% of county-level variation in food security vulnerability is explained by income, density, and car ownership. Here's how residualization separates structural factors from potential policy effects.
Why County Rankings Confound Policy with Context
Merced County's vulnerability index is 2.3 times higher than San Francisco's. But before drawing policy conclusions, we need to understand what that number actually measures.
Mobility Deserts: When Grocery Stores Are Close on Paper But Unreachable Without a Car
Federal food access policy assumes proximity equals access. But in California, 1 in 8 neighborhoods face a hidden barrier: stores are within a mile, but poor transit makes them practically unreachable.
The Widening Gap: Why Some Neighborhoods Are Falling Behind
County-wide SNAP rates rose 2 points over four years. But what happens when we look at neighborhoods instead of the whole county? A more complex picture emerges.
The Food Security Gap: How COVID Widened Inequality
County-wide SNAP participation stayed flat during the pandemic. But a census tract analysis of 408 neighborhoods reveals what aggregate data hides: food insecurity worsened in the most vulnerable communities while improving elsewhere, widening the inequality gap by 49%.
The Retail Density Paradox: Why More Stores Mean Worse Data
Developing a verification methodology for EBT acceptance across 7,000 California food retailers
When Work Isn't Enough: What Census Data Reveals About Silicon Valley's Working Poor
In 57 census tracts across Santa Clara County, more than 60% of working-age adults are employed. These same tracts have poverty rates above 10%. This pattern, high employment alongside meaningful poverty, appears in neighborhoods home to 256,773 people. The correlation between employment rate and poverty rate across all 408 county tracts? r = -0.063, essentially zero. Since employment doesn't predict poverty in Silicon Valley, we should think about what Census wage and income data can show us.
Beyond Demographics: How Neighborhood-Level Intersections Predict Food Security Vulnerability
When measuring neighborhood food security vulnerability, single demographic factors don't tell the full story. We built and validated an index that shows how intersecting identities create compounding risk.
The Food Desert Myth: Zero Geographic Barriers, Clear Economic Disparities
When a county has excellent geographic access to grocery stores (0.57 miles average), yet SNAP participation varies 3.7× across neighborhoods, what drives food insecurity? Analysis of 408 census tracts reveals the barrier isn't distance: it's affordability.