California
12 articles
Better Access, Higher Vulnerability: 9,033 CA Tracts
Across 9,033 California census tracts, better grocery access often coincides with higher food-security vulnerability, complicating the food-desert framework.'s food desert framework assumes that distance to grocery stores is a primary barrier to food access.
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%).
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%).
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…
Building a Better Metric: The Residualized Accessibility Index
Income, density, and car ownership explain 81% of county-level food-security vulnerability; residualization separates the structural signal from the rest.
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…
Mobility Deserts: Close on Paper, Unreachable by 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…
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?
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…
The Retail Density Paradox: Why More Stores Mean Worse Data
A verification method for EBT acceptance across the roughly 28,800 California stores in the USDA list, where more retailers means messier, not better, data.
When Work Isn't Enough: 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%.
How Neighborhood Intersections Predict Food Insecurity
A validated neighborhood food-security index showing why single demographic factors miss the mark, and how intersecting conditions predict vulnerability better.'t tell the full story.