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Seattle's grocery store bailouts can't fix its crime problem and the "food deserts" it creates.
Seattle city government faces a steep budget deficit amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars over the next three years — an estimated 10% of its revenues. Yet the city just allocated $1.7 million to help struggling independent supermarkets avoid going out of business. The money is both more than the stressed budget should apportion and not enough to make a difference in a metropolis of nearly 400 food stores.
The move, by Democratic Socialist Mayor Katie Wilson, was a nod to fiscal reality after her predecessor announced last year that Seattle would explore something far grander — opening government-owned supermarkets — to address growing concern about “food deserts,” that is, neighborhoods without ready access to supermarkets. In his statement on the problem, then-Mayor Bruce Harrell noted that at least 10 Seattle neighborhoods lacked “convenient access” to grocery stores, and he even invoked the possibility of using the government’s eminent domain powers to appropriate private property to create government outlets.
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Steven Malanga is the George M. Yeager Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a senior editor at City Journal.