U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand was in Latham this morning to promote legislation to help end food deserts — a move that could help bring a grocery store to Albany's South End.
At the Regional Food Bank of Northeastern New York, Gillibrand said her legislation would provide $50 million annually in mandatory federal funding to incentivize grocery stores to establish locations in underserved communities, such as Albany’s South End, which has not consistently had a single large grocery store since the 1990s.
Residents in the area are forced to rely on corner and convenience stores, which can often sell little to no fresh produce, meat or dairy and whose prices are higher than those of a typical supermarket.
"It's unfair, and it's unacceptable," said Gillibrand. "Luckily, the Healthy Food Financing Initiative, a federal program that was authorized in the 2014 farm bill provides grants and loans to food retailers and grocery stores to help improve access to nutritious food in these underserved areas. It's a deeply effective and popular program that is consistently oversubscribed and underfunded. So this week, I'm sending a letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee to make sure that this vital program gets the resources that it needs."
Gillibrand notes that people residing in food deserts often subsist on poor diets.
"Food deserts are far too common. They disproportionately impact communities of color, and barriers to food access have become even more with COVID and inflation. Here in Albany, we have unacceptably high rates of food insecurity. Across Albany County, there are 27,000 people or nearly 9% of our residents who were food insecure in 2021. According to the USDA, thousands of Albany residents live in food deserts, which are areas where there are few or no options to shop for affordable, healthy foods like fruits and vegetables,” Gillibrand said.
New York State Assemblymember John McDonald of the 108th district is a licensed pharmacist.
"No child, No family should be having to spend every day worrying about where they're going to get their next meal," McDonald said. "But the same token, it's having the right meal, having the right nutrition, which this program helps assure, that allows people to live a healthy life. When we look at the main health care drivers, hypertension, diabetes, hypercholesterolemia, the root problem usually is a poor diet. We need to make sure there's a solid program in place. A program where we don't need to worry about year over year, that can help move our whole nutrition efforts forward."
Fellow Democrat Wanda Willingham is deputy chair of the Albany County Legislature. She says food insecurity is an ongoing issue in the South End and North Albany.
"I can tell you right now, if you go into certain communities that I represent, you can see people lined up where they know that there are food pantries going in around the corner around the block," said Willingham. "The other thing that you see that people have tried to do now is they’ve taken lots and cleared them out. And that's where people are going to get their fresh fruit and their vegetables from these lots. There's a store that has just opened up right in the heart of the community. It's not a large store. It's the size of let's say, your convenience store. And that's where people also know that they can go and get fresh fruit and vegetables. So what we have found is these are the type of ways in which we have had to address to the food insecurities in our communities."
The South End Grocery was the most recent attempt to bridge food insecurity in downtown Albany. The store opened to fanfare in December 2022 but was closed by the following July after an employee accidentally set off a fire extinguisher. It reopened in August with shortened hours, then shuttered for good when the store defaulted on loans.
