Food Desert

Abstract

This essay explores the term ‘desert’ in the context of urban redevelopment. The essay draws out the contradictions of our contemporary planning condition that enables a massive new food distribution center to be placed in a beleagured community labeled a food and mobility desert—such that the new distribution center does not change life, food, or transit access for anyone who lives there. Theorizing a spatial-temporal mismatch between place and region that effectively starves communities to feed broader markets, this essay complicates the politics and potentials of food in the struggle for space against market logics that frame community access to food otherwise. The essay posits that to understand the violence of the contemporary American ‘desert,’ even the construction of the term itself, we should look critically at those most celebrated sites of regional economic growth—battleground sites that architects and planners are invariably complicit in reproducing.

Keywords:

• urbanism
• politics
• racial capitalism
• food insecurity
• inequality
• St. Louis

Opening Figure. A. J. Wade and Curtis Walton in October, 2012 at the Kinloch farm Curtis helped cultivate prior to its relocation for the grocery distribution complex. A plane from nearby Lambert Airport takes off overhead. Image © Christian Gooden, St. Louis Post-Dispatch/ POLARIS.

This essay explores the term ‘desert’ in the context of contemporary, and contradictory, urban redevelopment. It considers the urban food and mobility desert, which refers to low income, often marginalized, minority neighborhoods in US metro regions where access to healthy food, transit, or personal transportation is scarce. Much like an ecological desert, urban deserts are readily cast as desolate, emptied sites, despite being host to diverse and resilient life. And if natural desert landscapes are where conditions for verdant plant and animal life are harsh, then urban deserts too are othered spaces that are presumed not to fit mainstream socioeconomic spatial expectations.

Since the 1990s, the term ‘food desert’ has been used as a passive, politically instrumental way to frame low-income communities as depleted and deficient. This essay explores the idea that the urban ‘desert’ is in fact a highly orchestrated result of market-based (neoliberal) policies that devalue and deurbanize land to make it profitable for corporate capital accumulation. The reality of this has become so blatant that in recent years food access advocates have suggested alternate labels for ‘food desert,’ including ‘food apartheid,’ to better point to this weaponization of urban deserts, and race, in their making.¹ In fact many agencies and organizations now refer instead to the multiple dimensions of community food and mobility insecurity, in efforts to identify the many reasons for low-income neighborhood instabilities and public health crises. This moves away from ‘desert’ towards more open ways to understand the creative work-arounds that communities mobilize to overcome the shortages they face.

This essay intentionally maintains use of the term ‘food desert’ in order to problematize it as both concept and practice. The essay explores the deliberate way that one low-income community was subjected to food desert status as part of a longer-term project of capital accumulation for corporate actors elsewhere. It attempts to show how the very casting of urban deserts as devalued, emptied spaces stages them for exploitation as accessible sites for economic redevelopment. The policy and design mechanisms for urban ‘desertification’ are also discussed, as large-scale regional economic imperatives are pitted against local space.

I. Hunger

Kinloch, Missouri is in a food desert. The more striking and current definition of food desert acknowledges the myriad dimensions contributing to the problem of food access. It frames food deserts as places of compounded food and mobility scarcity, meaning residents live in a “low-income census tract where more than 100 housing units do not have a vehicle and are more than ½ mile from the nearest supermarket, or a significant number or share of residents are more than 20 miles from the nearest supermarket.”² Kinloch is a small town next to Ferguson, Missouri, located in the northern part of St. Louis County in the first-ring suburbs 10 miles outside the city of St. Louis (Figure 1). It was Missouri’s first all-Black city, incorporated in 1948. The layers of history in Kinloch are rich, with many notable politicians, actors, and educators hailing from the town (Figure 2).³ But for decades, and continuing today, predatory policies of destabilization, then erasure, have reduced it among the poorest of all 88 municipalities in the county.⁴ In 2021, 59.1 percent of Kinloch’s few remaining residents lived below the poverty line.⁵ Kinloch is not alone as a food- and mobility-scarce desert. In 2015, parts of Ferguson, and much of North St. Louis County and the disenfranchised northern half of St. Louis City all qualified as deserts.

Figure 1. Map of the St. Louis region, with Kinloch in red and Berkeley and Ferguson outlined. The airport is in red hatch. The broader grey hatched area designates the food desert, defined as: low-income areas with low access to transit or a vehicle and more than ½ mile from the nearest supermarket (2018.)

Figure 2. Kinloch residents pose with comedian and activist Dick Gregory, an alumni of Kinloch’s Dunbar School, on his visit back to the town in the early 1980s when they honored him with a street in his name. Image from Missouri State Historical Society, African American Experience in St. Louis Photo Archive, ca 1980.

The story of Kinloch’s desertification is extreme, and brings an important dimension to the otherwise reductive optics of deserts as ‘emptied’ sites thus justified for extraction—or recolonization. For many years before Kinloch incorporated as a city, it was part of a larger area that had distinct white and Black neighborhoods thriving with community life, with many churches and small businesses, despite increasing racial tensions. In 1937, almost two decades before the 1954 school desegregation mandates, the white areas around present-day Kinloch petitioned to separate into their own school district. When that petition was denied, the white residents mobilized to incorporate as their own city in order to create the all-white school district they wanted.⁶ That new city became Berkeley, shaped by boundaries that literally wrapped around the northern, western, and southern edges of all-Black Kinloch, deserting it as a residual void in the center (Figure 3).⁷ The following decade, Kinloch also incorporated. But as Kinloch’s population was growing in the mid-1960s, construction of an interstate began on its western boundary with Berkeley. This was combined with ongoing street closures to Ferguson (predominantly white at the time) on its eastern side, along with delayed sewer infrastructure installation, among other deliberate policy neglects by county administrators. These maneuvers all cut access to outside areas, resources, and opportunities. The early making of the desert was as intentionally racist as it was economically protective.

Figure 3. Map of Kinloch in context. Drawing by author, 2023.

Despite these maneuvers, and the increased poverty that isolation created, people in Kinloch knew they were part of an important Black cultural hub.⁸ To the outside, however, it was deemed a troubled space. So by the 1980s and early 1990s, Kinloch’s ‘de-valued’ condition was turned into a long-term development strategy. It is worth noting that those were the years marked by a national period of Reaganomics that pushed neoliberalism and privatization even further into US public policy. As local governments were increasingly gutted of public funding, revitalization shifted to a reliance on the private sector, and the battle for profitable (exploitable) ground intensified in American cities and suburbs. These shifts quickly bulldozed any lingering policy notions of public space, democracy, or social welfare as concerns of redevelopment. Kinloch was poor—and Black—at the right time, in the right place. Kinloch’s poverty was less a concern than it was a lucrative potential investment for the regional leaders increasingly allied with corporate development capitalists.

Regardless of the community’s existing sense of place built on connections between networked churches, prominent schools and a historically local economy, Kinloch was recast by white developers as emptied space with potential to become a locus of connection and exchange—except now as the region’s nexus to the global economy elsewhere.⁹ Paradoxically, Kinloch ‘the mobility desert’ sat at a crossroads of two major interstates and under the literal flight path of planes approaching St. Louis Lambert International Airport 1,500 feet away across the highway on its west. A chain of events followed, led by state, county, and regional leaders acting in the interests of private industry and corporate development: home buyouts, land use changes, and eventual incentives all supported a vision of growing airport-related logistics enterprises in Kinloch. These actions emptied Kinloch further, to the point of producing ‘blighted’ vacant space where a new food distribution warehouse complex for the Schnucks grocery chain was built, smack in the middle of the low-income food desert (Figure 4).

Figure 4. Aerial view looking south showing remaining residential streets in Kinloch and Berkeley next to the massive grocery distribution warehouses that were built over a large section of the neighborhood. Additional (Phase I) NorthPark warehouses are visible in the distance. The airport is to the right across the highway. Image from Google Earth; annotations by author, 2023.

Today food, goods, and people all come and go across Kinloch’s air and ground, over the land filled over everyone’s former basements. Those historical foundations of a once vibrant Black community are now covered deep under accumulations of externalized profits for regional actors. These are revenue and resource flows that never actually touch down locally in Kinloch itself. Of the 300 or so residents who remain, the majority are still poor, still mobility- and food-scarce.

On paper, narratives of progress gloss over the lives of real residents, to to reassure outsiders that any change must be inherently good. When the grocery distribution center opened in 2015, Steve Stenger, St. Louis county executive at the time, proclaimed, “On behalf of St. Louis County, we were proud to assist in making this investment in North County a reality. I commend Schnucks’ commitment to building this facility in Kinloch. It’s projects like this that will help revitalize our community.”¹⁰ (Stenger was later convicted for corruption unrelated to this project.¹¹) Echoing the rhetoric, the grocery-chain CEO Todd Schnuck said, “Not only is this project a big investment in the north St. Louis County community, it’s a major investment in the future of our company and demonstrates our commitment to our customers and to the St. Louis area.”¹² While it is true that the new distribution center doubled the company’s capacity to move food around the region, it is also true that the project upheld commitments to customers who were regional, not local. There is no Schnucks grocery store in Kinloch. There is one in Ferguson, but there is no easy route to get there across railroad tracks and many blocks of closed-off streets.

II. Design

The making of an urban food desert involves regionally-scaled power plays that subsume struggling small communities. This process operates by appropriating and twisting our own architectural and urbanistic notions of scale and space, including how we traditionally understand regionalism: here notions of lived local space are amassed under a ‘region-wide’ probusiness imaginary. This new appropriation of regionality as an economic attribute becomes a rebranding tool that gerrymanders time and property, reallocating local livelihoods for the sake of regional profit imperatives. The scale of residential parcels and the specificities of the environmental context are expanded (or subsumed) into the regional jurisdiction calibrated to the metro area’s much wider economic markets.¹³ For the media covering these stories, the larger scale of the region creates a sense of legitimacy, and gives an optic of broad support and benefit even when smaller communities resist. Additionally, as space expands, time fragments. Layered experiences of lived continuity get artificially parceled into discrete phases. Kinloch’s rich and complex history—along with that of decades of racist policy that made it into a ‘desert’—is replaced by shorter narratives of master planning that bracket public memory into before and after conditions, from when it is ‘blighted space’ to when it is saved by its incorporation into the externalized capital exchange.¹⁴ The parceling of time through phasing is a process that is, however, protracted over many years.

While Kinloch residents should have been seen as the main ‘stakeholders,’ it is also true that Kinloch residents had lost their ability to have any actual stakes over decades of racist planning protocols prior to the insult of the food distribution center. The 1990s buyouts were characterized as a government imperative related to the nearby airport noise. Private houses were acquired under the public-purpose guise of airplane ‘noise mitigation.’ (Even here, Kinloch’s neighboring predominantly white municipalities Berkeley and Ferguson were offered sound insulation to their homes instead of buyouts and demolition.¹⁵) This is how the planning separations were actualized; the buy-outs initiated the ‘redevelopment phase.’ After families vacated, and several years had elapsed, the noise purpose turned into a redevelopment purpose for areas blighted from buyout.¹⁶

A few years later, the larger development goal was consolidated under the St. Louis County Economic Development Council.¹⁷ By the early 2000s the emptied land was sold to a corporate industrial development consortium called NorthPark (and then later, around 2015, portions were eventually conveyed to the Schnucks grocery chain for Phase II of the redevelopment.) Not only did NorthPark get access to personal property dubiously acquired at deep discount rates—they were showered with state and local incentives totaling millions of dollars of additional public funding to ensure a profit.¹⁸ It goes without saying that this was public money never available for Kinloch in its community form. Incentives and tools like Tax-Increment Financing (TIF) could have been leveraged to, say, subsidize the building of a grocery store—since that tool in particular was originally set up to facilitate bringing key amenities to low income contexts. It’s important to note also that under Missouri law at the time, a property needed to be “blighted” in order to get some of these incentives. Yet the incentives are not meant to help people in places like Kinloch, but rather to remove them. ‘Blight,’ like desert, implies substandard quality that doesn’t fit an aesthetic norm and needs redevelopment to be fixed. In both cases—of ‘blight’ and ‘desert’—the development agents poised to fix those conditions were the same interests that created the insecurities in the first place.

In weak-market cities, regional economic development represents an important weapon of the growth machine arsenal. The strategy sets the terms for the economization of place. This is a process that transfers expectations of housing away from ideas that it is a right, and towards ideas of wealth speculation. As Logan and Molotch (and many others) argue, capitalism privileges exchange values over use values, and the rich history of Kinloch—of great use value to its Black citizens—had no exchange value.¹⁹ Wendy Brown’s critique of neoliberal ideology is also helpful to illustrate how the fever of privatization and the marketization of everything has created a situation where meaning and place are continually framed economically, even when it doesn’t make sense.²⁰ The urban planning and design term “stakeholder” itself comes from the investment world, and not coincidentally, is rooted in the history of white settler colonialism, where “stakes” were put down to mark claims on land stolen from Native Americans.

When urban growth mandates at the service of capital create ‘desert’ communities and then use this status to dispossess them entirely, like what happened in Kinloch, the resulting urbanization sweeps away the particularities of place. With these dynamics, design’s most creative possibilities are also curtailed. Regionalization remakes broader, nonspecific narratives of change across a larger conceptual (economic) radius of crafted popular perception. This privileges abstracted and generalized notions of space, as it rebrands external investments as a necessary blanket of change that according to trickle-down market logics will eventually benefit those who for now must leave. Jobs are often part of these promises but rarely materialize in ways that change a poor neighborhood’s trajectory.

While the redeveloped distribution warehouse space appears clean and new, architects have critiqued the violence of tilt-up big-box buildings that relegate architecture to serve as a disposable commodity rather than a long-term contribution to the urban fabric. But just as the big-box forms are aesthetically generic, they are processually highly specific, given the intensive relationship-building, lobbying, and networking required by investors to capture state politics in the service of wealth and land transfer.²¹ The distribution buildings and parcels are mega-scaled, for massive emissions-spewing truck-based logistics articulated with faraway markets. All changes appear to repair blight and fill in the desert, visually and economically, although never environmentally or meaningfully socially. The land is transformed while residents are moved off-site, with lives not much improved; instead people’s lives become more complicated with relocation and the loss of connections to place and meaning.²²

Again scale is important because these actors are often major companies and nonprofit organizations with financial influence among elected metro leaders. Like the intentional scalar slippages that turn local into regional concern, the power elite in a city—what public policy scholars call the urban regime—operates through an informal apparatus that shapeshifts into many aspects and scales of governance, as philanthropy, campaign donations, nonprofit boards, and public commissions. What’s important is that all of these modes of influence override democratically elected voices.²³ These privatized spaces are forms of a watered-down—capital-infiltrated—government. They work at the metropolitan scale but also across dispersed global footprints to advance the corporate development imaginary as ‘community revitalization.’

There are, of course, beneficial and necessary uses of the regional perspective when it comes to tackling broad systems that cross neighborhood boundaries—water management, habitat protection, transit, and other urban planning urgencies. But in the economicized version of regionalism, food deserts and mobility deserts, environmental systems—the indicators of social and biostructural insecurities and crisis—will fix themselves with the promises of indirect benefits from what are otherwise major corporate windfalls.

III. Nourishment

Before Kinloch’s perverse 2015 ‘redevelopment,’ and during the earlier decades of protracted decline and buyouts, a few retirees from the nearby McDonnell-Douglas (now Boeing) factory at the airport cultivated a literal ground-up urban farming project on some of the vacant parcels at Kinloch’s western edge. For over thirty years they farmed and harvested food to compensate for the ‘desert’—sweet potatoes, okra, mustard greens, and other crops on a nine-acre area.²⁴ These urban farmers reclaimed territorial history in a contested place that was being slowly desertified from the top down, just as they overwrote their own personal histories as former workers at the end of their careers able to redefine their own story of labor with skills still to offer after retirement (Opening Figure). When the time came to build the grocery distribution warehouses, the farmers were uprooted, along with their crops. But in a surprise event, the then owner of the land, the Clayco Company, announced that it would deed the men a new plot to farm nearby.²⁵ The media celebrated the generosity of the company, although no one pointed out that this area had actually belonged to people and institutions in Kinloch all along until the depletion and takeovers. Nor did anyone question the structural underpinnings that set up a situation where retirees take it upon themselves to work hard in good faith, to offset impacts of a devastating system that left this community in a desert to begin with.

Food and property have long been weaponized, or mobilized, in the struggle between profit and sustenance in America’s racial capitalist history. Black enslaved people in the South cultivated some of the most fertile farmland in the country—land they were dispossessed of via a labor system that maintained disconnection between them and any benefits of the harvest.²⁶ That may seem an extreme example, but it exemplifies forms of externality and extraction that we continue to see in the ways food, its labor, and access to it, are marketized, politicized, and racialized under neoliberalism. Return to the beleaguered St. Louis suburbs to any McDonald’s to see how fast food preys on the poor for profit over provision, not just by way of minimum wage part-time jobs that skirt benefits without security, but by offering nutritionless supersize soft drinks at ‘bargain’ prices—because sodas are the leading money-makers for restaurants, with up to a 90 percent profit margin, despite the fact that sodas are also the leading cause of diabetes and obesity.²⁷ Dig further to see how McDonald’s profits, not even entirely from food and drink, but from its model of land tenure that allows the company to own property while passing off operating costs to franchise owners who pay rent for the land and run the actual business.²⁸

The settler-colonialist separation of land and profits from those who work or live on it (or suffer the costs later) is a component of capitalist business strategy that relies on externalities. Corporations (and thus, modern US governments) shed operating expenses, cleanup costs, or employee benefits, to put the burden on the laborer or the consumer (via supplemental individual health benefits, extra fees, or pricing) or on to future generations (in the case of toxic waste and its environmental costs). Additionally, profits themselves are externalized, ensuring that capital doesn’t accumulate on local ground, but flows outward to accrue at headquarters elsewhere in the region, or offshore.

In Kinloch the starving of a community feeds an accumulation of wealth elsewhere. The hidden (to some) violence of this system within legal—and widely celebrated—accepted ideas about growth and economic development is what distinguishes the erasures today from those of midcentury. Kinloch’s depletion was not the product of a federal public welfare program like the clearings during Urban Renewal, but a project involving private actors and a coopted state over years of discretely connected phases and efforts.

But food still carries meaning that is tied to site contexts, meanings that defy its politicization. Food is regionalism! Local foods index the particularities of temperature, climate, water, soil, family traditions and cultures. This registers in recipes that cut across time and connect people. Like architectures of lived public and private space, food is an important part of the system of social reproduction. This illuminates another dimension of the violence of the food desert, since it curtails these social possibilities.

During the Ferguson uprisings in 2014 after Michael Brown’s murder at the hands of a white police officer just blocks from Kinloch, the local McDonald’s became an important space of community connection, reprieve and regrouping (Figure 5).²⁹ This transformation of an exploitative business into community space of connection demonstrates the power of local place and the relentless persistence of residents to claim their own territorial history against forces of capital that undermine them.³⁰ When local social anchors like schools, even grocery stores or small businesses are gutted from neighborhoods, unexpected places take up the slack, like McDonald’s. The very complexity of McDonald’s in this mix demonstrates that the struggle for local space is not over, but is an ongoing confrontation and negotiation of local circumstances subject to regionalization.

Figure 5. Ferguson residents gather on August 14, 2014 to watch the news in McDonald’s on West Florissant Road in Ferguson during the community uprisings following the police murder of Michael Brown. Image by Matt Pearce, public Twitter post, 2014.

The definition of an urban ‘food desert’ moves beyond food and mobility scarcity, and involves rights to land, democratic access to government and claims to the meaning of place itself as home. The making of the Kinloch food desert and then its transformation into a ‘food distribution’ hub, among other contradictions, provides a stark illustration of our contemporary market-based urbanization processes of desertification and its weaponization. Desert scarcities feed regional development that is in turn fueled by a political growth machine hungry for capital. But the good news is that people will continue to resist and inscribe meaning in new and novel ways in the face of being pushed into the desert.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Patty Heyda

Patty Heyda is an associate professor of architecture and urban design at Washington University in St. Louis, where she is also affiliated faculty at the Center for Race, Equity and Ethnicity and in the American Culture Studies program. Heyda researches American cities and urban redevelopment, with a focus on inequality and political economic privatization in weak-market contexts like St. Louis. She is the co-author of Rebuilding the American City (Routledge, 2016) and Rebuilding Small Towns (Routledge, forthcoming), with David Gamble; and Radical Atlas (Belt, forthcoming). Heyda has worked professionally in architecture and urban design in Europe and the US. Previously, she taught at Harvard and Northeastern University.

Notes

1 Lela Nargi, “Critics say it’s time to stop using the term ‘food deserts,’” The Counter, September 16, 2021, https://thecounter.org/critics-say-its-time-to-stop-using-the-term-food-deserts-food-insecurity/. See also Jessica Fu, “Is it time to retire the term ‘food desert?,’” The Counter, January 9, 2020, https://thecounter.org/is-it-time-to-retire-the-term-food-desert-grocery-snap/.

2 United States Department of Agriculture Food Access Research Atlas (2019 data): https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-access-research-atlas/go-to-the-atlas/. Accessed December, 2022.

3 John A. Wright Sr., Kinloch Missouir’s First Black City (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2000).

4 Patty Heyda, “Erasure Urbanism,” in Architecture is All Over, eds. Esther Choi and Marrikka Trotter (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2017).

5 US Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-year Estimates (2021). Retrieved from Census Reporter profile page for Kinloch, MO, http://censusreporter.org/profiles/16000US2938972-kinloch-mo/.

6 John A. Wright Sr., Kinloch Missouri’s First Black City (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2000).

7 Wright, Kinloch Missouri’s First Black City.

8 See Gwendolyn Wright, Through the Eyes of a Child Oral History Project, transcripts (Missouri Historical Society Kinloch interviews, 1998).

9 Patty Heyda, “Erasure Urbanism.”

10 Kristen Cloud, “Schnucks Building New DC In Kinloch, Missouri,” The Shelby Report, May 28, 2015, https://www.theshelbyreport.com/2015/05/28/schnucks-building-new-dc-in-kinloch-missouri/.

11 United States Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of Missouri, “Former St. Louis County Executive Steven V. Stenger Sentenced to Federal Prison for “Pay to Play” Bribery Scheme,” press release, August 9, 2019; Ashley Cole, Erin Richey, Jacob Long, “Steve Stenger sentenced to 46 months in prison in pay-to-play scheme,” 5 On Your Side Local News, August 9, 2019. https://www.ksdk.com/article/news/local/steve-stenger-sentenced-to-46-months-in-prison-in-pay-to-play-scheme/63-50fc3a72-ab62-4e9b-a4d0-62c0e6c879fb. Accessed July, 2023.

12 United States Attorney’s Office, “Former St. Louis County Executive.”

13 This discussion expands from early notions of a scalar disjoint between lived space and global economic imperatives in Kinloch. See: Patty Heyda, “Quality Urbanism--We Got What We Wanted But We Lost What We Had,” Conditions, Issue #5/6 2010.

14 Patty Heyda, “Unbuilding and Rebuilding St. Louis,” in St. Louis Currents: Facing Regional Issues at 250, eds. Andrew Theising and Terrence Jones (St. Louis: Reedy Press, 2016).

15 Lambert St. Louis International Airport, Baseline Mitigation Eligibility Areas, map, September 12, 2005.

16 A finding of ‘blight’ supports the adoption of a redevelopment plan “between the City of St. Louis and Kinloch TIF, Inc”: City of St. Louis Ordinance No.68084, Board Bill #145, June 27, 2008, https://www.stlouis-mo.gov/government/city-laws/upload/legislative//Ordinances/BOAPdf/ordinance68084.pdf

17 NorthPark brochure, “Building the Momentum,” http://www.northparkstl.com/, accessed June, 2022.

18 NorthPark brochure, “Building the Momentum.”

19 See John Logan and Harvey Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987, 2007).

20 See Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2017).

21 Patty Heyda, “Erasure Urbanism.”

22 These ideas draw on Herscher’s descriptions of the term ‘blight’ and how it is construed toward this redevelopment end in the case of Detroit. See Andrew Herscher, “‘Blight,’ Spatial Racism, and the Demolition of the Housing Question in Detroit” in Housing After the Neoliberal Turn: International Case Studies, Wohnungsfrage, eds. Stefan Aue et al. (Spector Books, 2015).

23 For more on urban regime theory, see Clarence Stone, Regime Politics Governing Atlanta, 1946–1988 (University Press of Kansas, 1989).

24 Paul Hampel, “Urban Farmers Working Vacant Kinloch Property Get Surprise When Land’s Rightful Owner Shows Up,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 9, 2015, https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/urban-farmers-working-vacant-kinloch-property-get-surprise-when-lands-rightful-owner-shows-up/article_a69bbb45-2cc1-542d-b7c0-51e6205c8e2c.html.

25 Paul Hampel, “Urban Farmers.”

26 As described poignantly in this architecture studio prompt: Cory Henry, “The Paradox of Hunger,” Harvard Graduate School of Design, 2022, https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/course/the-paradox-of-hunger-rural-mississippi-fall-2022/. Accessed February, 2022.

27 David Jones, “Supersized Sugary Drinks Target the Poor,” Community Service Society, July 26, 2012, https://www.cssny.org/news/entry/supersized-sugary-drinks-target-the-poor.

28 Claire Nowak, “The Real Way McDonald’s Makes Their Money—It’s Not Their Food,” Reader’s Digest, July 19, 2021, https://www.rd.com/article/real-way-mcdonalds-makes-money/. My casting of the McDonalds as important site of community connection expands on earlier discussion of the Ferguson QuikTrip gas station in: Heidi Aronson Kolk and Michael Allen, “Can We Preserve the Ferguson QuikTrip?” NextSTL, September 2, 2014, https://amcs.wustl.edu/news/can-we-preserve-quiktrip.

29 Alexander Kaufman and Hunter Stuart, “How One McDonald’s Became The Epicenter Of The Ferguson Conflict,” Huffington Post, August 19, 2014, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ferguson-mcdonalds_n_5689428.

30 The references to the power of place as layers of territorial history are drawn from Delores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Boston: MIT Press, 1997).