ABSTRACT
Longitudinal analysis of supermarkets over time is essential to understanding the dynamics of foodscape environments for healthy living. Supermarkets for 2007, 2011, and 2014 for the City of Chicago were curated and further validated. The average distance to all supermarkets along the street network was constructed for each resident-populated census tract. These analytic results were generated with GIS software and stored as spatially enabled data files, facilitating further research and analysis. The data presented in this article are related to the research article entitled "Urban foodscape trends: Disparities in healthy food access in Chicago, 2007-2014" (Kolak et al., 2018).
ABSTRACT
We investigated changes in supermarket access in Chicago between 2007 and 2014, spanning The Great Recession, which we hypothesized worsened local food inequity. We mapped the average street network distance to the nearest supermarket across census tracts in 2007, 2011, and 2014, and identified spatial clusters of persistently low, high or changing access over time. Although the total number of supermarkets increased city-wide, extremely low food access areas in segregated, low income regions did not benefit. Among black and socioeconomically disadvantaged residents of Chicago, access to healthy food is persistently poor and worsened in some areas following recent economic shocks.
