Food access and transportation policy in south los angeles: Soliciting the community's needs and wants

Introduction: Residents of South Los Angeles face a series of challenges in accessing healthy foods, including the highest rates of poverty in the county and dependency on a transit system ill equipped for reaching and transporting groceries. Despite efforts to bring grocery stores to the area, the ratio of grocery stores to residents remains 1:22,156, and concerns regarding food quality, the advertising landscape, store conditions, and transportation accessibility remain. Methods: Three community meetings were held with over 90 South Los Angeles community residents in order to present a menu of potential food access policy interventions and to gauge their preferences. To help put community preferences in context, project staff visited a random sample of 90 non-restaurant food retailers in a predefined region of the county in order to collect firsthand data on factors related to healthy food access. Results: Community meetings with residents highlighted and ranked 9 best practices policy interventions with widespread support in the community. The store surveys helped to contextualize these preferences by describing a constellation of barriers to healthy food access in South Los Angeles. These barriers included a disproportionately high number of liquor stores, low availability of fresh produce, frequent marketing of expired foods, prevalent advertising for unhealthy products, limited accessibility through the existing public transportation system, and store conditions including moldy produce, insect infestations, and foul odors. Discussion: By examining the intersection between documented barriers to healthy food access and community supported interventions, several promising venues for policy intervention and further research are revealed.