Living in Muncie’s food desert

MUNCIE – Like ants scrambling between their homes and a picnic lunch, a steady stream of people crosses East McGalliard Road between the Cambridge Square apartment complex and a Dollar General store.

There’s no traffic signal, no stop sign, no crosswalk here. With plastic Dollar General bags in one hand and her great-grandson’s hand in the other, Candy Buss crossed the four-lane street. Buss and her grandson, Brennan Burton, paused for a moment in a bus shelter so Buss could catch her breath.

In a typical day, 10,000 vehicles use this stretch of McGalliard, across the railroad tracks from high-profile commercial properties like Muncie Mall, Outback Steakhouse and Target. Even as cars sped past and other Dollar General shoppers made their way across the street, Buss said it makes her nervous to cross the busy road.

“I’m not too fond of it,” Buss told The Star Press. “But you do what you got to do.”

Buss and thousands of others on Muncie’s northeast side are dealing with the realities of what the U.S. Department of Agriculture calls a food desert.

Shopping at Dollar General and crossing the busy street is the only option for many of the hundreds of residents of Cambridge Square, Elgin Manor, Creekside and other apartment complexes in the area. The complexes cater, to a great extent, to senior citizens and the disabled. When many of them moved into the complexes, a Marsh supermarket and Kmart were nearby, accessible without having to cross a street.

Since those stores closed, hundreds of people — thousands, counting other residents of Muncie’s northeast side — have been living in a food desert. The people living there have no easy access to fresh and nutritious groceries without reliable transportation.

The nearest full-service supermarket is a Marsh on North Walnut Street. It is a round trip of four bus rides, including two transfers, away from Cambridge Square. It is more than a mile and a half away on foot and, as a Star Press reporter discovered, it is a route with stretches that are treacherous for an able-bodied person, no less someone in a wheelchair or using a walker.

Residents, neighborhood leaders and officials all say they want to remedy Muncie’s food desert problem.

In the meantime, people like Buss and her great-grandson still brave the traffic.

‘No place to get fresh produce’

There’s a short, gently arching bridge near Cambridge Square. It’s a footbridge that residents use to cross a ditch to get to a sprawling parking lot for Kmart and Marsh.

It’s likely the bridge is used less since Marsh closed in 2013 and Kmart closed at the end of 2014. There’s not much foot traffic since the stores closed and the only sign of activity — not necessarily recent — is the collection of shopping carts down in the ditch.

Mike Fields is one of the Cambridge Square residents who regularly took the bridge to the stores.

“I went to Marsh and Kmart using my walker,” said Fields, who has ALS. “I bought groceries but I have two cats and need litter and cat food.

“It was also therapy for me. I would do it every day just to get out and keep up my walking,” Fields added. “And I’m a diabetes person too, and I’m supposed to be eating fresh vegetables. There’s no place to get fresh produce now.”

Although he can’t find fresh produce there, Fields goes to Dollar General. “It’s scary for me. You have to cross McGalliard.”

It’s not just scary for Fields, said Joanne Guinn, service coordinator for Cambridge Square.

“We’ve had some residents fall crossing McGalliard,” Guinn said.

Guinn said many of Cambridge Square’s 126 residents are, like residents of other apartments in the area, older or disabled or both.

“Kmart and Marsh gave them a reason to get out of their apartments,” Guinn said.

As she spoke, Guinn sorted boxes of juice, cheese, pasta and canned goods donated by the Second Harvest food bank. She shook her head as she did it.

“Even this is ending next month because of funding,” Guinn said. “The residents here feel really isolated.”

Too much ‘food insecurity’

There’s more to food insecurity — the term used when people don’t have close access to reasonably priced, nutritious food — than just stores that go out of business, bus transfers and safe walking routes.

According to the U.S.D.A., food insecurity and food deserts can happen anywhere, from Muncie’s urban neighborhoods to rural areas where residents are far away from stores.

The USDA’s map of Muncie’s food insecurity area is mostly the city’s northeast quadrant but also includes downtown, where the nearest traditional supermarkets are a couple of miles in any direction. The Downtown Farm Stand has in the years since it opened brought fresh food and produce to downtown residents who want organic products and meat from specially-fed livestock.

For many residents of food-insecure areas, though, the choices are limited to convenience store fare.

It all adds up to a real problem with hunger in Indiana, said Emily Bryant, executive director of Feeding Indiana’s Hungry.

Bryant said Muncie has “a relatively high number of households without vehicles more than a half mile from a supermarket.”

Food insecurity is a growing concern in a state where one in six people are food insecure. Food banks like Second Harvest and others that Bryant represents help, but Feeding Indiana’s Hungry encourages partnerships like food co-ops, community gardens.

“I worked in economic development eons ago,” Bryant said. “The tools that cities have available now would be the standard abatements (for new grocery stores) or really thinking outside the box.”

One Indiana lawmaker found that outside-the-box thinking doesn’t always work in the Indiana Legislature.

No transportation? More expensive

Introduced in the 2015 legislative session, Senate Bill 322 was a food desert grant program. A total of $15 million — an amount that was cut as the bill wound its way through the Legislature — would have been appropriated for grants “to construct a new retail grocery store or renovate, expand or upgrade an existing retail business that increases the availability and quality of fresh produce and other healthy foods” in areas defined by the state as food deserts.

Sen. Randy Head, a Logansport Republican, told The Star Press that his bill was aimed at “fighting poverty in a conservative way.”

“There’s a food trust in Pennsylvania that’s had remarkable success in Philadelphia,” Head said. “When they put in a new grocery store, it sparked economic development. Other businesses wanted to take advantage of the foot traffic. Areas were revitalized and jobs were created. For every dollar spent, it generated $1.50. It gave people healthier food choices so their health care costs would be less.”

Head’s bill did not get a hearing in the appropriations committee. “A lot of people had questions about how the money would be spent, about accountability and what would happen,” he said.

Mayor Dennis Tyler, a Democrat and former legislator, has been studying the work of Feeding Indiana’s Hungry and the U.S.D.A.’s food desert maps.

“It’s hard to get good food if you have no transportation,” Tyler said. “And what you can get is more expensive.”

Tyler, who emphasized that downtown Muncie and the core of the city need more grocery options just as the northeast side does, said he hopes that the city’s food desert areas can be used to its advantage.

“We’re talking with (commercial grocery store) developers,” Tyler said. “What I need to do is show developers what the potential is.”

“I’m not sure what could be done to persuade a grocery store to come in, short of working on partnerships, which is what it sounds like Mayor Tyler is doing,” Bryant said. “I don’t think it’s a case of ‘if you build it, they will come.’ They have to know you’re coming (to their store) before they build it.”

Bryant emphasized that the answer for people in food deserts “doesn’t have to be a big box store.”

Something smaller in scale is just what northeastside residents have been thinking about.

‘For ourselves’

Muncie’s Whitely neighborhood, on the city’s northeastside, acutely felt the closing of the Marsh and Kmart, said Frank Scott, president of the Whitely Community Council.

“We have an average of 65 or 70 people at our meetings and they talk about (a grocery store) all the time,” Scott said. “I think it is something that residents would like to see.”

Scott said residents aren’t dedicated to the idea of a name-brand supermarket like Marsh or Kroger, however.

“We used to have neighborhood grocery stores and they’re saying maybe we should open up a grocery store, another Eavey’s or Wise’s, and see what we could do for ourselves,” Scott said.

Scott said a grocery store was included in the Whitely neighborhood’s strategic plan “even before they knew Marsh would leave.”

In the meantime, residents of Muncie’s food-insecure neighborhoods are making do.

Buss, who moved to Cambridge Square five years ago, said her daughter usually picks her up for grocery shopping. On days when her great-grandson is with her, like this sunny August day, she’d appreciate a nearby option. Buss said she’s heard talk about attracting a grocery store to her part of town.

“It affects a lot of us,” she said. “We keep hoping somebody will put something in here.”

Contact Keith Roysdon at 765-213-5828 and follow him on Facebook and Twitter.