I had the pleasure of working with the Detroit Food Policy Council (DFPC) to produce their annual report and pull together some key metrics on the City’s food system. You can read the full report here.

This map in particular is crucial to understanding spatial access to Detroit grocery and the data and policy lag from Federal agencies. They were unable to account for the opening of the second Meijer on Grand River and the reopening of Parkway Foods on E. Jefferson.

More from the report:

The USDA’s 2015 “food desert” designated areas are based on national retail databases that have been shown to undercount Detroit assets.

Looking at areas of green and orange that overlap in the map to the left highlights the mismatch in federal food policy in Detroit’s city context.

These maps only look to assessments within Detroit’s city limits. Many border areas of Detroit are served by grocers in nearby cities.