Molly Manning, News Editor
Antonio Hicks stood at the corner of Main and Meadow streets in the Fan neighborhood and pointed up and down the road, where he remembers grocery stores like Community Pride and Safeway once were.
Hicks has lived in Richmond all his life, and now, he said he takes the bus to the Kroger in Carytown, about a 15-minute bus ride or a half-hour walk.
“I grew up around here in the 70s. So this is a little different compared to now,” Hicks said. “And not really nothing new. It’s not enough opportunity to get groceries out here. We’re in decline.”
Hicks said the streets used to be home to Boys and Girls Clubs, grocery stores and fruit trees, but the area’s redevelopment pushed existing businesses and residents out.
“We ain’t never had no problem getting no groceries around here,” Hicks said. “When they got around here, they said it’s impossible these people built like that. Call it the Wall Street. Look at the history they trying to erase and why they try to erase it. You know we made some beautiful stuff right here.”
Historical disinvestment led to food deserts
In post-Civil War Richmond, the Jackson Ward neighborhood became known as “Black Wall Street.” Second Street served as a hub for Black-owned businesses like insurance companies, theaters and banks, according to the National Parks Service.
The neighborhood was “redlined” in the 1930s because of its racial makeup and began to decline. The city bulldozed the neighborhood and displaced its residents in the 1940s for the construction of what is now I-95 in a “slum clearance” project that effectively split the neighborhood into two, isolating what became Gilpin from Jackson Ward, according to the New York Times.
Spatial inequality today is a reflection of redlining — formerly redlined neighborhoods are often disinvested in by cities and targeted to be razed for the construction of interstates, urban renewal projects or gentrification, said Robert Nelson, director of the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond.
UR’s Digital Scholarship Lab created “Mapping Inequality,” an online collection of redlining maps across the United States.
Redlining was a process introduced in the late 1930s after the Great Depression which created “security maps” aimed at determining the security of neighborhoods for lenders of home loans. Redlining limited communities’ access to mortgages and prevented them from building wealth through homeownership.
Food deserts are a form of discrimination, and their maps often reflect historical redlining maps, Nelson said. They are areas lacking access to fresh foods, like fruits and vegetables, and supermarkets.
Researchers like Anika Hines, VCU associate professor of health policy, have worked to link racial disparities and food access in Richmond.
In Richmond, African Americans are about 10% more likely to be food insecure compared to their white counterparts nationwide, according to “Structural Racism and the Food Environment,” Hines’s research with The Valentine.
Hines said racial residential segregation is a disinvestment from an entire community.
“To be poor and white and to be poor and Black are not the same thing because you have these clustering of impoverished folks,” Hines said. “That’s kind of some of the residuals of redlining that we still see today. That has kind of created the housing infrastructure, created the community structures, the neighborhood structures, that link with it all these other factors related to social drivers of health.”
Hines said home values are tied to taxes that fund schools in an area, but also impact business landscapes.
“A chain of grocery stores might have categorizations of stores that might have higher quality foods and lower prices versus lower quality foods at higher prices,” Hines said. “That is also so tied to the communities that they serve.”
Neighborhoods considered “food deserts” are often “food swamps” as well, meaning they lack supermarkets and have high concentrations of fast food restaurants, Hines said.
“You’re expecting someone, instead of going to McDonald’s, to take three buses across town to get to the supermarket, to then lug a couple of bags of groceries onto the bus [and] bring it back to prepare,” Hines said. “It becomes a great burden for an individual to take on the task of trying to navigate these structural barriers that won’t allow them the easiest way to do the right thing.”
The city is working to address food insecurity
Hines referred to The Market at 25th as a response to a food desert in Richmond’s East End, which was historically redlined. She pointed to high eviction rates and a lack of affordable housing as an effect of the city’s steep history of racist housing policies.
“I think it’s on all of us, really, to think about the ways that we are allowing our fellow citizens, our neighbors, to not have access to the things that they need to survive,” Hines said. “Where you live should not have bearings on how long your life will be or what options you have to do something that is as fundamental as eating food.”
Ensuring access to transportation options for traveling to supermarkets, supporting urban farmers and ensuring nutritional lunches in schools are all ways the local government or community can work to address food insecurity, Hines said.
The City of Richmond first included food access in its Master Plan in 2020, featuring the Richmond Food Justice Alliance’s work in driving policy to expand access to healthy food. The Alliance is a resident-led organization created in 2017 to advocate for food access in historically disenfranchised neighborhoods.
Richmond Grows Gardens, one initiative from the Master Plan, sponsors several community gardens throughout the city aimed at supporting sustainability and food access for residents.
VCU’s Ram Pantry also works to combat college food insecurity through collaboration with community and university partners by providing degree-seeking students with things like produce, household goods and hygiene items.
RVA Community Fridges fights food insecurity with mutual aid
About a year after Taylor Scott graduated from VCU in 2020, she had an excess of tomatoes grown on her hydroponic farm stand, Patience. On the phone, a friend said she should bring them to her local community fridge.
When Scott looked up the nearest community fridge, she realized Virginia had none. Her birthday fell on Thanksgiving that year, and she decided her birthday and Thanksgiving gift to the city would be a community fridge.
Since RVA Community Fridges’ first fridge opened in Church Hill, they have created 15 more locations throughout the city. Volunteers head to local farms like Shalom Farms and Shine Farms to pick up produce and stock the fridges almost every day.
“We are by the community and for the community,” Scott said.
Matchbox Mutual Aid is RVA Community Fridges’ kitchen, where they hold weekly “community cook days” and make 200 meals to put in the fridges, Scott said. They also fund home cooks, who can buy supplies or make meals at home to drop off, as well as community shoppers.
“A lot of people, they’re trying to just find a place where they can grab something and go,” Scott said. “And it’s very, very helpful when they’re like, ‘Okay, I know this fridge is 5 minutes away versus going to a grocery store that’s 25 minutes away. I can get this.’”
Aside from the nutritional benefits of fresh meals and produce, Scott said the fridges allow better knowledge of where food is coming from. They also have pantries so community members can access dried goods and products like toiletries or baby items.
Many of them are located in historically redlined areas as well, according to Scott. She points to physical ability, transportation and time restrictions as barriers for many Richmonders in accessing established grocery stores; the community fridges aim to alleviate these barriers in food access.
“It kind of gives you a place to actually get the resources you need, but also feel like you’re not left out.” Scott said. “We’re not pushing people away in any aspect, you know. We try to make them physically accessible as well as timely accessible, which is why we try to keep them open 24/7.”
Scott said they are considering adding community lunch days, to supplement lunch times and days they do not have drops for supplies in the fridges amid current cuts to SNAP benefits.
Richmond Food Not Bombs is another local volunteer-based branch of the global movement working to share free vegan and vegetarian meals as a protest against war and poverty.
The Richmond chapter was created in 1993 and has served over 50,000 meals, according to their website. They also operate out of the Matchbox Mutual Aid kitchen on North Avenue.
MAD RVA encourages the community ‘take what you need, give what you can’
Mutual Aid Distribution RVA runs a free grocery and resource store in Richmond’s Northside. The Meadowbridge Community Market is open every Saturday for community members to access food and resources without having to provide an ID, proof of income or any other personal information.
Alex Feygin, a MAD RVA collective member, said the organization began just before the COVID-19 pandemic and has evolved since then. He said it was a “particularly brutal” winter, and after the cold shelters in the city shut down, an unofficial group formed to help other community members through distributing hot beverages and other supplies.
During the pandemic, they shifted to providing resources from restaurants and businesses shutting down to those in need. After they determined their capacity for distribution, Feygin said the collective rented a warehouse downtown.
The current Meadowbridge Community Market is what they envisioned creating — a location in an area that historically lacks food access is the “ultimate way to do full resource distribution,” Feygin said.
MAD RVA is currently campaigning to buy the space they are leasing from a former collective member for the Meadowbridge Community Market.
There was an internal debate between the north and south sides of the city when determining the market’s location, Feygin said. They decided a location on the Northside was more accessible by transit and also had more properties available for purchase.
At the community market, the team spends part of the week gathering donations from local farms and other organizations; they also purchase bulk goods from Feed More weekly. Feed More is a central Virginia-based nonprofit created in 2005 as a combined effort of Meals on Wheels and the Central Virginia Food Bank.
Feygin said he wants to see the local government reduce the limitations put on resource distribution. During the January water crisis, he said the City of Richmond limited the number of cases of water people could take, police asked some residents for IDs and distribution was only happening in certain locations.
“We were following our model of no limits on distribution, we distributed something like 10,000 bottles, whereas the Richmond PD only distributed something like 800 bottles,” Feygin said. “If you have an abundance of something and it’s something people need, it should be with the people rather than stored and siloed.”
MAD RVA stocks the community market on Fridays, and the free store is open on Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Their policy is to “take what you need and give what you can,” Feygin said.
“Folks need to eat regardless of their immigration status, regardless of their housing status, regardless of their employment,” Feygin said. “We tend to take people at their word and that works pretty well for us.”