Guest column: In food deserts, don’t just invest in grocery stores, invest in their customers, too.

Efforts to subsidize grocery stores in food deserts can work, but not if they repeat the same mistakes made in other parts of the country.

Everyone deserves access to fresh and affordable food, and two major initiatives are currently in the works across the state trying to make that happen.

The New Orleans Redevelopment Authority will spend $2 million to study and support business investment in the Lower 9th Ward, with the hopes of getting a grocery store to fill the retail void left since Katrina devastated the area twenty years ago.

Similarly, in East Baton Rouge, the Office of Community Development will soon review applications for up to $3 million in funding to support healthy food retail in areas designated by the USDA as “low income” and “low access.”

As a sociologist, I have researched and written about food deserts across the country for the past decade. During that time, I have tracked similar initiatives to recruit grocery stores in both small towns and big cities.

Sadly, many of these stores closed soon after their incentive programs expired.

If the goal is to bring nutritious food retail to the Lower 9th Ward and East Baton Rouge — and keep it in business — a more sustainable solution is warranted.

Don’t just invest in grocery stores, invest in their customers, too.

Otherwise, if we deploy the same business-first strategy that has been tried before in other food deserts, we can expect the same sad results.

Just ask the former shoppers of the Rise Community Market in Cairo, Ill., or the Piggly Wiggly in Spartanburg, S.C. When their stores’ monetary incentive packages expired, they shut their doors. Efforts in bigger cities haven’t fared much better. Millions of dollars in subsidies weren’t enough to keep the lights on at a Whole Foods in Chicago or a Shop’n Save in Pittsburgh, either.

We need a more balanced approach if we want affordable food retail to thrive. Aid for businesses should be matched with funds to improve the economic mobility of their would-be customers.

Grocery stores will stick around once population incomes and density match their business plan. For that to happen, the community needs sustained investment in job training, public transportation and child care. In other words, providing people with the tools they need to get and keep better paying jobs. The economic resiliency of consumers will be the deciding factor if targeted stores stay open in the long term.

It won’t be easy. The grocery industry is extremely competitive, and the biggest players can always beat smaller venues on price. The box-store retail revolution has been in full swing for a half century and the Walmarts of the world can leverage savings from bulk distribution networks well beyond the reach of any local operation.

However, smaller and local grocery storefronts have their own advantages. For one, community stores save people time and transportation costs. But perhaps more importantly, local retail means more to communities than the sum of the products sold on their shelves.

Having spent countless hours at kitchen tables interviewing households’ primary shoppers about how, when and where they shop for food, I can tell you with certainty that people want local grocery. They are even willing to pay a little more for it. But they can only stretch their dollar so far.

In the Lower 9th Ward, data compiled by The Data Center show how incomes have stagnated since Katrina. In East Baton Rouge, a report by HealthyBR found that over 64,000 of its residents experience food insecurity.

The question isn’t whether to help, but how.

For the past 15 years, “healthy food” financing programs across the country have been able to recruit stores to open with enough incentives. The real challenge is to keep them from closing after the subsidies expire.

To do this, we need to reframe the debate around incentivizing retail. Instead of putting all of our eggs in one basket to reduce costs for businesses, we should diversify our community development dollars by also funding programs that foster the economic resiliency of the people who will shop in them.

Invest in customers, not just stores. As shoppers’ spending power increases, they will sustain neighborhood retail on their own terms.