Redlining's Legacy: Housing, Crime, Schools Drive Food Access Gaps More Than Income

A study of nearly 9,600 neighborhoods across 38 states has found something counterintuitive about food access in America's historically redlined communities: the problem is not what you might expect. It is not that people cannot reach a grocery store, and it is not primarily that they lack money. The real barriers are crumbling housing, high crime, and failing schools—the accumulated weight of decades of systemic neglect.

Redlining, the now-illegal practice of denying loans and insurance to neighborhoods with large Black and Latino populations, officially ended in 1968. But its effects never did. Researchers at Texas A&M University and the State University of New York at Buffalo analyzed how seven overlapping factors—built environment, criminal justice, education, housing, social cohesion, transportation, and wealth—shape whether people in these neighborhoods can access healthy food. What emerged was a clear hierarchy of harm. Crime rates, housing quality, and school conditions mattered far more than distance to a store or household income.

Sebastian Linde, the health policy expert who led the work, put it plainly: simply adding grocery stores will not solve the problem. The issue runs deeper. These neighborhoods, locked in decline by a century of discriminatory lending, tend to have plenty of fast-food restaurants but few or no supermarkets. Residents face a landscape designed by neglect. When poverty is layered on top—and it almost always is—the consequences compound. Limited money forces people toward cheap, calorie-dense food. Food scarcity creates stress. Stress leads to overeating when food becomes available. The cycle perpetuates itself.

The stakes are substantial. Adult obesity in the United States has surged from 30.5 percent to 41.9 percent over the past two decades. Severe obesity has nearly doubled, now affecting roughly 22 million adults. These numbers are not evenly distributed. They cluster in the neighborhoods that redlining created and abandoned.

Linde and his colleagues examined four data sources: census records, historical redlining maps, a database comparing grocery stores to fast-food outlets, and a specialized tool designed to trace the hidden pathways connecting past credit discrimination to present-day health outcomes. The statistical analysis was clear. All the historically redlined neighborhoods studied showed signs of decline. Some had no access to healthy food at all. Others had ample options. But the determining factors were not transportation convenience or income levels—they were the visible and invisible infrastructure of neighborhood collapse.

The implications for policy are significant. If the problem were simply access, the solution would be simple: build more grocery stores. But Linde argues that approach misses the point. Improving food security requires coordinated action across housing, city planning, public health, and community organizations. He points to community gardens as one example—a tool that addresses not just food but also social cohesion, the sense of trust and mutual support that redlining systematically destroyed.

Linde acknowledges the study's limitations. It cannot prove cause and effect, only correlation. It applies only to cities and suburbs where redlining occurred. It did not measure every dimension of food access, such as affordability or nutritional quality. Yet he remains convinced that neighborhood-level data can guide better policy. The path forward, he suggests, lies in helping residents of these communities connect with one another, build trust, and take control of their own health outcomes. That kind of grassroots agency, he believes, could begin to reverse trends that have calcified over generations.