Food Deserts

Food deserts are a weakness in a city infrastructure’s ability to provide poorer residents with access to healthy food options. A lack of access to nutritious food options multiplies the barriers to health and wellbeing that individuals who live in multidimensional poverty face daily. For many living in food deserts, gas stations or convenience stores are the closest options for obtaining sustenance. For individuals already experiencing multidimensional poverty, living in a food desert can lead to malnutrition, obesity, or decreased educational and economic achievement.

Peer City Perspective

Louisville currently ranks 10th among its peers in households living in a food desert with 3.56% of households living in a food desert. A household is considered in a food desert if the household is in a low-income census tract, does not have a vehicle, and is farther than a half mile away from a supermarket.

Louisville ranks among the middle tier on this metric according to a natural breaks algorithm. Cities in green are those that outperform their peers, cities in yellow represent the middle cluster, and those in red are a group that lags behind its peers on this indicator.

Continue Exploring with Related Data

Food Insecurity

Food Environment Index

Multidimensional Poverty

Population in High Wage Occupations

Print Page

Natural Breaks Algorithm

For each indicator, Greater Louisville Project assigns cities into one of three groups (high-performing, middle-of-the-pack, and low-performing) based on how they compare to other cities. The assignment is based on how cities naturally cluster on that indicator. Sometimes, the differences between cities are very small, and the difference between a city ranked 5th and 6th could simply be a matter of the sampling error that arises from using survey data. Thus, rather than always make a division that declares the top 5 to be the top tier, we use a natural breaks algorithm to look for a cluster of cities that is outperforming the rest, a cluster that is about average, and a cluster that is lagging. This clustering gives us a better indication of where Louisville is thriving and where Louisville has room to learn from cities that are doing better.

Z-Scores

Z-scores (or standardization) is a way to combine data with different units of measurement into a single index. The z-score is a measure of how far away a city (or census tract, etc.) is from the average city. In order to be comparable across different units of measurement, the z-score is the distance from the mean measured in standard deviations (e.g. if Louisville has a z-score of 1 it means Louisville is 1 standard deviation above the mean of its peer cities).

Data from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's County Health Rankings use z-scores and all z-scores are relative to the mean of Louisville's peer cities. (On the County Health Rankings site z-scores are relative to all the counties in each state - thus z-scores reported by GLP will be different, because we are using a different reference group). The Greater Louisville Project also uses z-scores in our multidimensional poverty index, which compares each census tract to the mean of all census tracts in Louisville.