Like Chicago's unequal wealth distribution, racial segregation, and so many more divisions, food access is also a key issue facing many Chicagoans living in impoverished communities.
As our data engineering class project, our team sought to:
- Build a database from publically available Chicago food consumption data, health data, grocery store data to map out, and another dataset with key community information
- Draw key insights on where food deserts exist
- Make suggestions for how the city might fight root causes of food deserts in Chicago
Tools:
- OpenRefine
- MySQL
- Google Cloud SQL
- Tableau
Key Findings:
- Income is (unsurprisingly) highly correlated with access to healthy food and many other positive factors such as car ownership
- Chicago has large pockets of people living in poverty
- These pockets of poverty very frequently overlap with lack of grocery stores that have fresh food (vegetables and fruit)
- These pockets also have an inordinant number of convenience stores that offer unhealthy food options
- Consequently, people living in these areas both have less access to personal transportation (must rely on public transportation) and also do not have access to healthy food
Suggestions:
- Challenging but root cause issue: Seek ways to increase sustainable income sources for Chicago communities living in poverty
- Seek ways to improve access to healthy groceries for people without their own cars (i.e. it is time consuming and difficult to wait for buses with fresh groceries in Chicago winters and summers)
- Provide tax benefits or incentives for grocery stores to move into communities that don't have fresh produce within short walking distance
- During the summer, leverage existing empty plots for community gardens in areas that can't foster corporate interest for grocery stores
For more information, you can see our presentation as well as our Tableau visualizations in this github repo. Additionally, feel free to reach out.