Municipal policy attempting to remediate low food access neighborhoods tends to focus on improving demand conditions in these neighborhoods. We investigate the role of two fundamental measures of food demand (population and income) and the biases inherent in these data in creating low food access neighborhoods. Population and income data were collected for a 1-mile radius surrounding seventy-one grocery desert sites in Southern U.S. metro areas, those results were compared to thirty-eight low-income, non-desert sites in the same metros. No significant difference between the demand characteristics of desert and non-desert sites was found in our sample—suggesting that policy may need to be refocused on issues other than demand metrics. In addition, we detected significant demand underestimation bias from one source commonly used by grocery stores. Given these findings we believe that parcel level characteristics such as visibility, accessibility, and buildability may play a larger role in remediating low food access than addressing demand conditions.

试图修复食品供应不足的社区的市政政策往往侧重于改善这些社区的需求条件。我们调查了食物需求的两个基本指标（人口和收入）的作用以及这些数据在创建低食物获取社区方面固有的偏见。收集了美国南部都市地区 71 个杂货店沙漠站点周围 1 英里半径的人口和收入数据，并将这些结果与同一都市中的 38 个低收入、非沙漠站点进行了比较。在我们的样本中没有发现沙漠和非沙漠场地的需求特征之间存在显着差异——这表明政策可能需要重新关注需求指标以外的问题。此外，我们从杂货店常用的一个来源中发现了严重的需求低估偏差。