Mary Kaltenberg

EconHack 2025 — Food Insecurity

5th Annual Pace University EconHack. Co-hosted with Economics Society and Women in Economics.

Special thanks to Kristina Nadia Krichmaryov, Kristina Nikolaeva Nasteva, Greer Jones, Ava Lafferty, Fatima Abba, Zahabiyah Baboojee, and Lailaa Holmes. Special thanks to the judges: Dr. Kier Hanratty, Dr. Greg Colman, and Prof. Lilay Hagos.

2025 Winners

1st Place — First place presentation

2nd Place — More Food, Yum: presentation

3rd Place — presentation

Other team presentations:

The Problem: Food Insecurity

An estimated 14.6% (2022) of New Yorkers and 24.2% of children are food insecure. With rising living costs, New Yorkers are struggling to get access to affordable and healthy food, as evident by the fact that food pantry use among employed New Yorkers more than doubled from 5% in 2019 to 11% in 2023. The Robin Hood Poverty Tracker found 31% of NYC adults and 44% of families with children experienced food hardship. Communities are at risk for deepening food insecurity and diet-related health issues such as obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.

The current mayoral race has spotlighted a city-wide concern to combat food insecurity by eliminating food deserts and ensuring equitable access to healthy and affordable food across all five boroughs. Food deserts are areas where at least one-third of the population is more than half a mile from the nearest supermarket. Across New York City, more than twenty neighborhoods are categorized as food deserts. These communities often rely on bodegas and dollar stores for groceries, leading to food swamps filled with far more unhealthy food options than nutritious options.

As a result, food deserts in high-poverty neighborhoods like the South Bronx correlate directly with elevated rates of diet-related diseases, including obesity, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. These health disparities generate significant economic consequences: increased healthcare expenditures, reduced workforce productivity, and diminished educational outcomes. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle where food insecurity and poor health deepen poverty, further straining public resources.

Propose a novel policy intervention that addresses at least three policy objectives and utilize relevant data sources with graphs, tables, or regressions.

Policy Objectives

Context

Food insecurity correlates strongly with neighborhood poverty rates. The poverty borough rates are: Bronx 27.6%, Brooklyn 19.8%, Manhattan 17.2%, Queens 13.1%, and Staten Island 11.2%. Food insecurity rates reflect similar statistics, ranging between 5% and 32% in New York City.

With growing financial pressure, the concern of access to food is only getting worse. Food prices in the NYC metro grew 8.8% from 2021 to 2022 — the highest growth in over 40 years — with the food price index remaining 25% above 2019 levels. The rising pressure for all people is evident in that food pantry use among employed New Yorkers more than doubled from 5% in 2019 to 11% in 2023.

The current policies are not sufficient to address New York City’s growing food insecurity. First, federal programs are estimated the same across the country — a family of four is counted as living in poverty if their income is below $31,200 regardless of where they live. Since NYC has higher living costs, this substantially underserves the population. The percentage of pantry users receiving SNAP dropped from 66% pre-pandemic to 44% in 2023, indicating many working families earn too much for benefits but insufficient wages for food security. This “benefit cliff” particularly affects the growing population of working poor who cannot access traditional safety net programs. Another issue in NYC is that despite 20% of NYC residents (1.8 million) having SNAP as of 2024, the city processed only 40% of SNAP applications on time in fiscal year 2023, versus the USDA’s 95% acceptable rate. This suggests that SNAP benefits are likely underutilized for many New Yorkers who need them.

Food Deserts

One particular issue in NYC is access to quality food — often called food deserts. Food deserts in New York City affect over one million residents who lack adequate access to affordable, nutritious food within walking distance of their homes. These areas, concentrated in low-income neighborhoods across the Bronx, Central Brooklyn, Southeast Queens, and portions of Manhattan including East and Central Harlem, are characterized by an abundance of corner stores and fast-food outlets but few full-service supermarkets. In NYC’s dense environment, even shorter distances become barriers for elderly residents, families without cars, and those with mobility challenges. The spatial distribution of food deserts closely mirrors patterns of racial and economic segregation — predominantly affecting Black and Hispanic communities where poverty rates exceed 30%. These neighborhoods typically have one supermarket per 10,000 residents compared to one per 3,000 in wealthier areas, forcing residents to travel significant distances, often requiring multiple transit connections, to access fresh produce and healthy food options. The resulting reliance on convenience stores, where prices are 10–40% higher and fresh options limited, creates a “grocery gap” that costs low-income families an estimated $2,000–3,000 more annually for food while receiving inferior nutritional quality, perpetuating cycles of diet-related disease and economic hardship.

Zoning Barriers to Grocery Store Development

One particular barrier to building new grocery stores is NYC’s zoning regulations. Many high-need areas are zoned for manufacturing or lack the commercial overlay districts necessary for large-scale food retail, requiring lengthy and expensive rezoning processes that deter grocery operators. The city’s complex zoning code often restricts store size, parking requirements, and loading dock configurations that modern supermarkets require, making it particularly difficult to develop stores larger than 10,000 square feet in dense residential areas. While NYC introduced the Food Retail Expansion to Support Health (FRESH) program in 2009, offering zoning incentives and tax benefits for grocery stores in underserved areas, uptake has been limited — the program’s strict requirements for store size (minimum 6,000 square feet) and product mix exclude smaller format stores that might be more feasible in space-constrained neighborhoods. Additionally, the as-of-right development permitted in manufacturing zones often yields higher returns for warehouse and distribution facilities than for food retail, creating an economic disincentive for property owners to lease to supermarket operators. These zoning constraints disproportionately impact low-income communities in outer boroughs where industrial zoning predominates, perpetuating the geographic mismatch between food retail locations and populations experiencing the highest rates of food insecurity.

Farmers Market Initiatives in Food Desert Communities

New York City has implemented several policies to bring farmers markets into food desert neighborhoods and make them accessible to low-income residents. The Health Bucks program, launched by the Department of Health, provides $2 coupons distributed at community organizations that can be spent at participating farmers markets, with SNAP users receiving an additional $2 Health Buck for every $5 spent in SNAP benefits — effectively providing a 40% discount on fresh produce. The GrowNYC Greenmarket program operates over 50 locations citywide, with targeted expansion into underserved areas including markets in NYCHA housing developments and partnerships with community health centers in high-need neighborhoods. The city’s Green Carts initiative licenses mobile produce vendors to operate specifically in designated food desert areas, creating over 500 mobile access points that accept SNAP and offer culturally appropriate produce at competitive prices. Additionally, the Farmers Market Nutrition Program provides vouchers to WIC participants and low-income seniors specifically for use at farmers markets, distributing approximately $20–25 per recipient annually. Despite these efforts, significant barriers remain: many markets operate limited hours that conflict with working families’ schedules, seasonal availability restricts year-round access, and even with incentives, prices often exceed those at discount supermarkets. The geographic distribution also remains uneven — while Manhattan hosts numerous markets, food deserts in Eastern Queens and the North Bronx have minimal coverage, limiting the overall impact of these programs on citywide food access disparities.

NYC Children

Food insecurity profoundly affects NYC’s children, with 44% of families with children experiencing food hardship in 2023, creating consequences for physical development, cognitive function, and academic achievement. Children in food-insecure households face higher rates of developmental delays, iron deficiency anemia, and chronic conditions like asthma, while experiencing more frequent hospitalizations and mental health challenges including anxiety and depression. The school meal system serves as a critical safety net — NYC’s universal free lunch program reaches over 900,000 students daily — yet significant gaps emerge during weekends, holidays, and summer breaks when these programs are unavailable. The “weekend hunger gap” particularly affects the estimated 250,000 NYC children who depend on school meals as their primary nutrition source, leading many schools to implement backpack programs that send non-perishable food home on Fridays. These disruptions in consistent food access correlate with lower standardized test scores, higher absenteeism rates, and increased behavioral problems, creating educational disadvantages that perpetuate intergenerational poverty cycles and limit long-term economic mobility.

Data