Council Vote for Good Health May Weaken Business at Groceries in Poor Neighborhoods
By RAY RIVERA - New York Times- February 28, 2008

They are fixtures of New York City life: sidewalk peddlers and the grocers who try to shoo them away from their storefronts. The City Council grudgingly added to that time-honored clash on Wednesday, approving a bill that will increase the number of fruit and vegetable carts in the city’s poor neighborhoods.
The Council voted 37 to 9 in favor of the measure, despite intense lobbying from independent supermarkets, bodegas and greengrocers who said the bill would steal their customers without increasing demand for fresh produce.
The final tally belied the division among council members over the bill and came only after a series of compromises, including a sharp reduction in the number of sidewalk vendors that would be licensed and a slight cut to the number of neighborhoods in which they may operate.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn proposed the measure in December in an effort to increase the supply of fruits and vegetables in neighborhoods with high rates of obesity, diabetes and other health problems.
In was the latest in a series of initiatives by the administration — including a 2006 ban on trans fats and an ongoing fight to make chain restaurants post calorie counts on their menus — to make New York City healthier.
This latest bill focuses on neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant, Bushwick and Harlem, where a paucity of supermarkets makes many residents rely on bodegas for food purchases. A 2006 health department survey found that only 20 to 40 percent of bodegas in those neighborhoods carried apples, oranges and bananas and that only 2 to 6 percent stocked leafy green vegetables.
“Our bill targets neighborhoods where existing businesses have been unable to fully bridge the health gap and sell fruits and vegetables,” Ms. Quinn said, adding that the bill would help save lives.
The measure had the backing of antihunger and child-advocacy groups, and when it was introduced it appeared to have strong support on the Council. But support began to waver amid heavy lobbying from the retail food industry, leading to a flurry of late changes and compromises.
Among them, the administration reduced the number of carts from 1,500 to 1,000 and dropped 9 of the 43 police precincts in which the vendors would be allowed to operate. One of those precincts dropped, the 50th in the Bronx, which includes Riverdale and Kingsbridge, where there are already numerous neighborhood grocers that offer fresh produce, was crucial to winning the swing vote of Councilman Oliver Koppell in moving the bill out of committee.
Mr. Koppell, one of the bill’s original sponsors, expressed the concerns of many council members when they learned that neighborhoods were targeted based on consumption rather than supply. Put simply, neighborhoods where more than 15 percent of residents said they had not eaten fruits or vegetables in the last 24 hours made the list, regardless of how many area stores offered fresh produce.
“I think it’s important to have these green carts where supply is really not available, and it’s hard to say whether these consumption numbers are the best way of gauging this or not,” Mr. Koppell said.
Sung Soo Kim, president of the Korean-American Small Business Service Center of New York, said he applauded the spirit of the measure. “It’s the execution that’s wrong,” he said. He and other industry advocates said the city should identify neighborhoods where fresh fruits and vegetables were not available before deciding where to place vendors.
Mr. Kim added that the bill was unfair to Korean-American vendors who since the 1970s have become part of the fabric of the city, selling fruits and vegetables in low-income and high-crime neighborhoods where other businesses often hesitate to go. Korean-Americans make up about 1,200 of the city’s nearly 2,300 greengrocers, Mr. Kim said.
Councilman John C. Liu of Queens, who led a protest by 100 Korean-American business owners at City Hall on Monday, urged that the concept be tested with one or two vendors to see if demand increased.
“Where do we have an example where increasing supply actually increases demand?” Mr. Liu said. “That is backwards voodoo economics. It doesn’t work.”
Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the city’s health commissioner, said that consumption data was used because it was reliable and available. Compiling reliable data on retailers that sell a proper variety of quality fruits and vegetables, at affordable prices, was much more complex, he said.
The consumption data also corresponded to maps showing neighborhoods with the highest rates of obesity and diabetes.
“This is not going to end the obesity epidemic,” Dr. Frieden said, “but it is an important step to increase access to healthy food in the communities that need it most.”