EFFECTS OF THE SHOOTING IN BUFFALO COULD LAST FOR YEARS

 

                         …The Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo after the shooting

 

The closing of the Tops Market in Buffalo makes their “food desert” even worse

 

Route 33 tears through the heart of Buffalo, New York's East Side, a segregated city that the shooting nearly demolished a Black community.

The highway has devastated the economies of Black Buffalo’s commercial centers and lowered value from historic real estate.

The East Side, where the Black population here has been concentrated for more than 70 years, is hemmed in by Main Street to the west and Eggert Road to the east. Route 33 cuts a gnarly gash between the two.

The effect is a community stuck in what locals describe as a cycle of poverty and neglect, with a “food desert”.

Then the East Side Tops Market was attacked.

An 18-year-old gunman opened fire on Tops Friendly Market grocery store on Jefferson Avenue, killing 10 shoppers and employees, all of whom were Black, and injuring three more.

Even before the shooting, Buffalo’s East Side was considered a “food desert,” experts say, it's a term used to describe areas that lack convenient and affordable healthy foods, especially fresh fruits and vegetables. Finding nutritious food is so difficult, residents said, that this shock to local commerce could force thousands of households toward hunger.

‘This is Buffalo, this is America, this is an American problem.’

A week later, police say, another 18-year-old in Uvalde, Tex., shot dead 19 students and two teachers at an elementary school. Over Memorial Day weekend, there were 15 more mass shootings.  This is according to the Gun Violence Archive, marking a bloody start to another American summer.

Buffalo locals say, it is a case study of some of the worst aspects of the country’s gun violence epidemic.  Investigators say the slayings here were motivated by racist hate, and that the alleged gunman purchased his weapon legally in Pennsylvania.

Locals say the attack feels like a symptom of generations of destructive policies in Buffalo.  Now it has worsened another persistent problem: With its main grocery store closed, the East Side is running low on food.

“We like to call this "food apartheid" because the absence of these grocery stores is reflective of the range of policy choices and decisions that public and private sector leaders made,” Henry-Louis Taylor Jr., a professor of urban planning at the University at Buffalo, said.  “The consequences of not having this store open,” said QueeNia, a local activist, “is going to be greater than we can all imagine.  This community has been starved.'

“There is so much need,” said Andrae Kamoche, senior pastor at Rehoboth House of Prayer, a Buffalo church. “And it didn’t just start with the shooting Saturday.”

“There’s a quote,” said Alexander Wright, who runs the African Heritage Food Co-op in Niagara Falls, “that says, ‘The fork will kill you faster than the bullet.’ And here in Buffalo, we’re experiencing both, both the fork and bullet.”

It’s a struggle that reveals larger challenges for urban Black communities across the U.S., still struggling with the impacts of former red-lining that often blocked minorities from homeownership and urban renewal projects that tore up existing neighborhoods and depressed wages and property values.

'With the Tops being gone now, there are no other stores.'

The tough economic conditions led most businesses to locate in more affluent areas where consumers had more spending power, opening the door for others that experts consider “predatory.”

The East Side, is a community of about 130,000 people, and has four major grocery stores, according to a Washington Post analysis, and a couple dozen smaller stores with more limited selection.

But Tops was the only major grocery store within Route 33, and one of the few places on the East Side for residents to fill prescriptions, another service it supplied in a chronically underserved area. Weighted by population, Buffalo’s majority White areas have 22% more pharmacies than its majority Black areas.  This is according to The Post’s analysis of data gathered by market research firm Data Axle.

Note: A major grocery store is a store with at least 10 employees and chain-like, full-service stores, such as Wegmans and Tops.

Other food stores included corner stores, but convenience and variety stores were not included.

Elected officials and civil rights leaders here have pledged to hold accountable, not just alleged shooter Payton Gendron, but also the right-wing figures who inspired his attack, and the gunmakers and distributors and special media platforms they say enabled it.  Just how they do that is questionable at this point.

But some locals see another accomplice, one that has bolstered Buffalo’s racial division: “the Route 33.”

“How did this guy know to come to this grocery store?” said activist David Lewis. “He obviously researched it. He found out we all lived here, and that we’re segregated.”

The “food desert” will continue to starve those locals that don’t have the ability to access those stores that are further from Route 33.

Copyright G. Ater 2022