Food Desert Locator
http://www.ers.usda.gov/data/fooddesert/

Part of the First Lady’s Let’s Move! initiative, the proposed Healthy Food Financing Initiative (HFFI) will expand the availability of nutritious food to food deserts—low-income communities without ready access to healthy and affordable food—by developing and equipping grocery stores, small retailers, corner stores, and farmers markets with fresh and healthy food. The HFFI is a partnership between the Treasury Department, Health and Human Services, and the Agriculture Department (USDA). An Interagency Working Group from the three departments, along with staff from the Economic Research Service (ERS/USDA), developed a definition of food deserts to be used in determining eligibility for HFFI funds. The objectives of the Food Desert Locator are: a) to present a spatial overview of where food-desert census tracts are located; b) to provide selected population characteristics of food-desert census tracts; and c) to offer data on food-desert census tracts that can be downloaded for community planning or research purposes. The HFFI working group defines a food desert as a low-income census tract where a substantial number or share of residents has low access to a supermarket or large grocery store: 1) To qualify as a “low-income community,” a census tract must have either: 1) a poverty rate of 20 percent or higher, OR 2) a median family income at or below 80 percent of the area’s median family income; and 2) To qualify as a “low-access community,” at least 500 people and/or at least 33 percent of the census tract’s population must reside more than one mile from a supermarket or large grocery store (for rural census tracts, the distance is more than 10 miles). This has been added to the tools section of Research Resources Subject Tracer™ Information Blog.