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Seattle city government faces a steep budget deficit amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars over the next three years — an estimated 10% of its revenues. Yet the city just allocated $1.7 million to help struggling independent supermarkets avoid going out of business. The money is both more than the stressed budget should apportion and not enough to make a difference in a metropolis of nearly 400 food stores.

The move, by Democratic Socialist Mayor Katie Wilson, was a nod to fiscal reality after her predecessor announced last year that Seattle would explore something far grander — opening government-owned supermarkets — to address growing concern about “food deserts,” that is, neighborhoods without ready access to supermarkets. In his statement on the problem, then-Mayor Bruce Harrell noted that at least 10 Seattle neighborhoods lacked “convenient access” to grocery stores, and he even invoked the possibility of using the government’s eminent domain powers to appropriate private property to create government outlets.

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The proposed solution makes little sense in Seattle. The Emerald City is one of America’s largest retail markets and one of the country’s wealthiest big cities, with a median annual household income of about $120,000 and a poverty rate in the single digits, well below that of most large cities.

Even so, Seattle seems plagued by a lack of food stores, which Wilson, during her campaign, blamed on heartless corporations. Speaking at a rally against the closing of a Kroger supermarket, she said, “They want us to think it’s about crime and poverty and what they like to call regulatory burdens, which means high wages and strong labor standards. But don’t fall for it. It’s about corporate greed.” Wilson’s attack on Kroger reflects a prevailing narrative that emerged some 30 years ago in academic circles, when urbanists began using the phrase “food deserts” to suggest that profit-obsessed corporations were increasingly unwilling to serve lower-income residents.

What’s actually happened is quite different. During periods of urban disorder, retailers struggle to survive in the most crime-plagued neighborhoods and either go out of business or move elsewhere. Food stores began disappearing from whole swaths of urban America amid the rising crime of the 1970s and 1980s. Newark, to take one example, went decades without a single supermarket inside its boundaries as it earned a reputation as one of America’s deadliest cities. Major sections of New York lacked large grocery stores in the 1980s.

But stores returned when cities reprioritized public safety. As crime receded beginning in the 1990s, retail returned and flourished in many New York City neighborhoods. From 1993 to 2000, New York added some 38,000 store jobs, and then another 78,000 in the first decade of the new century. Employment at food stores alone increased by some 27,000 jobs from the early 1990s until just before the COVID economic shutdowns. Other cities similarly saw their retail markets blast off.

In recent years, those gains have begun to reverse in many places as lawlessness surged again. Beginning about a decade ago, states and cities reduced penalties for property crimes like shoplifting, spurring a gradual uptick in crime. Then in the aftermath of the riots over George Floyd’s death in May 2020, officials in many cities cut back on policing. Retailers’ reaction was swift. Since the beginning of 2020 through last year, chain stores closed a shocking 797 locations in New York City, including dozens of supermarkets and drug stores, as shoplifting complaints soared. Whole neighborhoods that once enjoyed easy access to food stores are now considered “deserts.”

Seattle, which never faced the kind of urban decline that plagued so many Midwest and Northeast cities decades ago, has been particularly hard hit by this latest wave of disorder. Rising homelessness enabled by bad public policy, the outbreak of chaos during the so-called 2020 Capitol Hill Occupied Protest that officials allowed to persist for weeks, and increasingly higher taxes and greater regulations have all undermined a thriving city.

While Seattle had been a leader among metro areas in attracting people and businesses from around the country for a decade, the number of residents leaving the city exploded starting with COVID. Businesses, including stores, fled too. The metro area’s net retail jobs have declined since 2019 and still haven’t returned to pre-COVID levels, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Big stores like Kroger have specifically attributed their closings in part to retail theft. They weren’t exaggerating. A 2023 study by the National Retail Federation rated Seattle as the fifth-worst retail market in America for losses from shoplifting.

Despite Mayor Wilson’s previous statements on those store closings, the city acknowledges the crime problem, though in a backhanded way, in the recent announcement touting its aid to independent food stores. Seattle’s subsidies include money to improve store security and payments to cover repairs from break-ins.

Even so, the city itself isn’t doing enough to restore order. Just days before Wilson’s office issued a press release about subsidies for food stores, a coalition of business leaders led by the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce sent a letter to the mayor advising her to “act with urgency, fund the actions needed to improve safety, and provide a clear plan for measuring progress.” The letter came in the wake of a poll in which only 34% of residents expressed confidence that Wilson’s administration had a workable strategy for addressing growing public safety concerns. Among the actions businesses called for were cutting 911 response times and instituting foot patrols in high-crime areas.

If pollsters had asked voters during any recent local election whether they approved of policies that reduced the number of food stores, I doubt many would have been enthusiastic. But that’s what Seattle residents have gotten from their elected officials. The convenient excuse from political leaders — that heartless corporations are to blame — ignores the fact that retail flight tends to follow other bad outcomes like rising crime, dirty streets, and soaring homelessness.

Sooner or later, Seattle voters will probably figure it out.

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This is republished with permission from the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. The original can be found here.

Steven Malanga is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a senior editor of City Journal.

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How Bad Policies Cooked Up Seattle’s Grocery Crisis