Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2016, Agricultural, Environmental and Developmental Economics

Most Americans do not consume the recommended amount of fruits and vegetables (FV). We explore the potential for the retail food environment to push Americans toward healthier dietary habits. First, we conduct a hedonic analysis to test whether households value access to farmers markets, a key source of fresh produce. The results suggest that a one-mile increase in distance to the closest farmers market yields a 1.1% decline in housing prices, with the effect being strongest for low-cost housing and areas with poor-quality food environments. Second, we use a county-level, modified retail food environment index to examine the impact of the food environment on the quantity of FV purchases of U.S. households. We find that merely increasing the proportion of food retailers that are healthy does not impact FV purchases overall but may help to reduce racial disparities in FV purchases among black households in urban counties and Hispanic households in rural counties. Lastly, we identify three homogenous groups of the U.S. population based on FV purchasing patterns using a latent class model that accounts for both the quantity and frequency of purchases. We test whether residing in a food desert affects FV purchasing patterns using multinomial logistic regression and find that residing in a food desert does not independently affect FV purchasing patterns, though the effects of income and race do depend on whether a household resides in a food desert. Overall, the findings provide insight to policy makers aiming to improve dietary outcomes by modifying the food environment.

Committee: Elena Irwin (Advisor); Joyce Chen (Committee Member); Brian Roe (Committee Member) Subjects: Agricultural Economics; Economics

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2014, Geography

Access to healthful food is imperative to physical well-being and quality of life. Failing to acquire and consume healthful food on a regular basis would lead to a series of adverse health outcomes. To date, the majority of the literature concerns food access as a geographical problem and discusses the disparity in access from a pure spatial perspective. A previously overlooked facet in this interpretation is time. Time shapes food access from two distinct perspectives: place, such as opening hours of grocery stores, and people, such as time available for an individual to shop groceries. In this study, these two perspectives of time constraints are examined for a better understanding of how food procurement is impinged by both space and time barriers in the study area of Columbus, OH. From a place-based perspective, the study employs the 3D visualization method in a GIS (Geographic Information System) to illustrate the variation of food access across space and over time of a day. This space-time access to food is then formulated in a rigorous mathematical manner to differentiate access disparity by mode of travel and across geographic units with different levels of SES. From a people-based perspective, the study firstly examines people's preference for food from their self-reported messages on social media, or specifically Twitter. With the spatiotemporally tagged Titter messages, individuals' exposure to food environment in real time is examined to identify the correlation with their food preference. A second aspect of people-based measure pertains to travel behaviors in food procurement trips. This study investigates and formulates people's daily travel trajectories in acquiring food, given their constraint of travel time, travel mode, and trip purposes. By including time as a determinant of food access from these two distinct perspectives, the study provides insights into how geographical methods can facilitate our understanding of the food access inequality acro (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Morton O'Kelly (Advisor); Ningchuan Xiao (Committee Member); Jill Clark (Committee Member); Desheng Liu (Committee Member) Subjects: Food Science; Geographic Information Science; Geography

MA, University of Cincinnati, 2012, Arts and Sciences: Geography

Adequate consumption of healthy and high-quality foods is essential for the prevention and management of public health conditions, such as obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and some cancers. Access to healthy foods is a critical public-health concern, and, consequently, there is an increasing interest in mapping the food environment and identifying food deserts, or those areas where people have significantly limited access to retail sources of healthy, nutritious and affordable food because of spatial distance and/or socioeconomic deprivation. In May 2011, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) launched a food desert locator that pinpoints the location of food deserts across the country by census tract units. A clear definition of “food deserts”, together with the criteria and methods applied for the identification were announced, based on the national-level analysis conducted by the Economic Research Service (ERS-USDA). A census tract that qualifies as both a “low-income community” and as a “low-access community” is defined as a food desert. However, the arbitrary criteria for identifying the “low-access community” have been criticized for their inability to account for both the detailed spatial variations of population demand and food supply within the aggregated geographic units (census tracts), and the interactions between them. To address these criticism and evaluate the integrity of the USDA's definition of food deserts, this study applies a GIS-based two-step floating catchment area (2SFCA) method to measure spatial accessibility to food sources, employing a higher resolution grid-based population data, and identifying what comprises a “low-access community” based on the weighted mean of accessibility scores at the census tract level. Combining this with the same criteria for the “low-income community”, the modified spatial interaction based approach is utilized to assess the local food environment in Hamilton County, Ohio. Differences between the (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Lin Liu PhD (Committee Chair); Changjoo Kim PhD (Committee Member); Kevin Raleigh PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Geography

MCP, University of Cincinnati, 2009, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning : Community Planning

As an integral part of a new and improved food economy, urban agriculture has the potential to bring productive uses back to urban lands while creating jobs, social capital, green space, and, most importantly, fresh produce. The City Council of Cincinnati recently introduced a program to allow urban agriculture on city-owned vacant parcels. This thesis attempts to identify Cincinnati's food deserts – areas without transit or pedestrian access to full-service grocery stores – in order to determine whether the new program has the potential to improve food access in the areas that need it the most. Once the food deserts are identified using GIS software, these are overlaid on maps of the proposed vacant parcels to determine if there is any overlap. Finally, an inventory of additional vacant parcels in the city is examined to determine the possibility of these being used to ameliorate the food access issues.

Committee: Frank Russell (Committee Chair); Xinhao Wang PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Agriculture; Health; Urban Planning

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2013, Public Policy and Management

The premise of this research rests on the idea that space has a significant influence on diet and health disparities and on the utilization of food assistance policies targeted towards minimizing those disparities. In the specific context of food deserts, this research integrates a multi-disciplinary conceptual approach and a multi-method approach to explore the relationships and interactions between people and spaces. The multi-disciplinary approach links spatial conceptual perspectives from rural sociology and health geography to provide the theoretical framework for the relevance of integrating space in policy analysis and diet and health disparities research. The multi-method approach provides a more comprehensive examination of diet and health disparities by allowing for the statistical testing of outcomes and the simulated exploration of policy interventions. This dissertation consists of a set of three interconnected essays. The first essay presents conceptual perspectives from a health geography and rural sociology lens and relates the perspectives to aggregate level participation rates for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Incorporating spatial econometric methods to measure county-level SNAP participation, the results from the analysis show variation in SNAP participation based on county characteristics. Understanding this geographic variation provides an opportunity to formulate SNAP policies and procedures which explicitly respond to and incorporate spatial differences across counties. The second essay expands the analysis of geographic variation by examining health outcomes at the individual-level in relationship to individual-level and county characteristics. This essay measures the consequences of lack of access to food by exploring the adverse health outcomes that can be attributed to the food environment. A hierarchical linear model is implemented and the results show that counties with a higher quality food environment (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Anand Desai (Advisor); Rob Greenbaum (Committee Member); Linda Lobao (Committee Member) Subjects: Public Administration; Public Policy

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2021, Management

Purpose: This paper aims to increase knowledge on the effectiveness of nonprofit organizations (NPOs), provide managers with tools to assess their service delivery of programs, and promote effectiveness at the organizational level to help identify and espouse best practices. There is a gap in the literature with regard to the factors that influence the effectiveness of NPOs in addressing the social aspects of well-being for individuals residing in food deserts. Design/methodology/approach: This mixed-methods research design examined the daily lives of food desert residents and how they achieve well-being. The research gained insight into the factors that influence a resident's well-being and whether or not residents found NPOs effective in helping them with the social aspects of well-being. The research examined how food desert residents achieved well-being before and during the COVID-19 pandemic and if residents found NPOs effective in helping them with the social aspects of their well-being before and during COVID-19. Findings: Findings affirm that the social lives of food desert residents have a strong positive effect on their well-being. Findings also show that NPOs were effective in helping food desert residents with their malnutrition. This research indicates that food desert residents found NPOs effective during the COVID-19 pandemic helping with the social aspects of their well-being and with access to healthy food. In sum, these three studies offer knowledge into how NPOs can increase their effectiveness in helping food desert residents' social aspects of their well-being. Originality/value: Research is limited on what constitutes NPO effectiveness and the approaches to measure it. This research extends NPO Effectiveness Theory and Complexity Theory to understand complicated food environments.

Committee: Chris Laszlo PhD (Committee Chair); David Aron MD (Committee Member); Eileen Doherty-Sil PhD (Committee Member); Yunmei Wang PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Environmental Health; Management; Organization Theory; Organizational Behavior; Sustainability; Systems Design

MARCH, University of Cincinnati, 2019, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning: Architecture

When thinking about housing in the United States it is easy to picture the typical suburban home. One that holds a man and his wife, 2.5 kids, and the dog named Spot. This image of the “ideal” family is outdated and quickly changing around the world, and the image of the perfect family home is changing with it. Architecture is responsible for over 60% of energy consumption in the United States, and housing makes up the second largest portion of that energy consumption. It is time for architects to question the standard single-family home and see if there is a better way to design dwelling spaces. I am researching the future of housing in terms of resiliency, sustainability, and connectivity. This thesis project will look at what it would take for a community of people to work together in order to generate a community of homes that are connected, sustainable, and can grow their own food. The goal of this project is to design a cohousing community that works together to have virtually no environmental impact while being part of a community. By working together, they become more resilient, more sustainable, and less isolated. This will require a group of people (families) to live in a co-housing community that incorporates an urban farm in their own back yard. Some of the community members will work the land, while others work full-time jobs off site. The co-housing units will depend on one another for energy, clean water, food, and social engagement. Cohousing is not a new idea, and communities like this have existed for many years. Case studies for both cohousing and urban farms show promise that this new housing model is attainable in the United States. This typology: cohousing and urban farming is new way of designing homes that could lead towards more prosperous communities.

Committee: Michael McInturf M.Arch. (Committee Chair); Terry Boling (Committee Member) Subjects: Architecture

MARCH, University of Cincinnati, 2008, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning : Architecture (Master of)

In economics, scarcity is defined as a condition where human wants and needs exceed production capabilities. Residents of impoverished urban areas suffer from the localized scarcity of healthy food options. Mass migration to the suburbs has caused the food retailers to follow their target market. In their wake, they leave behind low-income families and elderly residents with few grocery stores and an abundance of fast food restaurants. Some of these residents have been living in these situations for several decades, resulting in communities having unusually high rates of diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and most markedly, obesity. Often these residents, when given access to healthy food lack the health education to support a healthy diet. The localized scarcity of healthy food in impoverished urban areas has made a detrimental impact on the health and future of the residents in these areas. It has required residents to turn to other, less healthy, food options for several decades. The scarcity of healthy food in these areas is just one of the problems that have plagued urban life through the decades, but it is one that can be solved through health and agricultural education brought to these areas. Statistical surveys of existing urban food deserts in Chicago and Philadelphia will be studied to determine the make-up, causes, and potential implications of food deserts. Different food distribution systems and changing retail patterns will be studied to determine where the system breaks down in the urban centers and what can be changed. The outcome of these studies will be an urban food production and education center in an inner-city area. The center will serve as a location for residents to learn about healthy eating habits, take pride in the agriculture they produce, and have access to healthy food options.

Committee: Jay Chatterjee (Committee Chair); Elizabeth Riorden (Committee Co-Chair) Subjects: Architecture