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You only have to drive through the Gainsboro and Lincoln Terrace neighborhoods of Northwest Roanoke, or through Southeast along the Jamison Avenue corridor, to know they are places devoid of supermarkets.

A couple of months ago, the U.S. Department of Agriculture released data that confirmed what residents of those neighborhoods have long known. They live in what researchers have come to call “food deserts” – areas with concentrations of low income families, in many cases with no personal transportation, and no nearby supermarket. Food deserts aren’t exclusively urban, but frequently are.

And those who live in them, researchers confirm, suffer from high rates of diet-related disease – obesity and type 2 diabetes, for example — because of the ways they must shop.

The USDA identified nearly 200 census tracts in Virginia as food deserts. Just 29 of those are found to have 100 percent of residents with low access to a supermarket. And four of those 29 are in Roanoke, including the Gainsboro/Lincoln Terrace and Southeast.

Moreover, according to a Roanoke Times analysis of the data, the city of Roanoke is second only to Petersburg among Virginia’s urban areas

According to it’s documentation, the USDA first identified census tracts that it labeled low-income. Then, researchers determined what portion of the total population of each of those tracts lived more than a mile from a full-service supermarket in urban areas, and more than 10 miles in rural areas.

Some have questioned the USDA’s methodology, including Mari Gallagher, a Chicago-based researcher who first popularized the term “food desert” in 2006. In our story in The Roanoke Times, Gallagher points out that there is no perfect distance to a grocery store. You could live a quarter mile from a store, but if you have to cross a freeway on foot to get there, for many it may as well be 10 miles away.

Her sense is that the USDA data may underestimate the problem.

At a minimum, it does seem to confirm what is plain to the eye.  Grocery chains long ago began pulling out of the urban core in favor of places that accommodate their new model: megastores surrounded by seas of asphalt along main arterial roads with easy access.

What’s left behind is a hodge-podge of neighborhood food sources that charge higher prices, from fast food to old-fashioned corner groceries to convenience stores to chain pharmacies like CVS and Walgreens.

That sets up a dynamic for those who live in food deserts, which I described in an interview on pubic radio WVTF/RadioIQ: If you have to pay extra for bus fare and cab fare to grocery shop, your incentive is to shop less frequently, maybe even once a month.  If you shop once a month, your incentive is to by stuff that is filling and will keep, often high-preservative stuff in cans or dehydrated noodles. You have little incentive to buy stuff like fresh produce and dairy products that won’t last in a month’s quantity. The result is a diet which, paradoxically, produces obesity in people who have less to eat.

That’s the same stuff that’s hard to find in those neighborhood stores.

So, what’s the solution? Getting mad at chain grocery stores? Asking them to open stores in places that don’t make sense for them business-wise, when they already operate on thin profit margins?

Some cities are trying to convince those neighborhood stores to sell healthier choices, like fresh produce. What about community gardens and community farmers’ markets?

Are there transportation solutions? In Roanoke, there is bus service to supermarkets from its most challenged neighborhoods. But you can’t bring two weeks worth of groceries on a bus. Is there another option?

There are independent grocers who open stores in food deserts, and chains like Save-a-lot that specialize in smaller stores in impoverished areas. Some say they are proving that small stores on and old-fashioned scale can still be profitable in the inner city.

Does government have a role? What is it? Incentives and zoning to promote development of stores in needy areas? What else?

What do you think the solution is?

We focused on Roanoke, Franklin County, the New River Valley and the Martinsville/Henry County areas in our newspaper coverage published today, but reporter Duncan Adams also gathered some reactions from other suburban/rural communities that grew in the past decade, just not as fast as they had in the 1990s:

Bedford County

The 2000 census found that Bedford County’s population grew a whopping 32 percent during the years following the 1990 count. The data released Thursday show that the county’s growth has slowed but the increase still registers a robust 13.8 percent.

In an e-mail, Bedford County Administrator Kathleen Guzi’s response to the data was brief. “Numbers are not surprising and are about where we thought they would be,” she said. “Yes, the recession played a key role in the slower growth rate.”

Botetourt County

Population in Botetourt grew 8.7 percent between the census of 2000 and the 2010 count, when the total reached 33,148.

County Administrator Jerry Burgess said Botetourt’s 1998 comprehensive plan projected a 2010 population of 34,000.

“I’d say that the reduced homebuilding of the last two years and generally smaller family size account for the difference,” Burgess said. “The number is not surprising.”

He said the Great Recession has affected population growth in Botetourt.

“There are no new subdivisions in the pipeline or that have been approved during the last few years, a definite change,” Burgess said.

He said the population growth “has been more spread out than in the previous two decades,” which witnessed growth in the Blue Ridge area during the 1980s and in Cloverdale during the 1990s.

“The greater Daleville/Greenfield area has seen the most growth since then,” Burgess said.

The slower increase in population has allowed Botetourt “to catch up with infrastructure needs,” he said.

Virginia has 332 state-run liquor stores flung into all corners of the state. Some do big business. Others, not so much. The busiest ones, you’d guess — mostly correctly — are in the most populated places: Virginia Beach, Richmond, Fairfax County.

But, at No. 7 on the list, the store on South Main Street, Blacksburg, Va, less than a mile from the Virginia Tech campus. The two other liquor stores in Montgomery County combined didn’t do the volume of that store. That’s just one example of the noteworthy juxtaposition of a number of those top-selling stores (as measured by gallons sold) with college campuses.

We put the top 50 stores on a map to see how many lined up near Virginia’s 42 four-year residential colleges.

Check out the University of Virginia. Just down Emmett Street are two of the top 50 stores.

And it’s not just the big universities. Longwood University, in Farmville, has about 4,000 students — and one of the top 50 stores just a little ways down Main Street.

Along with the top liquor stores, we also mapped licensed alcohol sellers busted for selling to under-age buyers. State ABC agents routinely conduct under-cover inspections of places licensed to sell beer and wine by sending in operatives who are actually 17-19 years old to buy alcohol. The inspections are essentially random, but where they’re conducted can be influenced by the availability of under-age operatives and they can also be prompted by citizen complaints.

Between July 2008 and June 2009, licensees failed inspections 483 times. In the same period, nearly 4,200 inspections produced no violations, so the mass of sellers are following the law.

With nearly 500 of those violations on our map, naturally they’re all over the state, but you can see on the map that quite a few of the red Xs marking them are, again, near college campuses.

Come Dec. 1, Virginia will join a growing number of states banning smoking in restaurants (except for private clubs, outdoor seating, and designated smoking areas in a separate room from the main dining area, in Virginia’s case).

My colleague, Jenny Kincaid Boone, has a story on what the change means in the Sunday, Sept. 27, Roanoke Times.

As part of that, we decided to look at which places had the farthest to go to become smoke-free. I obtained from the Virginia Department of Health, the agency that inspects restaurants, data including the smoking status of more than 16,000 full-service and fast-service restaurants in Virginia.

And it turns out that statewide, some 70 percent of those restaurants are already non-smoking. And the Roanoke and New River Valleys are just about there, too, with about 68 percent of restaurants smoke-free.

(One caveat about the data: the smoking status is based on what was recorded during a health department inspection, and some of the dates on these status are months old, and might have changed.)

We took the data and stuck it on a map to see just where the stragglers are. Now, 16,000 restaurants is a lot of points to map, so we rolled the data up into percentages for each city and county, and that’s what you’ll find on the map. It’s a cool interactive, and you can make all sorts of changes to it, including changing which data is shown on the map. There are instructions at the bottom of the page.

It struck me that, really, there aren’t any dramatic and obvious patterns to where non-smoking restaurants are. I thought maybe rural areas would have fewer non-smoking places. But look at Craig County. It has five restaurants, and all are smoke-free. Look at the Shenendoah Valley. The whole spine of it has a high percentage of non-smoking restaurants. My best guess on that is that it’s influenced by Interstate 81, and the number of fast-food restaurants near interchanges. Fast food restaurants are routinely smoke-free these days.

Switch the map over to the percentage of restaurants which allow smoking in all areas. No great pattern there, either. I thought that the high percentages might correspond with heavy tobacco producing communities, but except for Pittsylvania County, that theory isn’t really born out.

But maybe you’ll see things that we missed. As always, let us know.

The Virginia Alcohol Beverage Control Board’s annual report came out recently, and the latest data on the top selling liquors was featured in The Roanoke Times today in a story by your favorite data delivery editor.

And, like last year, I’ve offered the data as interactive graphics in the DataSphere.

Here’s the top of the story:

Thirsty, Virginia?

Apparently so. Virginia ABC stores sold about 9.2 million gallons of liquor in fiscal year 2008.

That’s more than a gallon and a half for every person of legal drinking age in the state. That’s 795,412,236 shots. That’s enough to fill 14 Olympic-size swimming pools and still have enough left over to keep a football team schnockered for a good chunk of the off-season.

Statewide, vodka is the big seller, with 28 percent of all liquor sales by volume. But around the southwestern part of the state, it’s dark spirits, not clear ones, that rule.

“You’re going to skew a lot more brown goods than in an urban area,” said John Knutson, director of marketing for Jim Beam bourbon maker Beam Global Spirits & Wine.

Liquor sales representative Michelle Brooks sells Jack Daniel’s whiskey products to every one of 130 clients she has in the Roanoke region. Her colleagues elsewhere in the state say “it’s like water in these parts. Everybody’s got it.” (more)

Hey gang, it’s been a while, but I finally updated our Roanoke real estate sales search. It now has sales through mid-December for all 45,000 or so parcels in the city of Roanoke. This is the same data that’s behind Roanoke’s GIS, just re-tooled for a simpler search so you can find sales history on a particular home or parcel, or on a street or in a certain neighborhood.

Search by buyer, seller, address, neighborhood, a date range or a price range.

And your results are matched. Happy searching.

Since the already shaky economy began to rattle to pieces in October, about 1,000 people in Southwest Virginia have been laid off by 16 companies across 32 locations.  See the shape of where jobs are disappearing on our layoffs map. Get the number of jobs lost, the number left, and links to stories in The Roanoke Times about the layoffs.

The bulk of the jobs lost are in manufacturing, but some are in technology. Most are rank-and-file workers, but some are management. Word of other layoffs, sent by readers who don’t see them on the map, is still coming in. I added two layoffs to the data today that were confirmed after hearing from readers about them.

I put the map together after watching — with horror, like most people — the rash of layoffs being reported in The Roanoke Times. I thought it would be useful to track the job losses, and see what it looks like when you plot them on a map. What areas are getting hit the hardest?

WVTF, our local public radio station, ran a story on the map Friday. Rick Mattioni did the interview and put together the story. He was also gracious enough to send over the audio. Here it is if you want to give a listen:

And I lived to write about it.

Candidly, I wasn’t sure for quite a while if I could go back after seeing the pictures and reading the reports from the health department after a well-documented mouse-infestation and general disrepair caused the city to shut the building down.

But yesterday, with a fair amount of forethought, I made the trek down Campbell Avenue and had one of my faves, a bowl of pho soup from the Hong Kong restaurant.

Why? you might wonder. Partly I missed some of my favorite food. Partly, just habit.

And then there’s this: I found I didn’t care as much for the other options out there in downtown when I didn’t have the market building. Don’t get me wrong, there are more great restaurants serving lunch within walking distance of my building than I could name here from memory. But I rarely have the time or the do-re-mi to eat at those places.

In the Market Building, there’s a great range of stuff, moderately priced, no waiters to tip, and I can get in and out fast.

I wonder how many others — including those who want to change the Market Building one way or another — came to this same realization, that the place as it is serves an important role for downtown diners, and is the only place serving it.

I went back to a place that, while seemingly less-crowded, was more pleasant than before. It’s cleaner and the dinged-up old furniture is gone. I looked around and saw an anchor and reporter from Roanoke’s two tv stations, a federal judge, and a high-powered local banking muckety-muck.

I ate my pho sitting in chair with a back on it — a nice improvement from the old benches — and never once thought about the kitchen where it was cooked, or what might be in it that isn’t in the recipe.

With all that’s gone on, the hard-scrubbing the whole place got, the damage to reputations and everyone’s heightened awareness of cleanliness, there’s probably no eating establishment in Roanoke that’s cleaner right now.

Plus, I find I’m really back where I started with all this, eating food I like, and because I want to keep eating it, preferring my ignorance of how that food got to my plate.

Well, the evidence is in. It’s not a pretty picture.

The health department released reports from the latest inspections of the Roanoke City Market Building’s 10 restaurants on Tuesday. What emerges is not the image of a small rodent issue. Mouse “excreta” – poop to us regular folks – was found in essentially every corner and every stall of the building.

The building was shut down and all its vendors’ licenses suspended after a health department inspection Friday. Read the reports yourselves here. Links are on the left side of the page about half-way down.

Some had worse problems than others. Read more »

The Roanoke City Market Building and its 10 restaurants are about an 8-minute walk from my office. I eat there twice a week at least. I’ve never looked at the Virgina Department of Health’s inspection reports for those restaurants, even though I have link to the search in the DataSphere.

I guess I preferred my ignorance of how clean the building is.

But over the weekend the building was shut down because of a rodent problem found by health inspectors. Details are thin at this point on exactly what inspectors found. Actual rodents? Droppings? What kind of rodent? And where?! One shudders at the possbilities.

Now, curious, I’ve been looking at past inspection reports online, and thought it worthwhile to remind you, gentle reader, that you can do the same on the VDH website. There’s a search box on the left side. I searched on the word “market” to get a list that included all of the restaurants in the market building. You can click down to details of the violations cited in each inspection. Some are as recent as last month. Others go back to December.

Rather than summarize the results for 10 different vendors, I’ll let you see what’s there for yourself. You’ll find violations for pretty much all of them at some point.

Some of the violations will be called “critical.” But I encourage you to read what the actual violations are, and to check out their definitions. You hear the word “critical,” and you think of Band Aids in sandwiches and roaches in salads. But more often those critical violations have to do with proper storage of food with regard to temperature, or things like food workers drinking from soda cups with no lids in the food preparation area.

To be sure, there are disgusting things documented among the critical violations, but not every critical violation is something so horrifying as to make you nauseous.

That said, you might also consider not only quality, but quantity. What if a restaurant has not a couple of critical violations, but, say, ten? (And, in fact, one restaurant — Zorba’s, where the Jamaica Joe’s special is one of my favorites — did have 10 during an August inspection.)

And then there’s rodents. Yeah, I think that meets my definition of critical.

None of this covers the latest inspection which prompted the building’s closure. Again, what was found — and where?

In the urge to assess blame, those things matter.

With ten vendors in one space, can you single out those at fault, or are they all partly responsible? And don’t forget the building’s owner and management — the city of Roanoke. What is the the city’s responsibility in all of this? Can the city totally shift blame to the tenants, when the building is under its oversight? Or vice versa?

Before deciding that, let’s see what this latest report says. Keep watching roanoke.com for that.