www.roanoke.com

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?

Well, that’s perhaps a misnomer. But there is one section of Roanoke that is nearly a quarter Latin.

As two recent stories in The Roanoke Times documented, Roanoke’s Hispanic population grew from from 1,405 in 2000 to 5,345 in 2010.

That’s a 280 percent increase.

But where was that growth?

The most dramatic growth in Hispanic population occurred in the section north of 10th Street between I-581 and Williamson Road. That census tract was home to 159 Hispanics in 2000, who made up 3.34 percent of its population. In 2010, nearly 1,100 Hispanics lived in that area.

It’s now nearly 23 percent Hispanic.

Adjacent areas to the south, to Orange Avenue, and east to Plantation Road, also grew significantly, from being home to  149 Hispanics 10 years ago, to more than 800. Those areas are about 9 percent Hispanic.
Another high concentration of Hispanics lies south of Orange Avenue, running east from I-581 to the city limit, an area that is nearly 12 percent Hispanic.

– Matt Chittum

Today’s newspaper lead story by Laurence Hammack and Matt Chittum explores Roanoke’s surprising, and Hispanic-fueled growth from 2000-2010 to 97,032 population.

The 2.2 percent increase — the first good census news for the city since 1980 — was driven in large part by an influx of nearly 4,000 Hispanic residents.

That’s about twice the city’s net gain of 2,121 residents since the last government head count in 2000.

More blacks and Asians are also calling Roanoke home. However, the white population declined enough over the past decade to offset those gains, while making the urban center of Southwest Virginia even more culturally diverse.

Elsewhere in the region, most cities and counties posted gains that ranged from 0.2 percent in Salem to 18.8 percent in Franklin County.

This is for you, holiday lights nuts.

You know who you are: the guy who can reel off exactly how many tens of thousands of twinkling bulbs there are engulfing his house; the couple with the electric meter about to vibrate off the wall every December, the fanatic with his own FM transmitter that broadcasts music perfectly synched to his 11 blinking Santas.

Once again, The Roanoke Times and roanoke.com are offering our readers a searchable map and database of holiday lights displays in the Roanoke and New River Valleys — and beyond. And we need you folks with the lighting displays to populate it for us.

You can submit information about your display online using a convenient Web form. We’re looking for your address, so people can find your lights, the times you have the lights on, and a description of what visitors will see.

You can even upload a photo of your display if you have one, though that’s not a requirement. And if you want to shoot a photo, we have some tips on how to do it from one of our own staff photographers, Eric Brady.

Only a display’s owner can submit info, but if it’s your neighbor instead of you with all the lights, by all means, encourage them to submit their information.

Once you click submit, your information is instantly available to our visitors at roanoke.com in a searchable database.

So put down that extension cord and get clickin’.

According to Money Magazine’s August issue, the 89th best small town in America is Cave Spring, Va.

Huh? Cave Spring is a small town? It’s a fine place to live, I’m sure, but a small town?

Money does this every year. They compile a list of America’s best places to live, and this year they chose to focus on small towns. They define that as “U.S. towns that have a population of 8,500 to 50,000.”

Cave Spring, according to the U.S. Census, had about 25,000 people in 2007.

But is a town only about a population count? That word, for me, conjures the image of a mini-municipality, with a Main Street and demi-downtown, rows of houses, and probably in rural surroundings. That’s not Cave Spring, but that’s only one subjective definition. Towns also typically have governments and borders. Cave Spring has neither.

In other words, it lacks the kind of independence and apart-from-the-worldness that a phrase like “small town” connotes.

The Census Bureau has a word for a spot like Cave Spring. They call it a “place.”

All this goes to the meaning of Money’s findings. Per the magazine, they looked at the economy, jobs, crime, affordability of homes, how many things there are to do, schools, health care, diversity, weather and more.

It’s certainly valid to look at something where there’s a definitive answer for Cave Spring alone, like population and diversity. Money discarded towns that were 95 percent white or more. Cave Spring, according to the census, is 92 percent white.

You can certainly determine a crime rate or housing affordability for an area like Cave Spring, too.

But how do you evaluate the economy in a suburb like Cave Spring where few people work where they live? Does it make sense to talk about the economy of Cave Spring alone, when it’s really just part of the larger economy of the Roanoke Valley?

And how do you evaluate the quality of health care in Cave Spring, when really you’re talking about the quality of health care in the whole valley?

Even the schools are part of a larger system that serves both suburbs and rural enclaves.

“Lots to do” there? Well, it’s hard to tell how many people in Cave Spring limit their search for things to do to their neighborhood, but my guess is they get off their own street at least once in a while for shopping, entertainment, the arts, dining.

Oh, and you have to have a major airport within 60 miles. Congratulations, Roanoke Regional Airport. Money thinks you’re major.

Not to take anything away from Cave Spring or the folks who live there. Not at all. If a major magazine says part of the Roanoke Valley is one of the best places to live in the whole country, that’s something to be proud of.

But when you really look at the criteria, part of what makes Cave Spring a great place in Money’s assessment, is the bigger place that Cave Spring is part of.

That’s something the whole Roanoke Valley can brag on.

Just a heads up that the data for the Roanoke Valley crime map just got it’s weekly update. It now has offenses through April 20. Same goes for the separate database and map of Salem felonies.

To refresh your memory, the valley-wide data includes only serious violent and property crimes. The Salem-only data includes all felonies.

A repeated thanks to the Roanoke, Roanoke County and Salem police departments for providing this data consistently and reliably each week so we can offer it to you on roanoke.com.

Finally, don’t forget you can now follow the latest updates and additions to the DataSphere and the DataBlog on Twitter.

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.

You only have to poke around the DataSphere for a little while to figure out I love Google maps, and partly because I’m so dependent on them to give you, gentle reader, a geographic look at data sometimes.

Google just seems to jam out great new stuff all the time — Google Earth, Google Chat, and now the Google video chat.

The latest Google thing we in the Roanoke area ought to be checking out is it’s “Street View” images of Roanoke. Just go to maps.google.com, search on an address, and if there’s a street view there, you’ll see a link to it in the info bubble that pops up. Click that, and you’ll be transported to that spot photographically. From there you can pivot in any direction, 360 degrees. You can look straight up, or straight down. Notice the arrows on the roadway. Click one to move forward.

I played with this a while yesterday. Naturally, I plugged in my home address to see if my house was there. It was, in an image shot, apparently, on a spring day, while we were all gone. Neither of our cars was in the driveway. Well, that’s cool, right?

I mean, this is not only a visual document of pretty much every square inch of roadway around here, but it’s also a snapshot of the second in time when a particular image was taken. You can see cars on the road, pedestrians on the sidewalk, notice the weather.

On the other hand, it was kind of creepy. It made me feel vulnerable somehow, made my private life feel a little more out there than I really wanted it to be.

Now, as a journalist, I defend the right of any documentarian to take photos in a public place like a city street. This newspaper depends on that.

On the other hand, this feels invasive somehow. I’m all about more information, but do we really need this much information?  Granted, there’s not a minute level of visual information in these photographs. You can see people in some places, and you can zoom in, but not to a great extent before the image begins to deteriorate. I’ve been trying, and I’ve yet to be able to really see a face or make out a license plate. But is there still potential for abuse here? Could people use this to gather information about you for nefarious purposes?

No doubt, the technology is amazing, but this puts me in mind of something I ask myself about putting data on the web. I’m all about data, and the more the better, but all journalists, including data editors, ought to be frequently asking themselves,  “Just because I can, does that mean I should?”

What do you all think? Go play with this new toy, and if you think about it, report back here.

Oh, yeah, crime has marched on the last few weeks. And that’s not a joke about the last two weeks on the campaign trail.

The Roanoke Valley has been racking up it’s share of crime during that time, though you couldn’t tell it from our Roanoke Vallley and Salem crime maps. I haven’t been able to update them thanks mainly to being swallowed up by election coverage here lately.

But I put in an update today, so the data now runs through last Monday, Nov. 3.