Fast-Food Zoning
By STEVEN KURUTZ
South Los Angeles has roughly 900 restaurants, nearly half of which are fast-food establishments. Perhaps not unrelated: the adult obesity rate in South L.A. is 30 percent, which is 10 percent higher than the rest of Los Angeles County, and diabetes levels there are also a county high, according to a 2007 study by the L.A. County Department of Public Health.
In an effort to provide residents with more nutritious choices, the L.A. City Council adopted landmark legislation in July mandating a one-year moratorium on the building of new fast-food eateries in a 32-square-mile area. (Fast-food zoning exists in other cities but is based on aesthetic considerations, not health factors.) According to Jan Perry, a council member who co-sponsored the bill and whose district is part of South L.A., the idea is to freeze fast-food development so that sit-down restaurants and quality-food markets will build in the area. “When every corner is taken up with fast food,” Perry says, “there’s no room for anyone else.”
If the measure sounds desperate, that’s because it is. Perry has had difficulty attracting high-quality grocers to the low-income area, and a Ralph’s supermarket that served the community for decades closed two years ago. Carole White, a lifelong resident who leads a local neighborhood council, notes that “even a banquet room is nonexistent.”
Public‐health advocates favor the ban, provided it ushers in real reform. “Is the city working with stores to have an increase of healthy things available?” asks Mark Vallianatos, policy director of the Urban and Environmental Policy Institute at Occidental College. “Or are they just eliminating the bad choices?”
Federal Reserve Vote, The
By CHRISTOPHER HAYES
It’s easy to suppose that an election campaign’s mechanics — gaffes, organizing, fund-raising, ads — determine its outcome. But political scientists typically believe that what matters most is the economy: when the growth rate is good during an election year, the incumbent party is re-elected, and when it’s not, they’re booted out. This year’s results certainly fit that pattern.
But there’s more to the story than that. In his book “Unequal Democracy,” the Princeton political scientist Larry M. Bartels found that between 1948 and 2005, real income rose more under Democratic presidents than under Republicans. And yet Republicans benefited from a curious election-year pattern. For Republican presidents, the economy was typically sluggish during the second and third years of their terms, but strong in the fourth years, while for Democrats it was the opposite. Bartels speculates that this is a result of the parties’ priorities. When Republicans take office, they worry about inflation first and slow the economy in order to deal with it; the economy then bounces back toward the latter part of the term. Democrats typically prioritize the creation of jobs, and then, worried about inflation toward the end of the term, slam on the brakes.
Of course, inflation and economic growth aren’t set by presidents alone; they’re also shaped by other actors, including the Federal Reserve, which controls the money supply. The conventional view is that the Fed generally does not respond to political pressures. But in a working paper published last year, the economists James K. Galbraith, Olivier Giovannoni and Ann J. Russo analyzed Fed interest-rate decisions in the years between 1969 and 2006 and found a pattern in which “periods of sustained, abnormally low interest rates all begin during Republican administrations. All end following an election involving a Republican incumbent or his immediate successor.” This, the authors suggest, points to “the presence of a serious partisan bias, at the heart of the Federal Reserve’s policy-making process.”