"Journalism deserts" and "mobility deserts" also problems in Houston!

'Food Deserts' a problem in Houston - Ted Oberg, KTRK-13 News

Myrtha Billups has a pantry full of food, but no easy way to get it.

"The grocery stores are terrible around here," Billups said.

She's lived in Houston's Third Ward for more than 50 years and, while it wasn't always this way, it's tough for her to get to a grocery store without a ride from her daughter.

[snip]

"In Houston, food deserts are a big problem. We have more food deserts than other metropolitan cities in the U.S.," Laura Spanjian with the City of Houston Office of Sustainability said.

This is a really disappointing piece coming from Ted Oberg, whose "In Focus" selections usually bring balance and some degree of depth (at least for TV news) to the issues he chooses to cover.

In this piece, what viewers/readers got instead was a long editorial that never truly defined the "problem" of "food deserts," but merely ran with the complaints of a Third Ward resident about the lack of grocery stores in an economically challenged neighborhood, and the assertions of a city bureaucrat whose job depends upon (so far as we can tell) drawing attention to these sorts of "problems" and sucking up taxpayer resources to address them.

Not much balance or curiosity to that reporting -- indeed, it's a veritable Journalism Desert!

Now, squandering taxpayer resources to bribe grocery stores to build in problem neighborhoods doesn't strike us as a legitimate function of municipal government in the first place.

But here's a question Oberg might have addressed if he'd done something more than turn his camera (and Houston's top rated newscast) over to a self-serving city bureaucrat: Why in the world can't residents of poor neighborhoods depend upon public transit to do routine tasks like grocery shopping?

Answer: Because even as METRO is more in debt than ever before, all that red ink is being squandered on light-rail projects of the sort favored by the local world-class Houtopia set at the expense of bus and METROlift services that are more geared towards providing mobility for less affluent residents of our city. In effect, METRO has created Mobility Deserts through its light-rail madness. Too bad no self-serving bureaucrats are out in front of the cameras championing remedies to that problem.

PREVIOUSLY: CM Costello still working on Houston's "food deserts"

Posted by Kevin Whited @ 11/08/11 01:00 PM | Print |

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