Maloney on La Marqueta site selection and food desert criteria

I want to turn back to the questions about grocery stores that were alluded to earlier by a few of my colleagues and

reiterate how important addressing the food insecurity in our city is, especially with snap cuts.

And through this budget process, I've seen so many organizations asking for funding to fill in that gap.

I wanted to go back to the site selection, particularly for La Marqueta, where

it sounds like the two criteria, one is whether or not it's a public site that you already have access to, and then if it's a food desert, are those the two primary criteria for deciding the locations?

Another part of it is that it can be...

Built and online before 2029.

So it's sort of like development ready.

So La Marqueta, I believe, has multiple full-service supermarkets that are within one mile from the location.

I have the USDA definition of a food desert is 500 people living more than one mile away from a supermarket.

So just wanted to speak to if there could have been a higher need area to prioritize as the first market.

Yeah, thank you.

And why are we choosing that location?

Yeah, we had to balance a bunch of things.

From the DCP measure of enough grocery stores for a neighborhood, it did rank quite low.

So for the per capita that lives up there, it's a very dense neighborhood.

That it did qualify.

Okay.

And the construction timeline for that site will be 2029?

Yes.