Across the region, there's a big disparity in how long people live. Nearly 90 years, on average, in Indian Hill and Mason, but barely over 60 in Arlington Heights and Adams County. That's nearly 30 years of life, love, children, grandchildren, and memories that are lost. Why? Community health experts are looking at the larger forces that shape health and wellness. The places where we grow up, live, work, and age shape our lives and our opportunities to thrive. This is the eighth story in the series, Health Justice in Action, a year-long deep dive into the factors that people and neighborhoods need for long, healthful lives.You can read other stories in the series here.
The end of summer brings a bounty of locally grown peaches, blueberries, tomatoes, corn – a harvest of healthy food. But not all neighborhoods share in the goodness.
The handful of urban Cincinnati neighborhoods that lie along the west side of the Mill Creek comprise one of the largest food deserts in the region. For those who live in South Cumminsville for example, the nearest grocery store is more than two miles away. If you don’t have a car – and 40% of the neighborhood’s residents don’t – that’s too far to walk. Taking the bus means a 10- or 15-minute walk to the stop, a half-hour ride one way to the store, a grocery-laden walk to the stop for the ride home, another half hour back to the neighborhood and the 10-minute walk with groceries to home. If you’re old, disabled, caring for children, it’s a bit too much.
Valeria Glenn is a 70-year-old who lives in South Cumminsville. “We just don't have no grocery stores,” she says. She occasionally shops at the Kroger store in St. Bernard, partly because of its pharmacy, but “It can be a hassle, especially if I want stuff at the last minute. Oh my gosh, I got to travel around the world.”
Val and some of her neighbors in the communities around South Cumminsville are starting to take matters into their hands. In a once-vacant lot next to her home, she’s growing tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, collard greens, herbs and flowers.
Now, a few years into her home-garden project, she’s sharing the bounty. “Last year, I had so many tomatoes, so many cucumbers. I was like, I cannot eat this many. So I started passing them around to the neighborhood. And they were like, what? Real cucumbers?”
Real cucumbers and other fresh produce are a scarce commodity in South Cumminsville and the surrounding neighborhoods along what is becoming known as the
Beekman Street Corridor – North Fairmount, South Fairmount, English Woods and Millvale. None of them have a full-service grocery. To get to the nearest Kroger, you need to travel to St. Bernard, Downtown or Westwood. There are several independent convenience stores, but their stock-in-trade is highly processed foods, snacks, alcohol, and cigarettes.
These five city neighborhoods that share the north-south thoroughfare of Beekman Street as a backbone qualify as
food deserts, neighborhoods with limited access to affordable, healthy food.
Without a full-service grocery nearby, they don’t have reliable access to fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, low-fat dairy and the other essentials for a healthy diet. Relying instead on fast food or quick food from the corner stores, residents in these neighborhoods
may be more likely to suffer from diabetes, heart disease, and obesity.
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Joe SimonA vacant lot next to Val Glenn's South Cumminsville home became a vegetable and flower garden.Cincinnati’s hometown mega-grocer, Kroger, is unlikely to ever build in these neighborhoods, preferring instead suburbs like West Chester Township, where it’s building
a massive 123,000 square foot marketplace store. The newest entry into the grocery scene, Lakeland, Fla.-based Publix, is opening stores in the Northern Kentucky suburbs.
That leaves residents of these neighborhoods, some of the poorest in Cincinnati, to their own devices. With the support of
Working in Neighborhoods and other not-for-profit organizations, some residents are beginning a concerted effort to grow their own foods and bring healthy fare to their communities.
“Some of our neighbors struggle with access to fresh, healthy foods,” says Sister Barbara Busch, executive director of Working in Neighborhoods (WIN). “The Beekman corridor does not have a regular outlet for fresh foods people can prepare at home.”
That’s a problem that calls for creativity. Val Glenn bought the empty lot next to her home for $1 from the Port Authority, which had acquired the abandoned property through its land bank program. With help from college students, the lot was cleared. WIN helped with soil, starter kits and planting expertise. Where once a vacant, dilapidated house stood, vegetables and flowers now grow.
In South Fairmount, in a small lot next to Bethel No. 2 Apostolic Pentecostal Church, Theresa Thomas oversees a new permaculture garden, using compost and other sustainable gardening techniques to raise vegetables and flowers. “It’s been a dream of mine for a long time,” says the 65-year-old.
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Joe SimonTheresa Thomas oversees the community garden at her South Fairmount church.The garden is part food supply, part training ground and part classroom. "Some kids seem to think produce grows in the grocery store,” she says. “So we have cookouts in the garden with them so we can get them used to the vegetables and stuff that they're dealing with and know where they come from.” As she spoke, a church deacon brought three young children to the garden to water the plants.
Theresa hates seeing food go to waste and helped start a program called “Pantry Finds,” where she builds recipes from staples that are on hand in neighborhood food pantries. “I teach people to take what you have and combine it together and create a new recipe,” she says. Her beet and blueberry compote, served over chicken, is said to be delectable.
WIN staffers assist communities from the ground up, creating change by empowering residents to take charge of their neighborhoods. “Working In Neighborhoods builds neighborhood leadership by supporting the desires of the community,” says Sister Barbara. Its efforts are not so much charity as capacity-building, enabling neighborhoods that have suffered from disinvestment to lift themselves.
“It empowers us,” says Theresa.
In North Fairmount, Renu Bakhshi owns New York Grocery, a convenience store where in November 2023, she gave away homemade food and hot coffee after a water main break in the neighborhood caused water to infiltrate the gas lines, shutting off the heat to dozens of homes. The community effort felt good, and WIN connected her with a free-produce supplier, so the corner store became a hub for free produce on Wednesdays.
“We started something on a small scale and eventually it took a big turn,” she says. “Everybody was excited, and everybody wanted to continue it.”
New York Grocery became the home of the neighborhood seed library. Organized in filing cabinets are seeds for squash, watermelon, kale, cucumbers, corn, rhubarb, melon, Brussels sprouts, and lots more, including flowers.
“We want to encourage every household in the community to do their own,” she says.
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Joe SimonRenu Bakhshi's corner store in North Fairmount is home to the neighborhood seed library.The seeds are free, and so is advice from Renu, who grew up in a home where food was grown outdoors.
“So I feel like, why not share the wisdom, it should benefit it a lot of people,” she says.
Eboni Sheftall lives across the street from the store and experimented with seeds from her neighbor.
“I didn't know what to do, so I just kept coming over,” she says. When her potted pepper plant started sprouting, she was hooked. Now WIN staffer Heather Sayre has supplied her with bigger containers for planting, plus good-quality soil mixed with vermiculite to grow more veggies with.
Eboni’s budding garden will provide good food for her family and build self-reliance. “This is a blessing, and I feel like people need to take heed to it, because not only is healthier and better for you, but you never know what's going to happen,” she says.
Things do happen, and in March the Trump Administration
abruptly stopped funding a program that had supplied neighborhoods in the Beekman corridor and around the country with fresh food. The Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program provided about $1 billion to local food banks to buy food from local farms and distribute it in their communities. Cincinnati’s Freestore Foodbank lost about $750,000 in funding
, says Kurt Reiber, its president and CEO. That cutback is rippling through the region, as Freestore supplies 600 food pantries in the tri-state.
The cuts meant the supply of food to another neighborhood project, Beekman Community Market, dried up. Launched as a pilot project in 2023, the farmers’ market was well received and it continued through 2024 and into 2025. In the three months of the pilot, nearly 500 customers received free, locally-grown produce, and 18 community vendors sold crafts, baked goods and other items. It was not only a source of fresh food but a community gathering place, where neighbors could see each other and budding entrepreneurs could make sales. But the August market was cancelled, partly because of heat, but also because of a lack of food.
The spending bill passed by Congress in July will also bring change. The impact of the so-called Big Beautiful Bill will be big, but it won’t be beautiful. The bill’s
pending cuts to SNAP and Medicaid benefits (they’re scheduled to take effect in 2027) “will impact daily operations at Freestore Foodbank,” Reiber says.
Claire Babineaux-Fontenot, CEO of Feeding America, a nationwide network of food banks that includes Freestore Foodbank, said the bill's passage “is a significant setback for people and communities facing barriers to accessing the food and resources they need to thrive.”
Communities like those along the Beekman corridor. But the people who live there have faced barriers all their lives. Their efforts to bring healthy food to their communities is a small one and pales compared to the scale of federal and state cutbacks. But their work builds civic muscle, strengthens neighborhood connections, and expands the power to determine their futures.
This series, Health Justice in Action, is made possible with support from Interact for Health. To learn more about Interact for Health's commitment to working with communities to advance health justice, please visit here.