The phenomenon was happening before 'wokeness' there are articles from the early 70's talking about the problem - also, intercity america and rural america often have the exact same problems which just manifest in different ways.

Okay, but I'm saying I'm seeing a food desert develop in real time, and the reason today is what I said it was. I don't know about the 70s and 60s in detail. But from what I do know of them, I imagine similar dynamics were at play.

Yeah, and area that was already on the margins slips into poverty for a list of reasons. Grocery stores aren't closing en masse in poor areas. In most cases they've been gone for decades.

Please explain how tolerating petty crimes creates food deserts.

Businesses close... Local operators are at a disadvantage compared to owners in safer areas, thus they close or just don't expand as fast.

Nonsense. City centers were devastated by city planners in the 50/60s and cities in the US were hurt by zoneing regulation.

In fact, if you have good mixed use cities, your city shouldn't even need much policy in the first place.

Safety doesn't come from policy, but civil society. If you are relaying on policy to operate a basic store in a city you know you have big problems already.

And blaming 'wokeness' for the problems of inner cities in the US is crazy.

There is one more fact, grocery stores like large format locations, and those are very hard to find, even the older Safeway 'Marina' style stores (and similar other designs) are too small by modern standards, and both not economical to operate as well as too small to carry the standard product mix.

Yeah, I agree we should be reliant mainly on civil society. Unfortunately, moral relativism means we are not allowed to teach civil virtues in public schools. We see moral panic over things like our own government institutions (Smithsonian, for example) labeling virtues such as promptness as relics of colonialism and whiteness. You're not going to be able to have a moral civil society if your ideology associates all virtues with particular races.

"Wokeness" is the just this century's "politically correct", except almost no one has ever seriously talked about respecting being 'woke' in the context you're talking about.

Yes they have. I gave you an example of my city of Portland, OR whose policies resulted in a major destaffing of the police department by city policy.

This is blatantly false. The Portland Police have more funding now than ever.

It sucks that your grocery stores are closing, but I would be pissed at the store owners if that was the reason they gave. It sounds like they didn’t want to pay their own security/loss-prevention staff, so they had the taxpayers foot the bill.