Click this photo to download the report!

In 2009, the Project for Public Spaces (PPS), with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and in partnership with Columbia University, undertook a study to examine what market characteristics successfully attract low-income shoppers. The study also explored the obstacles that may prevent low income individuals from shopping at a farmers market when one existed nearby, and how youth-oriented market programming affects healthy eating habits among kids and teens. Today, we are thrilled to share with you the results of this study, and to offer recommendations for everyone working to get more healthy food into their communities through farmers markets.

For the study, our team examined eight markets across the United States that served low- to middle-income communities with higher than average ethnic and minority compositions. Each market had unique attributes that identified them for selection. In addition, each market was a previous recipient of a PPS grant, funded by the Kellogg Foundation, which offered technical assistance between the years 2006-2008 in addition to funding.

Out of our analysis of market management data, tracked over several years and surveys of market shoppers and non-market shoppers, we were able to identify two key trends. First, we found that price is not a barrier. Among the survey sample, almost 60% of farmers market shoppers in low-income neighborhoods believed their market had better prices than the grocery store. Among those who did not shop at farmers markets, only 17% cited price as a barrier to shopping at their local farmers market. Second, we learned that information is key. Unlike a grocery store, markets typically lack permanent structures and are therefore more ephemeral by nature. Shoppers need better access to information about schedules and seasonal changes in order to become more regular market shoppers.

One of the most important lessons learned from the focus groups with youth interns at the markets was that the end goal was to produce excellent citizens, not necessarily urban farmers. While eating well, advocating for food justice, and increasing the youths’ knowledge of the local food production process were all taught, it was the emphasis on leadership, personal development, and responsibility that ultimately made the programs successful and left the strongest impact on the youth surveyed.

A summary of the recommendations included in the report:

1.      Location, Location, Location – A common reason cited by non-market shoppers for not patronizing a farmers market was the need to complete their shopping at one location. While it is unlikely that farmers markets will be able to serve that function, positioning markets in locations that give the appearance of one-stop shopping may overcome this access barrier.

Also, given our experience with the transformative power of successful Placemaking, we advocate that market operators who are serious about long term sustainability turn their market into a destination. The market should not only be a place to buy produce, but should incorporate programming that integrates the market into the fabric of the surrounding community.

2.      Know your shoppers – One of the most interesting emerging trends from our data was the varying intensity in market use depending on the income of shoppers. What this tells us is that knowing your most frequent shopper, as well as the shopper demographic who purchases the highest percentage of their produce at the farmers market, is important for markets to achieve financial sustainability and develop a more stable consumer base. Knowing your shoppers has implications for both the kind of marketing and the location of marketing that the market should produce.

3.      Markets targeting a low-income customer base must partner with organizations that share the market’s goals – Partnering with neighborhood organizations helps facilitate better outreach efforts to the intense-use shopper, as previously identified. Furthermore, if the market could operate through an existing organization that shares its mission there is a potential cost sharing component in terms of office space, co-promotion and community recognition.

4.      Farmers Markets need to expand marketing and outreach efforts to reach consumers – We recognize that many market organizers are already well aware of the importance of successful marketing for the success of their farmers market.  However, the data from this study re-affirms the need for constant marketing and outreach to local consumers to educate them about the location, time, and acceptance of SNAP and WIC benefits.

It is our hope that the results of this study will help people to move the dial on creating healthier places through the creation of more effective, engaging farmers markets. Markets are wonderful public gathering spaces that put an emphasis on community health. They make it easier for people to make better dietary choices, while simultaneously bringing neighbors together to form the strong, supportive social networks that are critical to success in leading healthy lifestyles in the long term. And so, without further ado:

Click here to download a PDF of the publication!

Larry Lund

A great public market doesn’t usually just happen–there are a lot of smart, dedicated people behind the scenes who work to make sure that markets are set up to serve their surrounding area. Like any public space, markets work best when they reflect the people who live nearby. They are places for buying and selling food, yes, but they’re also places for meeting and learning about neighbors, accessing services, and becoming part of the daily life of a community.

We recently had the opportunity to speak with Larry Lund, a long-time Placemaker and head of the Chicago-based Real Estate Planning Group (REPG). Larry is an expert on markets, particularly in regard to how they scale up and down to fit the communities in which they are based. If you’d like to meet Larry and learn more about this subject, there is still time to register for the 8th International Public Markets Conference, which will take place in Cleveland, Ohio, just two weeks from now, from September 21-23rd, 2012.

How did your interest in markets begin? How does it relate to what you do now, with real estate planning?

I got involved with markets back in the mid 1980s, when Fred Kent pulled together a group to discuss how we could use Public Markets  to rejuvenate town centers. Our emphasis was on looking at markets as a model for rebuilding activity in the downtown area. Since then, the Public Market movement has evolved from a focus on Placemaking to include a better delivery system for fresh food Now, PPS is talking about how markets can be more than just a center for food—they can deliver other goods and services to communities, as well.

I started the Real Estate Planning Group in 1990, so I had already been working on markets before that, but most of my market projects  have been with PPS. I have now worked on more than 50 Public Markets throughout the country. My primary role working with PPS is to do the economic and market analysis. Even though markets have been around for hundreds of years, the nature has changed and we have had to find new methods to estimate potential using sophisticated tools like gravity models and survey techniques to estimate market shares. It’s very important to try to get the scale right for the market setting and to have some rational basis for estimating sales potential and tenant mix. There is lots of  talk  about sustainability from an environmental standpoint, but we also try to bring the concept of  sustainability from an economic standpoint: is there enough money here so that vendors can be successful and the market can operate in a sustainable fashion. Markets need to meet customer expectations, vendor needs, and operate in a sustainable fashion for whatever entity develops the market.

How important are the characteristics of the surrounding place? Can markets drive development, or are there components that need to be in place already?

There are some characteristics that you absolutely need for a market to work well, like visibility and accessibility. Historically, markets were always in or near the center of trade routes, and there’s an intrinsic need for that even today. If there’s a strong sense of place already, before a market locates somewhere, that obviously helps. However, in some cases, putting in a market can help develop a place if the market is large enough and visible enough. We’ve seen, in the US, how a market hall strengthens the center of towns and can complement other uses such as retail, office, and residential.

A bustling street market in Markets Conference host city Cleveland / Photo: PPS

What’s always a challenge is trying to get the scale right, and that’s something I’m going to be talking a lot about at the Markets Conference in Cleveland later this month. There’s an equation here in terms of sustainability, making sure there are enough people and enough vendors to support your market. Markets have a great appeal in just a visceral sense, but not all of them turn out to be successful. You still need a good location for them, and you need enough people who have access to the area. The larger the market, generally speaking, the larger the draw. There has to be a relationship with the population around the market; it’s important to understand who your customers are: their interest in fresh foods, their sensitivity to prices, and what the competition looks like.

What a lot of people don’t recognize is that there’s also a big difference between farmers’ markets and year-round public markets. The economics around both of them are radically different. It’s important to understand that, if you have a successful farmers’ market, changing that to what I call a public market building is a big leap for everyone, and a lot of analysis has to be done before making that decision because the nature of the market changes.

One of the attractions of farmers’ markets, besides outstanding food products, is the ephemeral nature of it. These markets are one or two days a week, and they’re seasonal; the ‘event quality’ is a very strong attraction for people. That changes when you start institutionalizing it into a market building, where the economics require you to start running the market six or seven days a week. For farmers to turn themselves into permanent vendors changes their business model, too. I often say that my role is to make sure that the visioning process doesn’t turn into a hallucination, and that there’s economic support in changing the business structure.

Can you explain more about scaling markets to their context? How are markets different in big cities versus more rural communities? How are they similar?

Most of my work is related to repositioning existing enclosed markets and responding to  the desire of successful farmers’ market wanting to become a  year-round event. In either case it is usually  more challenging in rural areas than it is in urbanized areas, and I have to say it’s even a challenge in urbanized areas in being able to find vendors today who can handle that year-round schedule. It’s difficult to find butchers and fishmongers, for instance. It’s even especially difficult to find  produce vendors—the main driver in most markets—who can operate full-time. When you want to run something on an annualized basis the seasonality draw begins to disappear.

That’s not to say  markets cannot run year-round and sell in the winter time, but it’s difficult if you don’t have a wide variety of food. Today there’s a whole issue of commitment to the local food movement and what that means for the customer. That’s something that has to be considered if you’re aiming to create a local-food market versus allowing food to be imported to your area and offering a full scope of services. I always caution that market managers have to understand their goal in building a public market building. I think a lot of people don’t give that enough consideration. Different kinds of markets meet different objectives.

What I’m seeing now is a series of market buildings people are developing that only have maybe three or four tenants. They’re not farmers, but you’ll find a bakery and a charcuterie and a coffee place, and they develop into third places. People are looking at these places as community-builders. You can see this happening in Seattle, for example, outside of the Pike Place Market. There are a series of buildings that have sprung up around the market that are more about creating an enjoyable place for public gathering than delivery of fresh local food—they’re great third places built around the food movement.

These storefront buildings have developed into a food cluster that offers something for each part of the day. In the morning, that the bakery serves coffee; the charcuterie starts serving sandwiches at lunch; in the evening, you may have a wine bar that’s part of this cluster. There are things to activate the space throughout the day, which makes it a nice neighborhood attraction for people to come to.

A mix of uses ensures that the area around the Pike Place market is always bustling / Photo: PPS

For our last question, how do you expect the upcoming markets conference in Cleveland to shed light on these issues?

In one of the sessions, we’re going to be talking about the scalability of markets extensively and getting people to focus on what the sponsor’s objectives are. We’ll show examples of different kinds of markets & what people have been doing around the country to meet various needs and community goals. We’ll help people identify and think through that process to make sure they have a project that’s successful.

Markets have to adjust themselves as they see who their customers are, and this is part of the discussion we’ll be having: how markets evolve even after they open. An exciting thing about markets is that they allow for change, and they adjust to their customers. The whole thing is about getting the scale and mission right. It’s always easier if you can do that up front, but frankly all retail has to go through that transition and evolution of understanding their customers and vice versa. The needs and demands of consumers are always changing. Our goal is to help people meet their objectives and be economically sustainable in delivering all the good things that  markets can deliver to their communities.

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Celebrating 25 years since its first gathering, the 8th International Public Markets Conference will set a new direction for the vital role markets play in transforming local economies and communities. Click here to register today!

Families peruse stands offering a variety of fresh foods at a farmers market in downtown Milwaukee / Photo: Ethan Kent

According to Dr. Richard Jackson, a pioneering public health advocate and former CDC official now serving as the Chair of Environmental Health Sciences at UCLA, the idea that buildings, streets, and public spaces play a key role in the serious public health issues that we face in the US “has undergone a profound sea change in the past few years. It’s gone from sort of a marginal, nutty thing to becoming something that’s common sense for a lot of people.”

That’s good news, but as a profile of Dr. Jackson in the Chronicle of Higher Education notes, today’s click-driven media climate means that the message of public health advocates like Jackson is “often pithily condensed to a variation of this eye-catching headline: ‘Suburbia Makes You Fat.’” And while these pithily-titled articles may do some good in alerting more people to the problems inherent in the way that we’ve been designing our cities and towns for the past half-century, they oversimplify the message and strip out one of the most important factors in any effort to change the way that we shape the places where we live and work: social capital.

Highways, parking lots, cars, big box stores–these are merely symptoms of a larger problem: many people have become so used to their surroundings looking more like a suburban arterial road than a compact, multi-use destination that they’ve become completely disconnected from Place. Real life is lived amongst gas stations and golden arches; we have to visit Disneyland to see a thriving, compact Main Street. To question a condition that’s so pervasive, as individuals, seems futile.

Bikers and walkers chat at a market in Portland, OR / Photo: npGREENWAY via Flickr

That’s why, if we want to see people challenging the way that their places are made on a larger scale, we need to focus first on developing the loose social networks that are so vital to urban resilience. This is the stuff Jane Jacobs was talking about when she wrote, in the Death and Life of Great American Cities, that “lowly, unpurposeful, and random as they appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city’s wealth of public life must grow.” When people are connected enough to feel comfortable talking about what they want for their neighborhood with their neighbors, it’s much easier to muster political will to stop, say, a highway from cutting through Greenwich Village–or, in contemporary terms, to tear down a highway that was actually built.

In Dr. Jackson’s words: “The key thing is to get the social engagement. Community-building has to happen first; people need to articulate what’s broke, and then what they want.” Serendipitously, gathering to discuss a vision for a healthier future is an ideal way to build the social capital needed to turn the understanding that our built environment is hurting us into action to change the existing paradigm. At PPS, we have seen first-hand how the Placemaking process has brought people together in hundreds of cities around the world with the goal of improving shared public spaces; it’s a process that strengthens existing ties, creates new ones, and invigorates communities with the knowledge of how they can make things happen.

The Healthy Places Program (HPP), which began last year as a collaboration between staff members working in PPS’s Public Markets and Transportation programs. “There are many different elements that make up a healthy community,” says Aurash Khawarzad, an Associate in PPS’s Transportation division, and a key player in getting HPP off the ground. “There are social factors, environmental factors, etc–and what we at PPS can do is take these people in our offices who are focusing on their own areas and bring them together.”

Aurash Khawarzad leads a Healthy Places workshop in upstate New York / Photo: PPS

With that collaborative mission in mind, Khawarzad and Kelly Verel, a Senior Associate in PPS’s Public Markets division, set out on a trip across New York last fall to facilitate a series of day-long Healthy Places workshops with local, regional, and state public health officials and a host of community partners. In partnership with the New York Academy of Medicine’s DASH-NY, the PPS team visited a range of communities, from rural towns, to suburban stretches, to major and mid-sized cities. The workshops were designed to help participants understand how multi-modal transportation systems can be better designed to create a network that links a series of destinations, including healthy food hubs and markets, to create a built environment that promotes well-being by making healthy lifestyle choices (like walking, biking, and eating fresh food) more convenient and fun. They focused not just on what wasn’t working, but on brainstorming ways that participants’ communities could become truly healthy places.

Any expert worth their salt will tell you that maintaining good health is not just about exercise or diet, but both together. In much the same way, addressing the problem of bad community design and its impacts on Public Health requires that we not just promote better transportation or better food access alone, but that we focus on both simultaneously. “The reaction we got from the the Healthy Places training attendees was really good,” notes Verel. “I think people have been really siloed in their efforts. We would ask people what they were doing and they would say ‘access to food in schools,’ or ‘rails to trails,’ and that they focus exclusively on that area.”

Understanding public health within the context of Place is essential, because the problems created and reinforced by our built environment are so broad in scope. HPP takes that case directly to local decision-makers and creates a learning environment where they can build their understanding of how Place effects health together, in a cross-disciplinary setting. This “silo-busting” is absolutely critical; as Dr. Jackson writes in the introduction to his latest book, Designing Healthy Communities (a companion to the four-part PBS special of the same name):

“For too long we have had doctors talking only to doctors, and urban planners, architects, and builders talking only to themselves. The point is that all of us, including those in public health, have got to get out of the silos we have created, and we have got to connect—actually talk to each other before and while we do our work—because there is no other way we can create the environment we want. Public health in particular must be interdisciplinary, for no professional category owns public health or is legitimately excused from it.”

The emphasis, there, is added, as this phrase strike at the heart of the problem we face. To shift the default development model from “low-density, use-segregated, and auto-centric” to one that promotes healthy, active lifestyles and more vibrant communities will take strong leadership from people who aren’t afraid to work across departments, and “turn everything upside-down to get it right side up.” PPS is certainly not the only organization to recognize this, and we’re thrilled to be part of a growing movement. In the US, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has its own Healthy Community Design Initiative program. Internationally, Urban Age made designing for public health the subject of a major conference in Hong Kong held late last year (from which a full report is now available).

New bike lanes are just one part of Pro Walk / Pro Bike: "Pro Place" host city Long Beach, CA's strategy to become "Biketown USA" / Photo: waltarrrrr via Flickr

Of course, individual citizens have hardly been waiting around and twiddling their thumbs. Active transportation, healthy food, and community gardening advocates have been working for decades on the ground, pushing for incremental changes to the way our cities and towns operate. Just through the robust conversations taking place online around issues like #completestreets, #biking, and #urbanag, it’s easy to see how well-organized and resonant these movements have become. Mounting public awareness is pushing more public officials toward programs like HPP, to learn about how focusing on Place can facilitate inter-agency collaboration around the common cause of improving public health.

Whether you’re looking at this issue from the top-down or the bottom-up, there will be several opportunities to gather with active transportation and public markets professionals, advocates, and enthusiasts from around the world this fall for debate, discussion, and more of that vital social capital development. As part of the Healthy Places Program, PPS is hosting two conferences, just one week apart: the 17th Pro Walk / Pro Bike: “Pro Place” conference in Long Beach, CA (Sept. 10-13); and the 8th International Public Markets Conference in Cleveland, OH (Sept. 21-23).

Cleveland, which will host the 8th International Public Markets Conference in September, is home to the historic, bustling West Side Market / Photo: Catherine V via Flickr

If you’re approaching Healthy Places from the transportation world, Pro Walk / Pro Bike (#prowalkprobike) will explore how efforts to advocate for safer and better infrastructure for active transportation modes are being greatly enhanced as more and more people learn about the benefits of getting around on their own two feet (with or without pedals). If you’re more of a “foodie,” the Public Markets conference (#marketsconf8) will highlight the burgeoning local food scene in Cleveland and throughout Northeastern Ohio, and will spotlight the iconic West Side Market, arguably the most architecturally significant market building in the US. Both events will focus on how supporters of active transportation and public markets, respectively, can grow their movements by busting down silos and thinking h0listically about how their chosen cause can be part of the effort to create Healthy Places.

If you can’t make it to Long Beach or Cleveland, there are plenty of Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper steps that you can take to get your neighbors together and talking, out in public space, building local connections. “Something like a playstreet or a summer street shows people that, not only do they like this kind of varied activity and flexibility and want more of it in their community’s streets, but that they can actually make it happen,” Verel explains. “It takes more basic manpower–putting up tents, handing out flyers–than actual lobbying or money to get the DOT to shut down a street for one day and focus on social interaction and healthy activity.”

And you can start even smaller than that. PPS mentor Holly Whyte once wrote that “We are not hapless beings caught in the grip of forces we can do little about, and wholesale damnations of our society only lend a further mystique to organization. Organization has been made by man; it can be changed by man.” If our problem is that we have become siloed and isolated, at work and in our neighborhoods, then the most immediate way for us to start re-organizing is to reach out to the people around us, with something as simple as a friendly “hello” on the street. An interaction like this might seem ‘lowly, unpurposeful, and random’–but at the very least, it will make you feel happier and more connected to your community. And guess what? That’s good for you, too.

So, here’s to your health!

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Click here to register for Pro Walk / Pro Bike: “Pro Place”
(Early Summer rate available until June 29)

Click here to register for the 8th International Public Markets Conference
(Early bird rate available until July 31)
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A Playstreet-style fundraiser for cicLAvia in Los Angeles / Photo: waltarrrrr via Flickr

Register now for PPS upcoming training session, “How to Create Successful Markets,” May 20-21 in New York City.

 

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While the number of new markets in Maine continue to grow, most of what I heard people talk about at the conference was how their established market is being asked to expand operations and take on a larger role in the life of the community.

Markets across the state are expanding the number of days they are open and adding second locations, accepting SNAP/EBT, selling local products online, and even operating year-round. While this growth is exciting it also is challenging, especially because so many of the state’s markets are operated by volunteers.

As markets in Maine and across the country are increasingly recognized as important community assets, they need help taking on larger responsibilities. No matter whether your market is new or established and undergoing growing pains, these principles can help make it succeed both as a market and as a great community place.

4 Guidelines for Creating a Great Public Market

A market on Rue Mouffetard in Paris

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Meg MacIver contributed to this post.

The East Lake Farmers Market is one of Birmingham's existing centers for fresh food

PPS has long known that public markets play a key role in alleviating these health concerns. Partnering with Main Street Birmingham and, supported by funding from the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) Communities Putting Prevention to Work (CPPW) program, PPS led a Placemaking workshop last summer and worked with local residents to help them build a vision for markets in their city.  The community’s participation will inform a study, which had two primary objectives:

• Increase the number and accessibility of quality markets in “food imbalanced” neighborhoods
• Coordinate and connect many market-related activities through a local Market Alliance

PPS’ markets team has proposed what we call “Healthy Food Hubs” throughout the city of Birmingham.  These hubs are places where people can do much more than just buy fresh, affordable food.  Food Hubs are vibrant community centers where neighbors can meet each other, attend cooking classes, learn about nutrition, and get health care.

Based on feedback from residents and the city’s various demographics, several concepts were proposed, including community garden-based farmers markets and the expansion and integration of the peddler and farm stand systems into retail and civic areas.

A plan for a Healthy Food Hub on Birmingham's Main Street.

For a city like Birmingham, recently named America’s second most obese city according to Forbes, where 31.3% of Birmingham’s residents have a BMI of 30 or higher, there can be no “silver bullet” solution. Providing all neighborhoods with access to healthy, fresh food is one way to start to mitigate obesity-related health concerns.

Download this guide for free.

The next step in implementing these initiatives in Birmingham is to find sponsors who will fund the the Market Alliance to begin work to start new Healthy Food Hubs, to connect community groups to the movement, and to set up a process for markets to accept SNAP (food stamps) and other Federal nutrition assistance coupons.

Main Street Birmingham’s Sam Crawford believes that “PPS has given the City of Birmingham and its many partners an excellent tool that will be used to establish a network of ‘public spaces’ that can become catalysts for further economic opportunity and where residents can work, play and access healthy foods in a safe friendly environment.”  We at PPS are also optimistic about the prospects of changing food and public space access in Birmingham and using public markets to improve the public health of the city.

Looking to set up SNAP at your market? Download a free copy of PPS’ Guide “SNAP/EBT at Your Farmer’s Market: Seven Steps to Success.”

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To learn more about setting up a great market in your neighborhood, come to PPS’ Spring Training session “How to Create Successful Markets,” May 20-21 in New York City.

• A new food system in the stimulus package. [Grist]

• Michigan farmers markets double in number since 2001. [Lansing State Journal]

• Washington Governor threatens to close thirteen state parks. [The News Tribune]

• Over 700,000 acres of land in California to be reclassified as Federally protected wilderness. [Los Angeles Times]