[gbd2]

Live site: https://gbd2.github.io/dashboard-project/

Houston Grocery Gap is a decision support tool for planning where new grocery stores should go in and around Houston. It maps where Harris County residents live far from a grocery store, ranks the places a new store would do the most good, and lets staff test a recruitment plan against a budget.

Who it's for

The main users are City of Houston and Harris County economic development staff, and the councils they report to who decide where and how grocer recruitment incentives get spent. The secondary users are grocers' site selection teams, who need to know whether a location can support a store, not only whether it needs one.

Decisions it supports

1. Where is grocery access worst, and how many people does it affect? Step 1 maps low income, low access tracts and lets you switch what counts as a grocery store. Under USDA's new definition, which counts every SNAP store, Harris County has 8 food desert tracts. Counting only supermarkets, supercenters and large grocers, it has 175, which is home to about 759,000 people.
2. Which sites should the city pitch to grocers? Step 2 weighs need, market size and Opportunity Zone incentives using weights you set, and produces a shortlist.
3. What would a specific deal buy? Step 3 lets you place stores within a fixed fund and see who they newly reach, what they would sell, how much of that comes from existing stores, and how long the city takes to earn back the incentive in tax revenue (roughly, haha).

preprocessing is in scripts/build_data.py, and sources and methods are in the README.