INTRODUCTION
The literature on food stores, neighborhood poverty, and race/ethnicity is mixed and lacks methods of accounting
for complex spatial and temporal clustering of food resources. We used quarterly data on supermarket and
convenience store locations from Nielsen TDLinx (Nielsen Holdings N.V., New York, New York) spanning
7 years (2006–2012) and census tract–based neighborhood sociodemographic data from the American Community
Survey (2006–2010) to assess associations between neighborhood sociodemographic characteristics and food
store distributions in the Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) of 4 US cities (Birmingham, Alabama; Chicago,
Illinois; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and San Francisco, California). We fitted a space-time Poisson regression model
that accounted for the complex spatial-temporal correlation structure of store locations by introducing space-time
random effects in an intrinsic conditionally autoregressive model within a Bayesian framework. After accounting for
census tract–level area, population, their interaction, and spatial and temporal variability, census tract poverty was
significantly and positively associated with increasing expected numbers of supermarkets among tracts in all 4
MSAs. A similar positive association was observed for convenience stores in Birmingham, Minneapolis, and San
Francisco; in Chicago, a positive association was observed only for predominantly white and predominantly black
tracts. Our findings suggest a positive association between greater numbers of food stores and higher neighborhood
poverty, with implications for policy approaches related to food store access by neighborhood poverty.