Even in an economically-thriving city like Sioux Falls, there are pockets where people struggle to afford food for their families. Local non-profits have now pinpointed these so-called “food deserts.”

Sioux Falls Thrive, the Augustana Research Institute and Feeding South Dakota released the results of their study Thursday which identifies three food deserts in the city.

The Froehlich Addition and Norton Tracks make up one desert in the northeast side of the city.  Then, there’s the neighborhood surrounding Hayward Elementary on the city’s northwest side.  And most surprising of all, 49th and Louise near The Empire Mall.

DeAnna Gould has been struggling to feed her family ever since she and her husband lost their Sioux Falls home to a fire this spring.  They’ve been staying with relatives and living paycheck-to-paycheck, ever since.

“When we had our house fire, we had to go about three months without food until we got our settlement from our house fire.  And we lived in a hotel, thank goodness for insurance for it.  But it was hard for us,” Gould said.

Even living across the street from a grocery store isn’t a convenience if you don’t have money to pay for food.   The biggest surprise of the food security study was finding a food desert in the neighborhood next to The Empire Mall.

“The ah-ha moment that the study provided for us was that’s the area of our city where we have the largest concentration of low-income individuals who do not have transportation,” Feeding South Dakota CEO Matt Gassen said.

Armed with all this new data, Feeding South Dakota is planning to reach-out to neighborhoods in these food deserts by starting up a mobile food pantry.

“This is kind of a shift in paradigm for us as an organization to saying that instead of hunger having to come to us where the food is, we maybe need to take food to where the hunger is in our community,” Gassen said.

The working poor of Sioux Falls hope the study sheds new light on what hunger looks like in the city.

“It scares me because once the food goes down, or like there’s not enough or prices go skyrocketing, it’s going to be hard for everyone to eat,” Gould said.

Feeding South Dakota hopes to begin its mobile food pantry in the spring.