Eye On Illinois: Do you live in a [choose your adjective] desert?

What is a desert?

In terms of climate – according to National Geographic – the pacing metric is precipitation: any land area that logs no more than 10 inches of precipitation per year. This accounts for about 20% of the planet’s land area and houses 1 billion people. The folks at Britannica narrow the scope by excluding Antarctica and other areas too cold to support vegetation.

In politics, desert has become a useful noun, while adjectives help tell the story. As noted last week, a child care desert is a census tract that has 50 children age 4 and younger with either no providers or at least three times as many kids as slots.

On Friday, the governor’s office touted 5,150 new publicly funded seats through grants awarded in preschool deserts. That determination starts by looking at public school districts and whether there are enough Preschool For All/Preschool Expansion and Head Start slots for at least 80% of eligible children.

Then there are food deserts. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Access Research Atlas, tinyurl.com/FoodAccessAtlas, identifies such areas in urban and rural pockets throughout Illinois. Here there’s so much data that desert definitions can stem from a variety of indicators that largely boil down to how close people live to grocery stores.

We also have maternity deserts. The March of Dimes applies that designation to any county without a birth center or a hospital that offers obstetric care as well as no obstetricians. Things are improving a bit here: When I wrote about the issue in July 2023, the most recent data showed 36% of counties met the designation nationwide – including 36 of 102 in Illinois – but recent numbers are 34.3% in Illinois and 32.6% nationwide.

There are other tiers for low and moderate access to maternity care, while other organizations run similar numbers for different types of medical deserts: trauma care, primary physicians, pharmacies and more. There also are transit and digital deserts.

From a macro level, many of these deserts fall into two basic categories: a rural area where the population is so sparse as to make providing services financially difficult, whether that be ultrasounds, teaching the alphabet to 3-year-olds or fresh strawberries, or a dense urban area where people don’t earn enough money to keep those places in business.

That’s obviously a gross oversimplification, but governments employ similar strategies when using raw statistics to fit certain areas into the right methodological box as step one of solving a problem. Governments can’t equalize household income and population density, so they prorate spending for public services and wield subsidies and incentives to make up the differences in the private sector.

Do you live in a desert? Would you know it without a government definition?

• Scott T. Holland writes about state government issues for Shaw Local News Network. He can be reached at sholland@shawmedia.com.