Until a clean and airy ShopRite opened a year ago in Parkside, her low-income west Philadelphia neighborhood, Christine Gilliard used to pay someone to drive her several miles to the closest supermarket so she could avoid a long bus ride. Now she can walk to the new 69,700-square-foot store as often as she likes. 'It's great, not just for me, but also for the elderly people,' said Gilliard, who is 46. 'Who can carry $150 worth of groceries on the bus?' The ShopRite, which was bustling on a recent weekday, has a pharmacy, the type of produce department that suburban shoppers take for granted and special sections stocked with items like fufu flour, a staple of Jamaican cuisine, and red palm oil, a favorite of West African cooks. The halal meat counter was set up with advice from local imams. Supermarkets are a low-margin business, generating profits of less than 2 percent, industry spokesmen say. The ShopRite owner, Jeffrey Brown, a fourth-generation grocer, said it would not have made economic sense to open the $14.5 million store, which is at 52nd Street and Parkside Avenue, if not for a Pennsylvania grant and revolving-loan program aimed at improving access to nutritious food in places with few, if any, good stores to choose from. 'In neighborhoods like this, people have less money and the first thing they cut out are all the high-margin items,' said Brown, citing prepared foods and fancy breads as examples. Costs, like extra security, tend to be higher in poorer neighborhoods, he said. Through the Pennsylvania Fresh Food Financing Initiative, Brown, who owns 10 other supermarkets in the Philadelphia area, got a $1 million grant and $7 million in federal New Markets tax credits, which are aimed at stimulating investment in low-income communities. Several customers said the prices at Brown's store were fairer than what they had been used to. Inspired by Pennsylvania's example, New York City officials have developed an initiative of their own to bring new neighborhood markets selling fresh food to areas of the city where they say the need is greatest. Like Pennsylvania, New York will offer financial incentives, but the city is also proposing a series of zoning incentives for northern Manhattan, the South Bronx, Central Brooklyn and the Jamaica section of Queens. These include a density bonus that would allow developers to add 20,000 square feet to a residential building in exchange for putting a supermarket on the ground floor. 'When we spoke to operators, they said that in terms of challenges and hurdles, zoning changes would make an enormous difference to them,' said Amanda M. Burden, the New York City planning commissioner. 'The level of enthusiasm was extremely strong.' The Pennsylvania program got started five years ago after the Food Trust, a Philadelphia nonprofit organization that was concerned about the high incidence of obesity and diabetes in neighborhoods where fresh food was scarce, began meeting with leaders of the supermarket industry. Another participant was the Reinvestment Fund, another nonprofit organization, which raises private capital from banks and investors for job-generating projects. The fund and the Food Trust teamed up. The program began with a $10 million allocation, which was renewed twice and matched with $90 million in private funds, for a total investment of $120 million, said Patricia L. Smith, the director of special initiatives for the Reinvestment Fund. In all, the program has resulted in 69 projects in various stages of development, 23 of them in Philadelphia. Five approved projects have gone out of business, a relatively low failure rate, she said. Some 3,700 jobs have been created, said John Weidman, deputy director of the Food Trust. Lucinda Hudson, who moved to Parkside in 1973, said she had waited more than three decades for a convenient way to buy fresh produce. Now she lives within shouting distance of Brown's market. 'I walk over there every day for my collard greens, my broccoli, my cabbage,' said Hudson, the president of the Parkside Association of Philadelphia, a neighborhood group. 'When it opened, we had to pinch ourselves a couple of times.' Some of the Pennsylvania money has been used to upgrade small corner stores. Last year, Romano's Grocery, in the Juniata Park section of north Philadelphia, used a $150,000 grant from the state program, to pay part of the cost of installing new lighting and energy-efficient refrigeration equipment. Before the overhaul, said Juan Carlos Romano, the store owner, 'we had bananas and onions; that was about it.' Now the store has a produce section, and Romano has experimented with different varieties of potato and squash to determine what his customers like. Business has increased by 40 percent, he said. In New York state, Gov. David A. Paterson has announced a 'Healthy Foods, Healthy Communities' initiative, supported by a $10 million revolving loan fund. State officials plan to select a non-profit organization similar to Pennsylvania's Reinvestment Fund to administer the program and to leverage private dollars, said a spokeswoman, Erin Duggan. New York City's initiative, called FRESH (the Food Retail Expansion to Support Health program), grew out of recommendations from a commission that included government officials and industry representatives. 'It was one of the first times that public officials were asking the right questions,' said Patricia Brodhagen, a vice president of the Food Industry Alliance, a statewide association of retailers and wholesalers. 'The answer is simple: if supermarkets could make money, they would be there. Finally, we had somebody saying, 'What are the barriers?'' Under the city's program, supermarkets will be encouraged to apply for tax abatements and other financial incentives that have long been used by other businesses that generate jobs. The incentives can be used to build new stores or remodel existing ones. To qualify, a store must have at least 6,000 square feet of selling space and devote at least 30 percent of it to perishable items. In addition to the density bonus, the zoning proposals, which are subject to a lengthy review process, would free smaller supermarkets from having to supply parking spaces and would exempt stores in manufacturing zones of up to 30,000 square feet from the cumbersome land-use review process. (The current limit is 10,000 square feet.) Some clashes seem inevitable. Operators of smaller markets that do not meet the city's fresh-food standards are likely to try to protect their stores. 'The city's notion of what is underserved may be different than the industry's,' said Jack Zumba, a senior vice president of White Rose, a wholesaler that supplies 1,400 supermarkets in the New York area. Some of the supermarket chains would like to see the city expand the zoning exemption to include much larger stores, Brodhagen said. Union leaders say the city needs to do more to ensure that the program creates good jobs and does not threaten existing ones by introducing unfair competition. 'We don't need more minimum-wage jobs,' said Pat Purcell, director of special projects for the United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 1500. Will the incentives work in New York? One member of the supermarket commission, Alicia Glen, who heads the urban investment group at Goldman Sachs, praised the city's efforts but said that tax incentives and zoning bonuses alone were likely to have limited usefulness during an economic downturn. 'For a good supermarket to operate successfully, you need big floor plates, you have to do a lot of volume, and you can't pay a lot of rent,' she said. 'In the current environment, it's hard to put together a financially feasible deal without a significant amount of subsidy.' 