Edit: if you simply wanted to flag “food desert” as a term of art, enclosing it in quotes would have been best. Your “so-called” implies that you are casting doubt on their existence.
Expertise on a subject in one specific area doesn't necessarily translate to expertise in the general concept.
The reason they’re better at this than a professor is a bit controversial but I will own up to saying it: banks actually care about people using their branches and need to design systems which will correctly site those branches. Professors need to design systems which get their papers cited. Making accurate observations about reality is not necessarily required.
"A grocery store on the corner of 24th and Main would help food access a lot and be quite successful" is not really a great research paper; but it is very useful to a business development person. "Food access is a significant problem in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas" is a fairly good research paper, but not something that you could ask the REAS in Community X to do for any area beyond Community X.
In the end, I think my question would be this. Let's take as true that Professors aren't all that accurate in their assessments of some issue, and that in their communities, REASs are more likely to be accurate in similar assessments. What then? How can we easily take that accurate, anecdotal REAS data, and turn it into broad comparative data that lets us better understand the problem nationwide?
In contrast if the professor’s paper a) actually gets noticed and b) the study conclusions are actually sensitive to the details of the distance estimation methodology, there’s a possibility (not guarantee) of someone writing a rebuttal in six months, which is embarrassing. B is important—spherical cows are frequently good enough!
Fundamentally, we shouldn’t be surprised that the methods appropriate for “decide where to spend $20M on a building” and “spend <$100k of researcher time to perform population-level analysis” should differ.
> Food Deserts and the Causes of Nutritional Inequality
> We study the causes of “nutritional inequality”: why the wealthy eat more healthfully than the poor in the United States. Exploiting supermarket entry, household moves to healthier neighborhoods, and purchasing patterns among households with identical local supply, we reject that neighborhood environments contribute meaningfully to nutritional inequality. Using a structural demand model, we find that exposing low-income households to the same products and prices available to high-income households reduces nutritional inequality by only nine percent, while the remaining 91 percent is driven by differences in demand. These findings counter the common notion that policies to reduce supply inequities, such as “food deserts,” could play an important role in reducing nutritional inequality. By contrast, the structural results predict that means-tested subsidies for healthy food could eliminate nutritional inequality at a fiscal cost of about 15 percent of the annual budget for the U.S. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
