Explaining the Absence of Grocery Stores in Poor Neighborhoods

Nathan Berg, of the Center for Urban Economics, has noticed that there are many fewer grocery stores in poor urban neighborhoods than economic theory would suggest. The public-health implications of eating mainly processed food are pretty nasty, to say nothing of the increased food costs for families who can least afford them. And the annoying thing is that this absence of grocery stores makes very little economic sense:

Economic theory predicts that the typical low-income resident spends a lot less on luxuries like vacations, but not very much less on necessities like food. Everyone has to eat...
Economic theory suggests other reasons why grocery stores should thrive in low-income neighborhoods. Rents are lower, which means stores can save on costs by locating there, and there are few competitors nearby to steal away sales.

Berg's article in the Dallas Morning News doesn't go into a lot of detail as to why this should be the case. He does mention one anecdotal reason:

In interviews with a number of top executives, I found that most of them consider only a few locations for new stores and that these locations are nearly always discovered more or less by accident – while the executive is running errands or driving through town on other business. This is not necessarily a bad strategy, but it can lead to an unhealthy side effect: Neighborhoods that are ignored today may be ignored for a long time, despite their advantages.

Mark Thoma is unimpressed by this:

Does the suggestion that there are fewer grocery stores in low income areas because executives don't happen to be in those areas very often ring true? I would have guessed other forces are at work besides simply being overlooked.

But it turns out that in Berg's paper, there are many other, more compelling, reasons for the absence of grocery stores in poor neighborhoods.

The big reason is that grocery-store executives either explicitly or implicitly believe that markets are reasonably efficient. I might believe that I can run my grocery store with higher profit margins than you can run yours, but that doesn't mean that I can make a healthy profit in a neighborhood where you won't make any money at all. So if I see a neighborhood with no grocery stores at all, I don't see opportunity: instead, I see a warning signal. There must be a reason why there aren't any grocery stores there, and if I don't know what that reason is, then it could be very foolish indeed to go blundering in where lots of sensible people have feared to tread. Writes Berg:

Firms do not even consider moving to an undeveloped neighborhood simply because no other firms can be observed to have located there, and not because expected profits were estimated and deemed too low for consideration...
We should not be surprised to find imitation heuristics in widespread use among business decision makers responsible for
choosing locations because, in many environments, imitation is consistent with profit maximization...
Beliefs about crime are an important factor influencing the location decisions of firms, and play an especially large role in conditioning firms’ decisions about entering ghettos and other stigmatized neighborhoods. Interviews with business decision makers responsible for location choice confirm that many firms cite crime as a reason for not considering stigmatized neighborhoods, although those firms rarely, if ever, conduct or commission quantitative benefit-cost assessments to justify such omissions from their consideration sets.

But I have another question. When writing for a newspaper, Berg seems to be wholly capable of writing in clear, easy-to-understand English. But when writing the abstract for his paper, he comes up with sentences like this:

The model facilitates normative analysis of imitation in location choice by explicitly quantifying losses in aggregate efficiency following a shift from centralized to decentralized regimes.

As far as I know, there's no law of economics stating that abstracts have to be as incomprehensible and jargon-filled as possible. So why is Berg writing like this?

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