A lifelong Pleasant Hill resident can no longer buy groceries from neighborhood convenience stores.
A handful of corner stores used to thrive within walking distance from Harry Hopkins’ home on Ward Street, but they’ve all gradually shuttered since the 1990s, he says.
“You could find anything there. You could feed your family if you had to,” the 52-year-old said Tuesday afternoon. “But everybody that has a say in most of the stuff here, they just let the neighborhood go down.”
While Macon-Bibb County has made strides to support its low income neighborhoods with affordable housing, food drives and demolition of blighted homes — Pleasant Hill still lacks healthy food options and grocery stores and deals with a cycle of poverty, according to locals and experts.
People living in Pleasant Hill, one of Macon-Bibb County’s lowest income neighborhoods, are expected to live two decades less than the county’s richest area, Idle Hour, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The average life expectancy in Pleasant Hill is about 63 years, but it’s 82 years in Idle Hour, according to the U.S. Small-Area Life Expectancy Estimates Project.
Generational poverty, malnutrition and trauma are the most apparent challenges attributed to the age disparity, according to Hopkins, as well as a neighborhood historian, family doctor and the Macon-Bibb County Health Department.
Income disparities are stark between Macon’s most and least affluent neighborhoods: The annual median household income in Pleasant Hill was about $13,700, compared to $194,900 in Idle Hour, according to the 2023 U.S. Census American Community Survey, the most recent comprehensive data.
The racial and financial disparities are not unique to Pleasant Hill and Idle Hour, which is a mostly white neighborhood, but they represent the largest difference in life expectancy of Bibb County neighborhoods, despite being just 5 miles apart.
Hopkins, who became partially paralyzed from a gunshot wound about 25 years ago, sat in his wheelchair on the front porch of his multi-unit house Tuesday afternoon, where he said he pays more in rent than he makes in income.
“It’s rough,” Hopkins, the youngest sibling of six, said. “Mentally, I wish I could be on an island sipping a margarita. But in reality, I’m stuck in this ****.”
The 52-year-old regularly cooks at home but often struggles to afford groceries at the nearest grocery store to Pleasant Hill: Kroger at 660 North Avenue, past Interstate 75 and over the Ocmulgee River. It’s the only grocery store in east Macon and nearest to downtown. Federal redlining from the 1960s, when I-75 split the historically Black neighborhood, have left lingering physical obstacles to find healthy food nearby.
Most of Hopkins’ protein consumption comes from eating home-grown vegetables from his girlfriend Andrea Moses’ garden in front of his house. It was full of eggplants, tomatoes, bell peppers, habaneros, squash and herbs Wednesday.
It’s one of only a few at-home gardens in the neighborhood. It’s become increasingly hard to maintain community gardens, which used to be a common source of affordable fruits and vegetables in Pleasant Hill.
George Fadil Muhammad, an east Macon resident and president of the Pleasant Hill Neighborhood Organization, said self-grown food is not a priority for many, especially younger generations.
“It requires consistency, and people at a certain point may not have that,” Muhammad said. “People who don’t have those priorities just let things go by, and (they’re) kind of waiting on a new cycle to begin.”
He thanked local food donors, but said even those sometimes only offer snacks, rather than energizing meals.
“People really gravitate heavily to cheap meats, just hamburgers and hot dogs …,” Muhammad said. “It’s just very common for children to be hungry walking the streets that obviously have not got anything to eat at home.”
Dr. Conrad Miller, a primary care physician for patients across Middle Georgia, including some in Pleasant Hill, said fast food is often the most convenient option for locals, if they can afford it.
Some of his patients told him cooking is difficult because “their schedule doesn’t allow it, their life is too chaotic …, physical inability, or (there is) something strange in their household (like) repairs,” Miller said.
Trauma often steers people away from seeking preventative medical care in Pleasant Hill, according to Miller.
High blood pressure, diabetes, stress and depression are some of the most common treatable health issues in Macon’s low income, predominantly Black neighborhoods, Miller said. Many of his patients usually only seek medical care when something feels off, rather than for regular check-ups.
A patient’s time spent in primary care accounts for 10-20% of their health outcome, or length and quality of life, according to the National Academy of Medicine.
They also often assume extreme outcomes for what ends up as a minor or treatable diagnosis. Miller attributed this to trauma and the feeling of being let down in the neighborhood.
“The first thing the patient will say is, ‘Is it cancer?’ Miller said. “Some of these people have experienced so many traumas right after another that when you give them any bad or questionable news, it automatically concerns them.”
The ZIP code 31201, which makes up most of Pleasant Hill, had one of the highest levels of trauma in Macon, according to the 2024 Adverse Childhood Experiences survey. This encompassed trauma includes violence, crime, abuse, neglect and household dysfunction.
While Hopkins said he is healthy and visits a doctor four times a year thanks to Medicaid, which may soon face cuts under President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” food insecurity in Pleasant Hill still impacts his and others’ well being.
He said local officials tend to “forget” about the needs of longtime residents in the food desert, but fast-growing and financially sound areas like downtown, Ingleside and Idle Hour receive more support.
“If people who make decisions ... really want to be helpful to the neighborhood, you got to go to the people in the neighborhood and study,” Hopkins said. “They’ve never really been in the neighborhood until they start (changing) things over here.”
Hopkins rents out a few housing units in Pleasant Hill as his form of income.
Dr. Jimmie Smith, administrator for the Macon-Bibb County Health Department, said the area needs updated zoning measures to create “empowerment zones” that would allow for more grocery and drug stores. For example, mixed-use zones could allow for commercial and residential property, and bring them closer together to improve walkability.
Incentives for developers and business owners could encourage supermarkets to stay open.
“Many of the things that we deal with from a health standpoint we can actually address outside of the doctor’s office or the health department,” Smith said.
The county has made efforts to improve the quality of life in Pleasant Hill, Smith said. But he emphasized nontraditional health factors should be considered when developing the area such as environmental impacts, space for subdivisions and grocery stores, and transitional support to bridge those seeking food and shelter.
Even if sharp changes are made, it will take several years for the life expectancy of people in Pleasant Hill to change, according to Smith, who studies social determinants of health in Macon.
“There’s ways in which we live that we actively keep some folks in poverty and it becomes a cycle,” said Smith, who also referenced the book Poverty, By America, by Matthew Desmond.
“So those life expectancy numbers are not something that fluctuate,” Smith said.
Hopkins was surprised to hear about the average life expectancy of those in his lifelong neighborhood. He said socioeconomic challenges have only pushed him and his neighbors to stay strong.
"I’m further in life than I was before I got this wheelchair,” Hopkins said. “A lot of the people living in this neighborhood were here before I even came about. … We’re still living, still in our right mind.”
This story comes to GPB through a reporting partnership with Macon Telegraph
