Zoning and the Loss of Neighborhood Grocery Stores

Earlier this month Strong Towns published a note on neighborhood grocery stores, "The Death of the Neighborhood Grocery Store."

In it they seemed to place the primary blame on zoning for excluding small retail from residential districts.

In essence, this means that in most residential neighborhoods, people don’t have a choice. They are forced to drive to get their groceries. What’s more, thanks to zoning codes, residents have been stripped of any avenue to come up with solutions to the problems facing their neighborhood. They have no agency over whether or not a large supermarket chooses to locate in their area.

What if, instead of being at the mercy of the workings of a giant corporation, headquartered hundreds or thousands of miles away, residents were allowed to open a produce stand? More broadly, what if residents were allowed to respond to the needs of their community? Wouldn’t that be a more equitable landscape?

It used to be possible. It isn’t anymore.

But the move away from neighborhood grocery stores is much more than a story about zoning, even if it also correlates with zoning. Zoning reform is a necessary ingredient for the return of neighborhood grocery, but far from a sufficient cause.

This is not a major criticism of the piece, but a quibble about emphasis and proportion.

The movement and building forms of the downtown Safeway encapsulate the complexity. In 1936 they opened a store on 13th and State. Even though it was a chain store, it was still neighborhood scaled and had no parking lot. It was outdated quickly. In 1941 they replaced that store with the one on 14th and State. The chain had purchased two lots in order to have a parking lot alongside the building. Within a decade it too was obsolete, and Safeway opened the large supermarket at the current site a few blocks north.

June 19th, 1936

July 3rd and October 1st, 1940

Successor store, just 15 years later
November 13th, 1951

The note at Strong Towns does not give sufficient weight to the fact that the centralization of grocery stores was driven also by consumer demand — by cars and by customers who wanted to drive for groceries, by the businesses' desire to supply parking lots for those customers, and by the quantity pricing advantage of chain stores. Just look at how much business Costco does today.

For the old Safeway store at 14th and State, zoning was a difficulty but not a barrier. The lots had been in a residential zone, and "the city council granted a change...to business classification."

Current zoning for the corner store in Highland permits a market, but the building has struggled to attract a new store business.

Back in 2017

During the debate on neighborhood hubs, many said they did not one one near them, and some people even said outright they preferred to drive for short trips, which made explicit the revealed preference of many.

Another piece at Strong Towns, published a few days earlier, "3 Takeaways From Ivan Illich’s Critique of Cars," is much more abstract, but also gets at the totalizing mode of our autoism.

Most people, myself included, subconsciously expect our movements around cities to be speedy, convenient, and efficient…desires that are not bad in themselves, yet which emerge so naturally that we hardly notice. We inherit such values from being born into a car-centric world, but no matter how natural such expectations may feel, they are not beyond debate....

Drivers are not the customer, they are the product. Our participation in the game of car centricity is essential to keep countless industries going. Why else do you think alternative modes of transit are not heartily integrated into our local transit plans? In order to run our errands, we have to spend much more time and money using a car than we would if we could hop on a bus or a bike. And that is the point. Auto-oriented transit is organized to extract as much from the user as possible. How exactly is this liberating?

Space limitations in the grocery zoning piece might preclude the larger discussion that I would have liked to see. So, again, the points here are minor quibbles. But when I look at Salem's history of grocery stores, I don't see zoning as the primary culprit for the loss of neighborhood stores.

January 24th, 1923

Piggly Wiggly opened downtown in 1923, and our first formal zoning was in 1926.

January 30th, 1923

Chain stores with innovations in self-service and cash-and-carry retailing, and the customers who responded, started the erosion before the city introduced zoning. Cheap parking added to the erosion. Our autoism is the heart of the matter.

See all notes on grocery history here.