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 It was outdated quickly.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.
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| June 19th, 1936 |
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| July 3rd and October 1st, 1940 |
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| January 24th, 1923 |
Piggly Wiggly opened downtown in 1923, and our first formal zoning was in 1926.
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| 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.
4 comments:
Grocery stores within purely residential areas might be a tough sell for many reasons:
- Store size limiting variety
- Independent stores may not have pricing parity with chains (perhaps IGA does?)
- "Neighborhood" stores need safe connections that allow people to walk/bike/etc. there without requiring a vehicle.
- To be viable, there needs to be a sufficient density of people within a catchment area, especially if parking is limited.
- The people in the area need to be willing to carry their groceries etc. home. This usually will mean a small amount of food, or a small household.
- Lack of parcels that could be redeveloped into a store. Or just the cost to develop a parcel with a current building on it.
Beyond those issues, there is the e-grocery option that seems to be used by more people post-Covid.
Small grocery stores have been tried, and either are niche, try to be general (e.g., Green Zebra), or are niche and expensive.
I wonder if Cristaller would come up with Central Place Theory in this environment? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_place_theory
A follow-up on online shopping from a post on Streetblog. The journal article is free to read as well.
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2023/08/23/study-grocery-delivery-may-not-reduce-driving-as-proponents-claim
An inventory of grocery stores in Salem since, say, 1930, would be an interesting project. In 1978 I know there was a QFC just a few blocks from the Safeway, across the street from where Cinebarre is now. I think it's now a school or office building of some kind. Central Thriftway was just south of downtown on Commercial. Another Thriftway was at Mission and Hines. Those are the only ones I remember...there might have been more in the central zone. But anyone who lived in or near downtown was no farther than a few blocks from a supermarket. By then most of the small corner markets in the surrounding neighborhoods were closed or showing signs of strain. I specifically remember the little one on 17th, the Highland market just down the street from my apartment, and one at High Street and Lincoln. My parents lived in London around that time with the means to have a car for my mother to use if she'd wanted one. Instead she walked up to the "high street" most days, year round, rolling a little cart, to stop at the bakery, butcher, greengrocer, florist, stationers, newsstand, etc. Milk and other dairy were delivered. It would be great if local entrepreneurs could come up with a successful "corner store" model for general food and retail on a small scale, but it seems that Costco, Walmart, Amazon, Walgreens, Target, Trader Joe's, the Kroger/Albertsons/Safeway/Fred Meyer conglomerate, Uber Eats, GrubHub, and meal kit delivery companies have convinced most people that big is better and even that shopping is passé.
(A minor note on commenting policy: Please adopt a pseudonym/handle for commenting! The August 23rd comment meets the intent of completely "anon" commenting, but not the other two, which have opinion and longer comment.)
See "Veterans Hall Litigated, Abandoned Before Bergs Market at New Howard School Site" for more on the former QFC by Cinebarre.
Several others you mention are touched on in posts tagged "Grocery History."
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