Downtown Groceries

At roughly the turn of the millennium, people began returning in earnest to live in American city centers, after 50 years of urban flight (and urban blight). Young adults and baby boomers have been particularly attracted to the amenities, lifestyle and lower-maintenance dwellings that city centers have to offer. Living downtown means being steps from great restaurants, nightlife, public plazas, and cultural offerings like museums and concerts. Developers responded in the last real estate boom, augmenting downtown skylines with shiny condo towers. But one staple of modern living has been slow to join the downtown migration: the full-service grocery store.

Until recently, most downtown pioneers had to trek to the suburbs to shop at an acceptable, full-service grocery store, interspersed with emergency visits to the nearest "bodega." Many are still forced to do this. It comes down to a simple population equation that large grocers have used for decades. During the suburbanization of the mid and late 20th century, people moved to the suburbs en masse, then grocery stores followed them a few years later. Now, large grocers are similarly waiting for a critical mass in urban neighborhoods before building new stores there. Most large grocers use fairly rigid demographic formulas to determine where and when to build. In addition to total population counts, they also examine socio-economic indicators like median family income and household size. These corporate formulas often determine whether you’ll see a Whole Foods, Safeway, Aldi, or nothing at all (a.k.a. “food desert”) in your downtown.

So how are American downtowns doing in the grocery department? If there are grocery stores, do they sell fresh, healthy food? If so, is it affordable? Open at reasonable hours? Clean? Anecdotally, it’s a mixed bag (pun not initially intended).

Portland's Pearl District Whole Foods. Photo: Four Legs Good

Portland is doing quite well, with two Safeways and a Whole Foods in the city center. While many dub the latter “Whole Paycheck,” few would refute its range of healthy, high quality offerings. Whole Foods seems to be the bellwether of a revitalizing, repopulating (and some would say gentrifying) downtown, and is often a ground-floor anchor in full-block mixed-use redevelopments. Philadelphia has one on South Street. Chicago has one near the Magnificent Mile. There are seven of them on the island of Manhattan, including one three blocks north of the 9/11 Memorial.  

Safeway also sells plenty of wholesome food to downtown dwellers, and without the sticker shock. Other mid-level grocers stepping up to the urban plate include Marsh, which renovated an art-deco building in downtown Indianapolis, and Publix, which built an exhaustingly ornate store to fit downtown design guidelines in Fort Myers, Florida.

But my pal Pasqual tells me that reliable groceries are hard to find in downtown Denver. A Google search shows a suburban-style Safeway one mile east in a transitional neighborhood, and a small natural grocery in LoDo, but no centrally-located, full-service grocery store. Pickins are even slimmer in downtown Phoenix, Houston and Atlanta, where downtown residential development is similarly scant.

Small cities have even greater challenges attracting or maintaining downtown grocers. It’s not that people don’t live in the centers of small cities like Fort Wayne, Indiana or Springfield, Missouri. It’s that the big grocery chains would prefer to build anew on suburban greenfield sites using boilerplate designs that include ample parking, rather than customize a store in a tight urban neighborhood. And the markets in these small cities are not hot enough to build creative mixed-use developments like the Pearl District Safeway or the South Street Whole Foods. In some cases, classism may be at work. I can say from experience there are no full-service grocery stores in the centers of neighboring cities Allentown, Bethlehem and Easton, Pennsylvania, even though these are the most densely populated portions of the Lehigh Valley. The corporate formulas must not favor neighborhoods with poor people.

Lehigh Valley, PA full-service grocery stores, including Weis (red), Valley Farm Market (pink), Giant (yellow), Fresh Market (green), Target (aqua), Walmart (blue), Wegmans (purple). Major city centers shown with question marks. Notice they are at least 2 miles from grocery stores.

Some would argue that a large, full-service, chain grocery is not the only, nor the best, solution to having healthy, affordable food at your downtown doorstep. After all, in most world cities, grocery shopping is a gathering act. Parisians stay fit not just by eating healthy food, but also by walking between the various small specialty markets (boulangeries, fromageries, etc.) where they buy it. Grocery shopping in Asia and Africa is often a trip to a central market with hundreds of family vendors. A handful of American cities have something similar - Seattle and Baltimore included. But in most of the United States, we are accustomed to “going to the store.” And not just any store, but a known, reliable, full-service store that we trust.

Can you get decent groceries in your downtown?