Comments on: Supermarkets as Neighborhood Centers: Vision For a More Walkable America

By: Ed Mejia

Ed Mejia — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 23:57:15 +0000

In order to be a more walkable America, the facilities such as supermarkets or food centers must be within the willing waking distances of Americans. Is there a study that indicates how much Americans are willing to walk to go to a neighborhood supermarket or a food center?

By: Rod Stevens

Rod Stevens — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 04:04:56 +0000

I like the concept and agree with the forecast long term, but it’s generally not in the cards yet. 8000 to 10,000 people will support about 30,000 to 35,000 square feet of space, which is about right for urban locations, but not competititve with “modern” supermarkets, which after rising to a national average of about 48,000 square feet several years ago, is now back down to 45,000 sf. People say they like convenience, but the reality is that they still drive to the less expensive stores that also have in-house florists, Starbucks, drugstores and video rentals. You can cram all that in smaller format stores, but other than Supervalue, most of the chains are keeping their formats large, even Walmart, whose “neighborhood market places” is more than 40,000 square feet. The reality is that at mid-income ranges we are still car-driven.

By: Kristen Mitchell

Kristen Mitchell — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 01:01:19 +0000

I am working to recruit a full-service grocery store to a neighborhood in the city in which I work. This is a low income community, and although it is dense, it is not nearly as dense as, say, Harlem. I would like this grocery store to fit into a walkable, mixed-use environment, but I have been told repeatedly that we’d be lucky to have a grocery store even consider the neighborhood and I should not jeopardize any interest by asking for a better site plan, less parking, etc. I would really appreciate hearing about examples of recently constructed full service grocery stores in low income communities, particularly those that provide less parking than the norm or are incorporated into mixed-use buildings with parking garages. Thank you!

By: Health Magazine

Health Magazine — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 13:11:32 +0000

An interesting trend, though. In fact, super markets drove small grocery stores out of business. Now, it seems the balance is reversed in favor of smaller grocery stores.

By: Chris Saleeba

Chris Saleeba — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 16:01:46 +0000

We also need to address access to grocery stores from an equity standpoint. The Convergence Partnership published a document called Recipes for Change: Healthy Food in Every Community. In the document they point out that low income communities face significant challenges to buying fresh fruits and vegetables. Moreover, many residents in low-income communities do not live withing walking distance of a supermarket and must travel further than higher income residents to buy groceries. My point, we need to consider ways to bring grocery stores and/or other healthy retail outlets (such as selling fresh fruits and vegetables at the corner store) to all communities.

By: Beth Humstone

Beth Humstone — Sun, 30 May 2010 15:02:01 +0000

I live in downtown Portland, Maine and often walk to Whole Foods and the Public Market a few blocks away. (I could walk to Hannaford’s but the busy six lane roads are a deterrent.) I have noticed a lot of wire baskets on wheels being used by all kinds of people in the downtown – not just those collecting bottles and cans. Most of us in my loft building have them. (Mine has a sign on front saying, “Bellows Falls, Vermont: Doing Cartwheels for Downtown Merchants.”) In addition, in our bike storage area, I observe most bikes have saddle bags attached. We definitely embrace this small city living where we can walk and bike to meet most of our needs. Now if there was just a hardware store around the corner!

By: Richard Strathern

Richard Strathern — Sat, 29 May 2010 23:36:16 +0000

Here are several excellent comments. Can we keep these grocery stores to 25,000 sq ft?

By: Jon Reeds

Jon Reeds — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 15:46:57 +0000

I’m still a little surprised whenever I see US commentators citing Europe in general, or the UK in particular, as the exemplar of good urbanism. Europe certainly does have many examples of good practice, but it is far from universal and some countries have made only timid steps in that direction.
Here in the UK, the weekly car trip to the supermarket for groceries has been most people’s default mode for some decades now. This is the product of a laxer planning regime than you might imagine; up until about 15 years ago there was a huge explosion of out-of-town supermarkets and shopping centres. In the second half of the 1990s some curbs were put on further expansion, but the last 10 years have seen a slow erosion of those controls. Thus supermarkets are encouraged to choose town centre before edge-of-centre and that before out-of-town. There was also a retail needs test. But although the growth of out-of-town shopping is slower than it was, they are still getting built and town centre shops, especially food shops, have long been shutting. That draining away of town centre vitality has turned into a flood with the recession of the last two years and today town centres, even in prosperous areas, are full of boarded up shops and in economically disadvantaged areas centres are in a bad way. Meanwhile our big four supermarket chains have responded to the weak restrictions on building large supermarkets with a new generation of town centre stores designed to suck up any spend that’s available and finish off the last few small competitors.
There are a huge number of obstacles to overcome to restore traditional town centres. Britain, like America, has a “long hours culture” which is always going to make a weekly or fortnightly shop look more attractive than a community-friendly daily shop. Most of our larger towns have some kind of rail service and everywhere has a bus service of varying quality, but it’s not as good as you might think and our efforts to rebuild our city light rail systems (entirely destroyed between 1930 and 1960) over the last 20 years have been patchy and are presently stalled (unlike yours). Sure, the UK never got as far down the wholly car-dependent townscape road as yours did, but the advantage of that is that you have “low hanging fruit” opportunities to turn things round. Here they must struggle against entrenched attitudes. Despite England having the highest population density of any European country, we still persist in trying to build low-density, car-dependent, greenfield sprawl suburbs.
So, please don’t feel hesitant about proclaiming the successes of your urbanist, transit-oriented development and smart growth movements. The UK would certainly benefit from something similar.

By: Neal Peirce

Neal Peirce — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 20:41:05 +0000

Here’s an especially interesting note and relevant opinion piece from Paul Bray, President of the Albany Roundtable civic lunch forum. His e-mail is PMBRAY@aol.com

Neal: I wish the supermarkets you talk about in your column became a reality. I have seen it work and I have seen markets try to become a destination for more than food to carry home in an auto. But it is tough. That is why I thought about the peddler and wrote the following column. Perhaps you might be interested. Best, Paul

Back to the future where we live

By Paul M. Bray

Breaking out of our auto dependency is about increasing options for mobility like living where you can walk to work or have good access to transit. Getting from here to there has been the focus without thinking how much less there there we have where we live and where we work because of the auto age.

While the auto offers efficient personal mobility if you ignore traffic congestion, when you get to your destination the space required for parking results in less diversity of uses. Meeting the need for parking usually takes priority in our downtowns and residential neighborhoods.

If the destination is a downtown, it often lacks retail diversity. You can’t find, for example, a book store or sporting goods store in downtown Albany. Auto dependency has led to retail and food markets to be clustered in isolated malls on the outskirts of urban areas. Suburban residential neighborhoods generally lack walkable access to a grocery, café, hardware store, hair dresser and a library.

Even with reliable and frequent transit to work, we would still be dependent on the auto for much of our shopping. A former regional director of the Department of Transportation told me there are many more automobiles with their carbon foot print on the road on Saturdays than during the week. He said the first instance of auto gridlock in the Albany metro area will come on a Saturday.

This led me to think about what is turning out to be an emerging trend back to the future with the milk truck, ice cream truck, veggie mobile, bookmobile and art mobile coming to our own home and neighborhood.

The ice cream truck with its jingle to attract kids is still a regular during the summer in my Albany neighborhood. The home delivery milkman is making a comeback. Norm Monsen, a consultant to the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection, believes “a milkman renaissance is starting to take shape in many parts of the country”. The NY Times reports “For Oberweis Dairy in North Auroa, Ill., home delivery customers have increased to 40,000 from 10,000 in 1997.”

A veggie mobile has started to bring fresh produce to Troy and Albany children and seniors in the food deserts our center cites have become as supermarkets retreated to the edges of the city or to the suburbs.

In addition to food, the Albany metro area has benefited from the Music Mobile started and maintained for 30 years by Ruth Pelham. Ruth has reached tens of thousands of children and adults with Music Mobile songs as her van traveled throughout our communities.

In the Chicago area an artist converted a school bus into an art gallery that similarly brings visual arts from neighborhood to neighborhood.

My first thought about going back to the mid twentieth century when home delivery of bread, milk, eggs, vegetables, chicken and meat and frequency of other services through providers like knife sharpeners was that this would only increase social isolation. If we can work at home and goods can be delivered to our door, where would social interaction happen?

But the opposite may be the case. Ice cream trucks have a way of drawing neighbors out of their home with their children to buy ice cream. Pied Pipers like Ruth Pelham and veggie mobiles can also be catalysts for bringing neighbors together. Regularly scheduled visits to neighborhoods by veggie, bread and butcher trucks would increase the livability (including walkable access to more goods) of visited neighborhoods. It would also require much less carbon than all the auto trips now used by individuals to buy what the mobile provider offers.

We need many options to be able to move beyond adjusting our lives to our autos and accommodating its insatiable and costly requirement for parking space. Let us think about living in a time when we can look forward to what a nano world might offer and back to what peddlers and delivery people could provide goods directly for people where they live.

By: Lawrence Gulotta

Lawrence Gulotta — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 15:56:42 +0000

I’ve seen such supermarkets, as you describe, in the Seattle area. By comparison to NYC standards, these new style supermarkets are extraordinary. The merchandise is of high quality, the aisles are very wide and briming with specialty/imported items. The store was clean and very well designed. The store I visited had a carefully designed classroom/kitchen for cooking classes. There were chairs and seating outdoors. The parking lot was on a small scale.

The problem we have in NYC is that we do not have enough supermarkets. The Municipality recently issued many more permits for “curbside fruit and vegetable stands” because many neighborhoods are so underserviced by supermarkets.

The economics of supermarkets are not so attractive when land values and property taxes are so high as in urban areas. Incentive programs are being used to spur supermarket chains to locate in the City.

Of course, we do have a large number of fancy specialty stores that cater to expensive tastes and deep pocketbooks.

It was a hurculean effort to attract a full service Pathmark super -market to Harlem, in the early 1990s. City, State and Federal monies were required to subsidize what so many suburban areas take for granted. Many urban areas require shopers to leave their neighborhoods to purchase groceries.