Letter from Washington (III)

One of the outstanding walkable aspects of the Capitol Hill neighborhood is the presence of small-scale shopping within five minutes' walk of our apartment. These include innumerable cleaners--maybe a unique aspect of a city of "suits"--as well as pharmacies, medical offices, cafes, a used bookstore and even a couple of auto repair shops.

They also include that staple of urbanist vision, corner stores. A block away, across East Capitol Street, is Corner Market.

The Congress Market is a block west of that.

Capitol Hill Supermarket is a  little farther away, on the other side of Stanton Park.

Each has an impressive variety of foods and household goods packed around a couple of aisles. They exist in a context that is almost ideal for corner stores, an unusual combination of wealth and population density. Census tracts #66 and #82 have median family incomes of over $110,000, which provides ready spending money even with a high cost of living. Its combined 5000 residents live in less than 0.25 square miles, because many of the expensive houses have English basement apartments like the one we're living in. There are also sets of small houses that face alleys, like Terrace Court...

...and Browns Court:

In a recent interview on the Strong Towns podcast, urbanist author Jeff Speck guesstimated the population density necessary to support corner stores as 1000 households at five or six units per acre, depending on auto traffic. We got that beat here.

Corner stores here are nothing like convenience stores in my hometown of Cedar Rapids, Iowa: they look better, and don't feature gasoline pumps or huge parking lots. Yet they share feature with c-stores that I've raised when I wrote about the prospect of corner stores in Cedar Rapids three years ago: you pay premium prices for their merchandise. So we wind up doing most of our shopping at Giant Food, a supermarket on H Street. It's a walkable 0.7 miles away, though for major weekly shopping Jane prefers to drive.

Here are comparison prices for three items we bought at corner stores:

	CORNER STORE	SUPERMARKET Brand equivalent	SUPERMARKET Off brand
Graham crackers	4.99	3.59	2.00
Orange juice 58 oz	5.49	3.00	2.50
Raisins 12 oz	3.59	2.49	--

The individual price differences would add up quickly for a family of four doing their weekly shopping. So I'm left wondering about the business model for corner stores, even in walkable urban neighborhoods. New Bohemia in Cedar Rapids is pretty much of a food desert (not to mention the other basic necessities of life), but if a store like one of these opened there, would people really shop there or would they still go to Hy-Vee?

On a totally different note, notices like the one pictured above suddenly appeared at homes all over town a week ago, relating to a marathon that will be run through the city next weekend. It won't go down our street, but will be nearby on East Capitol Street, and in an area where many people including us park on the street that might increase competition. I've decided after consulting with our landlords upstairs that this isn't a big concern for us. Still, I'd rather the city over-react than under-react, as is typical in Cedar Rapids, where events like the Mayors' Bike Ride suddenly appear with no warning to residents.