10th Anniversary Post: Neighborhood stores

 

Founded April 2022:
Cultivate Hope Corner Store, 604 Ellis Boulevard NW

One of my hopes ten years ago for urbanist development in Cedar Rapids was the emergence of neighborhood grocery stores. I'd been reading urbanist luminaries like Andres Duany and co-authors, as well as Jane Jacobs and Stacy Mitchell, who commended having daily essentials like groceries within walking distance. Though corner stores flourished a couple of generations ago--the 1953 Polk's Directory for Cedar Rapids lists well over 100--today the grocery landscape is dominated by big box suburban supermarkets and gas station-convenience stores. In 2015, the then-new master planning document Envision CR did not mention corner stores, although it allowed that newer developments on the edge of town could see "neighborhood retail or mixed use" near residences.

Closed June 2024:
Former Hy-Vee, 1556 1st Avenue NE

The ensuing decade has brought some though not very much movement in this direction. The versatile social service nonprofit Matthew 25 opened a corner grocery store on the northwest side three years ago. Meanwhile, however, the Mound View and Wellington Heights neighborhoods lost their grocery store when Hy-Vee closed last spring. There are a couple of "international" groceries in preparation, but they haven't opened yet. 

Opening TBD: Hornbill Asian Market,
 1445 1st Avenue SE (photo 12/31/2024)

And burgeoning apartment construction in the core neighborhoods have surprisingly (to me, at least) not resulted in local stores to serve their new occupants. 

The Neighborhood Corner Store is operated by Matthew 25 as a non-profit, and they seek donations of cash and produce. It has the potential to do a lot of good in what it calls a "former food desert," but may not be a model for widespread adoption of corner stores. When I talk to sympathetic people about the Neighborhood Corner Store, they immediately mention the shortage of parking. Of course, if you're coming from across town, that's going to matter, but that's not what corner stores are for. It makes me wonder if Cedar Rapids even "gets" the concept of corner stores, much less is waiting for them to supplant the large-lot suburban supermarkets?

Small groceries were everywhere in my early life; growing up, we did most of our grocery shopping at the Sunnyside Supermarket, three blocks from our house, albeit required crossing a fearsome state highway.

Former Sunnyside Supermarket site:
611 West Roosevelt Road, Wheaton, IL today

My only recent experience with corner stores came in Washington, D.C., where I spent a semester in 2018. There were three corner stores near our apartment, no doubt due to the neighborhood's unusual combination of wealth and population density. One of them, the Congress Market on East Capitol Drive, has since gone out of business. 

Congress Market, formerly at 4th St and East Capitol Drive SE

So has an Amazon Fresh store in Crystal City that had only opened in 2022, as well as two small-format Target stores (Del Maestro 2025).

So, I don't know. The argument for corner stores is compelling: As walkable destinations, they provide everyday opportunities for exercise, energy conservation, and community building. But are there viable business plans, and strong enough public preferences to choose corner stores over megamarkets? 

Dave Olverson's recent piece for City Builder blames zoning restrictions for the lack of corner stores, and so, in a talk for Cities for Everyone that focused on housing, does Missing Middle Housing author Dan Parolek. Addison Del Maestro, however, notes the difficulty of slotting neighborhood stores into metropolitan form that is decidedly suburban:

"Urbanism," after all, isn't just land use. It's all the other elements of a place scaled to urban land use. [Emphasis his.] That includes passenger and utility vehicles--urban firetrucks, the small cars that Europe calls "city cars"--for example. It also includes smaller-scale retail. But because the status quo everyday store has shifted from a small Main Street store to a big-box, car-oriented suburban one, localities and developers do not have a bundle of "off the shelf" retail concepts to fill out Main Streets, urban neighborhoods, and mixed-use developments. Residents want their own grocery store nearby or underneath the apartments, but most national and general merchandise chains do not really operate that retail concept at scale. (Del Maestro 2025)

Cedar Rapids found this out when city officials, actively but in vain, tried to recruit grocery chains into the former Hy-Vee space on 1st Avenue NE. I just don't think that zoning reform will be enough in our town, as long as grocers choose away from small stores, and residents are for the most part comfortable driving to supermarkets, as well as being anxious about the supply of parking being impacted by stores near their homes. 

Neighborhood supermarket? Folks in this subdivision
can walk to Hy-Vee

ORIGINAL POST: "Envision CR IV: Neighborhood corner stores," 28 May 2015

EXCITING UPDATES!!

"NewBo City Market Expansion to Field Neighborhood Grocery by Field to Family," Iowa's News Now, 8 May 2025

Rebekah Vaughan, "Developer Hopes to Bring Grocery Store to Wellington Heights, Neighbors React," KCRG.com, 6 May 2025

10th anniversary post: Improve public transportation

 

Passengers boarding at Ground Transportation Center

Early in 2015, Cedar Rapids produced a master planning document, Envision CR, that included two ideas for public transit:

1. "Continue to evaluate transit ridership and serviceability to identify opportunities for improvement" (#37)
2. "Explore the possibility of creating a BRT-like crossroads that connects users from Lindale Mall to Westdale, and from Hiawatha to Kirkwood Community College" (#38)

"BRT," by the way, stands for Bus Rapid Transit.

These are part of a longer section on mobility, which aims for a multi-modal (i.e. not just cars) network that connects places, eliminates barriers, and is safe and pleasant to use.

Ten years later, nothing as radical as BRT has been implemented, but a number of positive changes have been made:

• The #5 bus, which runs along 1st Avenue from downtown to the boundary with Marion, runs every 15 minutes throughout the day
• Two suburban circulators, the #20 and the #30, serve Marion and the far northside/Hiawatha, respectively
• Service has been extended one hour later in the evening, with the last bus on each route departing at 7:15 and running its route until around 8:00
• While not strictly part of the Cedar Rapids bus system, the 380 Express bus, an inter-city service begun in 2018, departs for Coralville and Iowa City every 20 minutes throughout the day

Also, I'm not at all confident about this, but there seems to be more capacity for bicycles on buses, albeit only two per ride. I've never personally witnessed someone unable to load their bike because the rack on the bus was full.

Bike rack demonstration during Move More Week, Oct. 2022  

Riding the bus is easier than ever these days, because apps like Ride Systems, Transit, and any mapping app I've used take most of the guesswork out of when the bus will arrive. (I say "most of the guesswork" because every once in a while Ride Systems will show me a phantom bus.) I've been riding more because I get free rides with my senior pass, and while buses are typically not stuffed full, at least during peak times they are well-used. Consider that a bus with five passengers is serving more people than 99 percent of private motor vehicles.

There are definitely some pinch points, however, that limit how connected and pleasant riding the bus can be. One issue is Cedar Rapids' sprawled design--our 137,000 residents are spread over 71 square miles, or less than 2000 per--which scatters people and destinations. That puts quite the strain on the system, given that we seem committed to a coverage model, and so most people who ride the bus have no other choice.

What's the next step? 

Sean Duffy, U.S. Secretary of Transportation
(Source: transportation.gov)

In the public chaos that is America in 2025, the answer to that question on any subject at all is anyone's guess. That is certainly true for public transportation, towards which the Trump administration has characteristic hostility. (See Weiner and Duncan 2025, Parshley 2025.) The Chicago Transit Authority has already announced substantial imminent service cuts (Farver 2025), while the State of Colorado is scrambling to replace federal funding for Bus Rapid Transit projects (Minor 2025). Suffice to say funding levels in Cedar Rapids are unlikely to go up in the next four years, and may be drastically reduced.

With that said, I've noticed a few pinch points in our local transit system that we could address with incremental measures. Even small steps have tradeoffs, though, and I don't have any data on which to assess those, so I'll just throw these out there and walk away.

1. Improve traffic flow. Any place where the bus has to stop for cross traffic should not be on the route. A couple examples are the inbound #2 bus on 5th Avenue which has to wait for all traffic to clear on 8th Street (and currently 7th Street, too, due to a construction detour) before turning left, and the inbound #6 bus on 2nd Avenue which has to cross both 8th and 7th. Shifting the route one block over means they're on streets (well, avenues) with all-way stops at 8th and 7th. This will improve both travel times and drivers' nerves.
2. Express or crosstown buses. As of now, anyone traveling from one side of the city to the other has to change buses at the Ground Transportation Center, which entails a wait of up to 15 minutes. We can't eliminate everyone's transfer issues, given the scattered nature of Cedar Rapids destinations, but there could be one or two buses that go north-south, and one or two that go east-west without stopping at the GTC.
3. Swing shift routes. Anyone who works past 7 p.m. can't take the bus home. Could we exchange some day service for a small number of routes that run late into the evening? That could be useful for a substantial number of workers.
4. Shuttle buses for evening events in the core. Once Downtown recovered from the 2008 flood, it saw an increase in events and restaurants, which led to many complaints about the scarcity of parking. The answer is not more parking lots, which are the implacable enemy of city activity, but more ways to get there.

Buses poised to depart the GTC

A workable bus system is an important part of any city's transportation network, for reasons of equity, traffic congestion, environmental impact, and financial resilience. The potential of the bus system to achieve those goals is constrained by the layout of the city. But even a city as sprawled and scattered as Cedar Rapids can do things to improve that functionality.

Rezone CR Open House

Early attendance was light on a stormy evening in Cedar Rapids, as city officials offered a sneak preview of the new zoning plan prior to its official release July 3. Form-based zoning will be applied in a small section of the city (see map above). I was on the Steering Committee for the rezoning, but have had no role in its content.

A few quick reactions:

1. This is the right part of the city on which to try this: older, already-urban areas that have seen considerable redevelopment since the flood. For the most part, the redevelopment has reinforced rather than challenged the traditional pre-Euclidean form of these areas. If form-based zoning works here, perhaps it can be extended to the adjoining core neighborhoods: Mound View (soon to be the object of the College District Action Plan), Wellington Heights, the Taylor Area and the Northwest. Beyond that the city's form is predominantly suburban, and it's hard to imagine much change from that is likely.

2. Outside of downtown (the red area on the map), there seems to be a good balance of mixed use (orange) and purely residential (baby blue). It looks like no one in this part of the city will live more than three blocks from a commercial establishment, albeit may be one that sells auto parts when you need a loaf of bread.

3. The area between 7th and 10th Streets East is designated "Urban Neighborhood General Flex"--essentially, mixed use with taller buildings--which seems appropriate for the area between downtown, the hospitals and the neighborhoods. Whether it actually develops that way depends on the acquiesence of the hospitals and Physicians Clinic of Iowa, which have so far been powerful forces behind anomalously suburban-style development. Another old house came down today, in fact:

Photo by Cindy Hadish, from Save CR Heritage Facebook page

This could, of course, make way for new construction, but the clearances seem intended for another parking lot.

EARLIER POST: "Re-Zoning Cedar Rapids," 4 December 2017

Re-Zoning Cedar Rapids

Community residents at ReZone Open House,
New Bo City Market, October 2017

Cedar Rapids's adoption of form-based zoning will be targeted in scale and proceed incrementally, according to city planners Seth Gunnerson and Anne Russett. The two spoke last week to the Corridor Urbanism group, following an input-seeking open house in mid-October. (I am a member of the ReZone Steering Committee, which has met occasionally since March 2016 to discuss formulation with planners and the consultants from SAFEbuilt Studio.)

ReZone Cedar Rapids grew out of the city's comprehensive plan adopted in 2015. Form-based zoning is being applied first in the downtown area, as well as four nearby areas that had previously been designated as zoning overlay districts allowing for relaxation of existing zoning rules: Czech Village/New Bohemia, Ellis Boulevard on the Northwest Side, MedQuarter and Kingston Village. The intent is to follow through where there has been ongoing focused planning efforts; these areas can then serve as models for other areas where occupants may seek focused planning in the future (such as the College District).

Citizen suggestions at the open house for future form-based zones included
Mound View/College District (center right cluster)
and along the Highway 100 extension (far left)

The area created by the extension of Highway 100 is currently a blank slate, and currently under the jurisdiction of Linn County, but is likely to be annexed by the City of Cedar Rapids before development, so form-based zoning and even walkable urbanism are open possibilities there. This poster...

...presented by H.R. Green Engineering at a city open house in March 2014 suggested walkable urbanism was at least being considered for future development along Highway 100, albeit there were two other posters there too.

Gunnerson and Russett explained that form-based zoning centers on the form and size of buildings rather than separating uses (residential, commercial and industrial being the three main traditional categories). The code also describes street networks and multiple access, neighborhood character and the relationship of buildings to streets.

Dot stickers indicated citizen support

Typically form-based regulations have buildings fronting the streets rather than existing behind parking areas...

...or green space, and describe pedestrian scale infrastructure like lighting...

and signs...

...although any form including large-lot suburban subdivisions can be part of the code.

The reasons to change the zoning code, besides encouraging more traditional walkable development, is to allow more options for neighborhoods beyond single use, update zoning that is often decades old and not descriptive of certain areas, and simplifying the process of approving or disapproving developments.

The first draft of the code is due this winter; the revised draft following public feedback will be presented to the City Council in summer 2018. The new codes may take effect immediately or be phased in over a number of months.

My guess is the average Cedar Rapids citizen will not notice much impact from this zoning change. In the targeted districts certain types of building will be restricted, but other types can be expedited. Over the long term we can hope for better economic development in those economically-important districts, and aroused public interest in attempting form-based zoning in other parts of the city. I'm more hopeful about the first than about the second.

CORRECTION: The discussion of property along the Highway 100 extension has been amended to clarify the probable sequence of annexation and development i.e. previous false information has been replaced by true information.

MORE! MORE! MORE!

City's promotional "trailer":

The city's Rezone website contains display boards as well as results of public input.

SEE ALSO:
"What is a 'Form-Based Code' and Other Mysteries of Zoning," 7 March 2016
"Envision CR Open House," 26 March 2014

Envisioning CR V: Regional governance

Sprawl benefits edge city governments, but not the metropolitan region... or the environment
(Photo credit: Rich Reid, Fine Art America)

To cut to the chase: Is there anything about "regional governance" in Envisioning CR? No--probably not surprising, because Cedar Rapids can't make specific plans beyond its own boundaries. But it's important to the future of the city anyhow.

Regional governance is important because one of the major obstacles that gets in the way of addressing almost any American policy problem you care to name is that our political arrangements do not match the reality of people's lives.

Source: Wikipedia

This has not always been the case. Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America (1835-40), described an America of self-governing towns, with a few weighty matters handled at the state level and a very small number at the national level. That made sense in a world where economies were local, with town commerce linked to surrounding farms; and when most people performed all their lives' functions in a small geographic space generally within walking distance of their residence. [This isn't to say people didn't move--in the 18th and 19th centuries every generation of Nesmiths began life in a different state than the one before, and everyone's heard of the peripatetic Ingalls family of the Little House series of books--but these moves tended to be from one self-contained community to another.]

Political arrangements reflected this way of life. In self-governing towns with self-contained economies, neighbors could decide the kind of community they wanted, and could use their resources to build that community. They had to live both within the limitations of their resources and with the consequences of what they decided.

I don't want to idealize early America. Even de Tocqueville admitted his descriptions applied to a relatively small part of the country, and even that part (the Northeast) excluded blacks, Native Americans and non-conformists from full membership in the community. Slavery was legal in much of the country, gays and the mentally ill were pariahs everywhere, and women's lives were extremely and rigidly circumscribed. Today's technology and global economy provides abundant material comfort that would make most of us reluctant to return to those bygone days.

Technology and globalization bring their own sets of problems, though, and we have been slow to respond to them. My argument here is that one way in which we have been slow to respond is in our political arrangements. The national government wields power in more areas than it used to, and in a global economy that's appropriate. Still, many political decisions are made at the state and municipal level at a time when most people in their daily or economic lives encounter those boundaries as artificial.

Peter Calthorpe and William Fulton noted 14 years ago that most of us live our lives in a region, [which is] a large and multifaceted metropolitan area encompassing hundreds of places that we would traditionally think of as distinct and separate "communities" [ch. 1]. Individuals cross municipal boundaries to work and shop; investors think in terms of the whole area's reputation, work force, &c.; people across political boundary lines are economically interdependent; and they share a cultural identity as well as a natural environment. Calthorpe and Fulton argue for regional design--"conceiving the region and its elements as a unit not separately"--in order to integrate its ecology, economy, history, politics, regulations, culture and social structure [ch. 3]. Only at the regional level can effective policies be made to address efficiently issues of growth, land use, transportation, housing, poverty, education and taxation [ch. 4]. This can be facilitated by leadership at the state level--to start with, national and state transportation policy need to stop incentivizing sprawl--but requires vision in the region itself [see examples of successes and failures in ch. 8].

Sprawl not only facilitates the political atomization of metropolitan regions, it is facilitated by it. Todd Litman and his colleagues at the London School of Economics note that while sprawl benefits the individuals who can afford it, it carries substantial costs, including land use displacement, per capita infrastructure requirements, travel time and distance, traffic fatalities, and physical inactivity and obesity. They list a number of market-based policy reforms cities can pursue in the way of smart growth: cities can improve and encourage more compact housing options, reduce or eliminate minimum parking requirements, reduce development and utility fees for compact infill development, charge efficient prices for using roads and parking facilities, apply multimodal transport planning, and correct tax policies that unintentionally favor sprawl and automobile travel. But cities can't do these things if they're thwarted by state or national governments, or if other political units in the metro region have incentives to continue sprawling.

Of course, moving decision-making to the metropolitan level doesn't guarantee the decisions will be made well, as witness Dave Alden's report of the regional rail authority in Petaluma choosing to site a commuter rail station in a spot with few prospects for much residential population. But metropolitan government does mean the considerations decision-makers use will be based on the scale of the whole region, not the efforts of some political atoms to get the advantage over others.

Cedar Rapids shares a metropolitan region with several smaller communities as well as unincorporated Linn County. It has an advantage which many larger central cities--Chicago and St. Louis, for example--do not, in that it commands the vaster part of both metro population and economic resources. There are a couple of regional intergovernmental organizations: the Linn County Board of Supervisors are elected from five districts with varying mixes of urban, suburban and rural precincts. The Corridor Metropolitan Planning Organization ("Corridor MPO") is a forum for discussing issues, particularly related to transportation, among appointed representatives of Cedar Rapids and five adjoining towns, the county, and key non-governmental organizations.

Neither really amounts to regional government, nor has either been notably successful at promoting regional-mindedness. Partly this is due to limited jurisdiction, but mostly it's due to revenue being handled at the municipality level. It may be in Cedar Rapids's interest to control sprawl--although if it were we wouldn't be all in on the Highway 100 extension, would we?--but controlling metropolitan growth clearly hurts the surrounding communities by robbing them of potential corporate and individual tax revenue. So Marion sprawls like the devil's on its tail, and Hiawatha and Cedar Rapids try to poach each other's businesses. A couple years ago, the MPO nearly broke up when Cedar Rapids fought with the smaller towns over funding for trails--the smaller towns wanted more money for roads--and then tried to spend trail funds to connect two sections of the downtown Skywalk.

Cedar Rapids can do a lot on its own, and its plans in Envision CR to move to complete streets and transect-based zoning will be hugely positive steps. But only a regional government could enact an urban growth boundary, no poaching, and revenue sharing such that Cedar Rapids's loss is not Hiawatha's gain. Until we get a handle on these issues as a metropolis, and stop playing games of beggar-thy-neighbor, critical issues will defy solution. As much as this true for Cedar Rapids, it's even more true for Chicago, Kansas City, Minneapolis-St. Paul, St. Louis, and other major metros.

FROM A DIFFERENT VANTAGE POINT

Jeff Wood, "Metro Areas--True Laboratories of Democracy," Talking Headways Podcast 62, Streetsblog USA, 4 June 2015, http://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/06/04/talking-headways-podcast-metro-areas-the-true-laboratories-of-democracy/ ...interview with Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution, co-author (with Jennifer Bradley) of The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy (Brookings Institution, 2014) on devolution of policy making in Britain from national to metropolitan government. Katz is mainly concerned about the national vs. local dimension of the level-of-government topic, and as such doesn't distinguish between cities and metropolitan areas.

SOURCES

Peter Calthorpe and William Fulton, The Regional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl (Island, 2001)
Envision CR [Cedar Rapids's master plan adopted 27 January 2015]

Todd Litman, "Urban Sprawl Costs the American Economy More Than $1 Trillion Annually," USAPP, London School of Economics and Political Science, 1 June 2015, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2015/06/01/urban-sprawl-costs-the-american-economy-more-than-1-trillion-annually-smart-growth-policies-may-be-the-answer/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Usapp+%28USAPP+-+American+Politics+and+Policy%29



EARLIER POSTS IN THIS SERIES
"Envisioning CR I: A 24-Hour Downtown," 1 March 2015
"Envision CR II: Including the Poor," 15 March 2015
"Envision CR III: Improve Public Transportation," 6 April 2015
"Envision CR IV: Neighborhood Stores," 28 May 2015

Envision CR IV: Neighborhood stores

Is this corner in need of a store?

One of the critical factors in whether people walk at all is whether there are places to walk to. This hit home to me last summer while I was investigating how people used Redmond Park on Cedar Rapids's southeast side. I was interested in whether the busy three-lane one-way 3rd Avenue served as a barrier to park use. It didn't, but what really impressed me is how many people I saw walking from the surrounding neighborhood through the park, across 3rd Avenue, and then across 1st Avenue to Hy-Vee Food Store. Hy-Vee itself isn't constructed in a pedestrian-friendly way--whether coming from Mound View or Wellington Heights, any pedestrian has to make their way across several lanes of parking lot--but it is impelling enough to get people to walk, across the parking lot and all those busy streets.

1st Avenue Hy-Vee

Neighborhood stores--small-scale operations located in residential areas--have pretty much disappeared from American towns and cities, but before World War II they were plentiful in any populous community. Historian Mark Stoffer-Hunter refers to Scolaro's on 1st Av and 29th St NE as "one of the many small grocery stores that served the people living nearby" (Henry and Hunter 2005: 54). When poet Paul Engle (1908-1991) was in high school, he worked at a drug store a couple blocks from his home:

I spent seven hours a day, seven days a week, for seven dollars a week, in that little place crammed with drugs, lotions, tonics, tobacco, candy, ice cream, ointments, soft drinks, writing papers, newspapers, magazines, and the row of pumps with their many flavors called a soda fountain.... Now, of course, the drugstore culture has deteriorated--real drugs instead of a soda fountain! (Engle 1996: 36; similar reminiscences from Kingsport, Tennessee, in Stallard 2008)

The Paul Engle Center for Community Arts is in the former pharmacy building

The last two of the neighborhood groceries depicted by Henry and Hunter, the Food Center Neighborhood Grocery Store and Merklin's Cash Grocery, closed in the 1970s. By the time we moved to Cedar Rapids in 1989, two independent groceries operated nearby, both in strip malls; both closed within two years. Even the 1st Av Hy-Vee nearly closed in 2000, saved only by a $1 million grant from the city.

Today our city's groceries and pharmacies are mostly large, with some ethnic groceries in strip malls, and two recently-arrived gourmet groceries (Fresh Market and New Pioneer Co-op). Two Super Wal-Marts and two Super Targets also have grocery and pharmacy sections. None is particularly easy to walk to from any residential neighborhood, though the 1st Av and Oakland Road Hy-Vees aren't bad if you don't mind hustling around parking cars. And then there are the convenience stores, mostly attached to gasoline stations, the closest thing we have to the small, neighborhood stores of yore, but hardly the same breed of cat.

Jim's Foods, in a strip mall on 6th St SW, has survived by shifting to a convenience store model

The size of grocery stores, pharmacies, hardware stores, &c. has expanded along with everything else in America. A visit to the supermarket provides a breadth of selection that would stagger my grandparents, at prices (thanks to economies of scale, among other things) that enable me to eat (and shave, block the sun, and do simple home repairs) in the style of a king. So why not just declare victory and move on to the next topic?

Because neighborhood stores have benefits, benefits that are widely touted, such that they appear on some level to be merit goods. Their presence reduces auto use and increases walking, increases the number of community-building interactions both in the store and on the way, and adds to the attraction of the area (Duany et al. 2000: 187-188; Jacobs 1961: 36-37; Mitchell 2009). Locally-owned stores, as opposed to mini-Targets or Wal-Marts, keep the profits in the community. From these direct benefits spring secondary benefits too numerous to list in a reasonable post. In particular, it's hard to imagine recent walkable-scale, residential development in downtown Cedar Rapids and the nearby areas of Kingston and New Bohemia succeeding for long without stores where life's necessities can be purchased.

Benefits or not, any reappearance of neighborhood stores faces serious hurdles. As urban areas sprawled in the latter half of the 20th century, people moved far away from shopping and work. Hunter and Henry note that the Fifth Avenue Market and Grocery once had over 100 houses nearby, almost all of which have been torn down (p. 55). Residences may now be too widely dispersed to support a small neighborhood store. Functional zoning means commercial and residential uses are kept apart: neighborhood over here, stores over there. Even where zoning ordinances permit mixed-uses, residents are often hostile to the idea of inviting corner stores into their neighborhoods. Duany, Plater-Zyberk and Speck explain:

[W]hat the neighbors are picturing instead is a Quick Mart: an aluminum and glass flat-topped building bathed in fluorescent light, surrounded by asphalt, and topped by a glowing plastic sign. It's not that these people don't need convenient access to orange juice and cat food like everyone else; they just know that the presence of a Quick Mart nearby will make their environment uglier and their property values lower.... The building type of this corner store is essentially the same as the town houses next to it: two stories high, three windows wide, built of brick, and situated directly against the sidewalk, which its entrance faces. One could imagine it may even have been a town house once, so well does it blend in among its neighbors. [2000: 26-27]

Finally, there is the business plan question: Can neighborhood stores make a profit when most people can drive to a supermarket with wider selection and (I'm guessing) lower prices? I did some furtive price comparison today on a "market basket" of breakfast items, with these results:

	Supermarket (large store)	Supermarket (small semi-walkable store)	Posh market	C-store
½ gal skim milk	1.58	1.69	1.99	3.39
Orange juice (12 oz conc or 48 oz bottle)	1.98	1.79	5.70	8.00
Sandwich bread (24 oz)	1.69	1.69	5.25	n.a.
Name brand wheat flakes cereal (10.9 oz)	2.50	2.50	5.50	n.a.
One dozen large eggs	2.09	2.68	2.99	n.a.
Oranges (1 lb)	1.59	1.99	1.50	n.a.
TOTAL	11.43	12.34	22.93	n.a.

Maybe I picked the wrong c-store? Anyway, it shows that the farther you get from the suburban supermarket model the more prices go up, and for anyone with a car that can be a deciding factor. So does the same logic apply to a corner store?

Duany and colleagues suggest that developers not only include corner stores, but provide the space rent-free because the store makes an attractive amenity yet "should not be expected to turn a profit until the neighborhood matures" (2000: 187). But that applies to new development, and doesn't analogize well to existing neighborhoods.

Highway 100 extension, from thegazette.com; can we sprawl our way to neighborhood stores?

What does the city's master plan adopted in January, Envision CR, say about corner stores? Specifically, nothing--the phrase is never used. The "Grow CR" section describes a "mixed land use pattern," but the specific example of "housing above commercial and office establishments" (p. 55) means apartments downtown, not corner stores in neighborhoods. On the future land use map (p. 67), much of the new development anticipated around the Highway 100 extension is expected to be "urban-medium intensity;" some areas, mostly around downtown, are "urban-high intensity;" and most of the existing city is "urban-low intensity." That means that established neighborhoods can expect little change, but at the edge of town newer developments--if they occur--could see "neighborhood retail or mixed use" included on "any street provided a smooth transition in intensity of uses is maintained" (p. 69). That opaque language may be all we should expect, and maybe it even intends all we could hope for, but the specific reference to "mixed-use" at the new, improved Westdale (p. 82)--it will include a bit of senior housing--is hardly encouraging. I'd like to see more affirmation of the concept, and more expressed flexibility in how all areas of the city develop over time, but I understand that creating too much uncertainty could create panic.

SOURCES

Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (North Point, 10th anniversary ed, 2010)

Paul Engle, A Lucky American Childhood (University of Iowa Press, 1996)

George T. Henry and Mark W. Hunter, Cedar Rapids: Downtown and Beyond (Arcadia, 2005)

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Random House, 1961)

Stacy Mitchell, "Neighborhood Stores: An Overlooked Strategy for Fighting Global Warming," Institute for Local Self-Reliance, 19 August 2009, http://www.ilsr.org/neighborhood-stores-overlooked-strategy-fighting-global-warming/

"Neighborhood Store," BusinessDictionary.com, http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/neighborhood-store.html ... their definition, oriented to specialty stores, is too restrictive for our purposes

Kenny Stallard, "Neighborhood Stores," Memories from the Past, 2008[?], http://freepages.military.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~whitetwp/neighborhood_stores.htm

EARLIER POSTS
Envisioning CR I: A 24-hour downtown, 1 March 2015
Envisioning CR II: Including the poor, 17 March 2015
Envisioning CR III: Improve public transportation, 6 April 2015

NEXT: Regional governance.

Envision CR III: Improve public transportation

The #3 heads downtown on 2nd Av SE

One of the most encouraging sections of Envision CR, the city's recently approved master plan, is undertaking a new approach to the city's bus system. The section on transportation begins by promoting the idea of multi-modal transportation, which includes:

• Public infrastructure that connects neighborhoods and destinations;
• Elimination of barriers that discourage or obstruct pedestrians, cyclists and transit users;
• Project designs that provide safe and pleasant passage from the public to the private realm.

The plan then lists four criteria for evaluating pedestrian and bicycle systems: (1) directness, (2) integrity [connect to places and provide continuity], (3) safety and (4) comfort. Surely these apply to bus transit, too!

There are two initiatives listed that are specifically bus-related: one general promise (#37, "Continue to evaluate transit ridership and serviceability to identify opportunities for improvement") and one specific and praiseworthy idea (#38, which "explores the possibility of creating a BRT-like (Bus Rapid Transit) crossroads that connects users from Lindale Mall to Westdale, and from Hiawatha to Kirkwood Community College").

The second, scheduled for implementation in 4-5 years, would be the second major initiative in city transit since I moved to Cedar Rapids 26 years ago. The first, about 1997, took a motley collection of moderately usable neighborhood routes and converted them into wandering loops each of which takes exactly an hour to run. This has improved coordination of routes at a significant cost in utility, particularly for those with any available alternative to the bus. If the city truly wants to expand service beyond the transit-dependent, conceiving routes that are direct and connect to places is an excellent place to start. And we could run those routes at least until midnight, instead of putting the system to bed at 6.

There has been a lot written about transit. Two excellent blogs, Human Transit (Jarrett Walker of Portland, Oregon) and The Transport Politic (Yonah Freemark of Chicago), are devoted entirely to the issue, and Strong Towns has given it a lot of attention. Transit policy talk is mainly aimed at larger cities than Cedar Rapids, but here are just a few insights on which we could build:

Freemark: [B]us services in cities around the country are often simply too slow and too unreliable for many people to choose them over automobile alternatives. Rail, particularly in the form of frequent and relatively fast light and heavy rail, may be more effective in attracting riders, but so might, the article hypothesizes, BRT services, which provide many of the service improvements offered by rail ("Recent Trends in Bus and Rail Ridership," 3 March 2014). I don't know that Cedar Rapids is populous or dense enough to support light rail, but we could start by looking for places and ways BRT could compete with automobiles for speed.

Walker: In the transit world, for example, we know that ridership arises from a relationship between urban form (including density and walkability) and the quantity of service provided ("Basics: Conceptual Triangles," 23 January 2011). He describes a triangle, the points of which are Development (density and walkability), Service (frequency and span), and quantity of Ridership. Any of these can be treated as the outcome of the other two. This suggests that areas of dense activity (downtown, Kirkwood, the malls at one time but maybe not anymore) are potential objects of transit. It also suggests that the more Cedar Rapids sprawls--far more resources are being put into exurban development than downtown or the core neighborhoods--the harder it is going to be for anyone to get around in anything other than a private vehicle. Public transit in a sprawled city is fundamentally absurd.

Strong Towns: A Strong Town builds wealth by connecting financially productive places with transit. A Strong Town uses a transit approach scaled to the places being connected ("Strong Towns Knowledge Base: Transportation"). It could be that the next two steps--after our BRT-like routes are online--in improving bus transit in Cedar Rapids are (1) building financially productive places (right now the only one I can think of is downtown and maybe New Bohemia), and (2) cutting existing service that is unproductive. It may be that an efficient, usable bus transit system for Cedar Rapids is smaller than the one we have now.

Where could/should transit be going? Here, for starters, are the traffic counts of more than 10,000 cars per day in Cedar Rapids in 2013 (omitting I-380, US-30, and interstate access):

1st Av E-W (Twixt Town Rd NE to 18th St W)
6th St SW (US-30 to 16th Av)
7th Av Marion (w of downtown, including Marion Blvd)
8th Av Marion (w of downtown)
10th St SE (1st Av to 8th Av)
16th Av SW (West Post Rd to Rockford Rd)
19th St SE (1st Av to 2nd Av)
Blairs Ferry Rd NE (Milburn Rd to Marion Blvd)
Boyson Rd NE (Creekside Dr to Alburnett Rd)
C Av NE (74th St to Old Marion Rd)
Collins Rd NE (Edgewood Rd to 1st Av)
Edgewood Rd NE-SE (Blairs Ferry Rd to US-30)
Kirkwood Blvd SW (US 30 to 76th Av)
Northland Av NE (Collins Rd to Blairs Ferry Rd)
Wiley Blvd SE (16th Av to Williams Blvd)
Williams Blvd SW (18th W out)

Auto traffic patterns measure demand for transportation. Does that help us see where there are "financially productive places," in ways that can help plan transit that is more efficient and effective, and even popular?

SEE ALSO:
Cedar Rapids transit official page: http://www.cedar-rapids.org/transit/
"Connect CR" section of Envision CR, http://www.cedar-rapids.org/government/departments/community-development/city_planning/Documents/connect.pdf
Transitmix is a really fun and thought-provoking public transportation simulator

EARLIER POSTS
Envisioning CR I: A 24-hour downtown, 1 March 2015
Envisioning CR II: Including the poor, 17 March 2015

Next: Neighborhood stores.

Envision CR II: Including the poor

If affordable housing is far from jobs, it creates as many problems as it solves

(from Google Street View)

The word "poverty" does not appear at all in Envision CR, the comprehensive plan for the City of Cedar Rapids. (The word "poor" appears several times, but always to refer to the physical condition of facilities.) That doesn't mean that the poor won't benefit from fulfillment of some of the city's initiatives therein. But it does leave a concern that those who most need to benefit from the city's growth may not be positioned to do so, and the city may not be prepared to bring them along.

Poverty is a problem of long standing and great complexity, the subject of much research which has been published on a lot of paper. So you'll have to forgive a great deal of oversimplification when I say that, in a dynamic market-oriented economic system, today's American poor are thwarted by lack of access to two key things: economic opportunity and social structures of support. The obstacles are not completely removable, but cities can at least do some things to mitigate them.

In saying this, I am not unmindful that individual factors also affect poverty. There's not much a city or state can do to protect someone from the consequences of their bad choices. But--admittedly arguing here without data--surely some individual factors are exacerbated by systemic ones. In other words, lack of economic opportunity and/or access to social structures of support make it more likely that an individual will encounter stress, poor health, depression, alienation, and so forth, and so will make poor life choices. They also reduce the margin of error and increase the consequences of those poor individual choices.

The city could try to ignore the poor in its midst, and Lord knows, many have tried. But that means foregoing human resources, trying to go forward with portions of the city seriously under-productive, and tolerating a high level of potential instability. It seems prudent, not to mention moral, to be as inclusive as possible as the city charts its future.

US poverty rate over time; data from US Census Bureau, chart from topforeignstocks.com

The poverty rate is a highly flawed indicator, but it's the best we've got. The chart above shows that since the early 1970s, when the U.S. economy began to shift away from manufacturing employment, the poverty rate has stayed stubbornly around 15 percent. While recent decades have seen the rise of fields that were unimaginable fifty years ago, there have not been remunerative career opportunities on a mass scale to replace those lost manufacturing jobs. This has not only affected the 15 percent at the bottom, but many of those in the middle as well.

Cities can't bring back Joe Lunchpail, but all are trying to develop their economies by "creating" jobs. I argue that it's not only important that they do it, it's important how they do it. Cedar Rapids would, for example, like to take advantage of existing concentrations of tech and medical professionals by attracting more. Do it. Bringing more money into a city can benefit all its residents when that money circulates to support public facilities (the library, swimming pools, &c.) and local businesses. The city can make this happen (or not) by:

• encouraging compact development (as opposed to sprawl): the closer people are to the action the more they are likely to benefit
• encouraging local entrepreneurship (as opposed to colonization by out-of-town franchises and in particular big box stores): the more money that stays in the city the more likely it is that everyone benefits
• connecting areas of concentrated poverty to the rest of the city: ghettos are the result of design, and can only be overcome by design.

Envision CR has a number of encouraging elements along these lines. In the "Strengthen CR" chapter, Goal 3 is "Adopt policies that create choices in housing types and prices throughout the city." This mainly involves ensuring a mix of different types of houses--including townhouses and multi-family units--and avoiding exclusionary zoning in the new developments the city anticipates at what are now the outskirts of town. Goal 4 is "Create a city that is affordable and accessible to all members of the community." Currently the city administers several affordable housing programs, including Section 8 Housing vouchers, Rebuilding Ownership Opportunities Together, and subsidies for senior and low-income housing projects; other potential initiatives are also listed.

Poverty may be most closely associated with core neighborhoods, but there are pockets in other parts of town that are inconvenient to pretty much everything. People will choose where they live for all kinds of reasons, but if the only apartment I can afford is at 34th and Pioneer far from everything, or at Cedarwood Hills which is up a steep hill in an unwalkable part of town, that's a problem the city needs to address.

In the "Grow CR" chapter, Goal 3 is "Connect growing areas to existing neighborhoods." This mainly is to ensure there aren't barriers between developments at the periphery and the rest of the city. But the principle could also be used to address existing neighborhoods where there are pockets of poverty. Development in downtown and MedQuarter (as well as Kingston Village and New Bohemia) can create economic opportunity in adjacent core neighborhoods, if they're designed to be connected rather than separated.

Finally, the business-oriented "Invest CR" chapter has four goals, all with potential to improve the lives of the poor.

1. Expand economic development efforts to support business and workforce growth, market Cedar Rapids, and engage regional partners.
2. Cultivate a skilled workforce by providing cutting-edge training and recruiting talented workers.
3. Reinvest in the city’s business corridors and districts.
4. Grow a sustainable, diverse economy by supporting existing businesses, fostering entrepreneurism [sic], and targeting industry specific growth.

The emphases on entrepreneurship and existing businesses and industries are particularly encouraging. Chasing after franchises (including casino franchises) would have been a less productive approach. (See Johnny, "Big Box Urbanism," Granola Shotgun, 12 March 2015.)

Cedar Rapids has big plans for development. Of course, every other city probably does, too; there's a gulf between having plans and realizing them. Envision CR anticipates that quite a lot of this development will occur at the periphery of the current city, albeit in the form of mixed-use neighborhoods and complete streets. Can Cedar Rapids sprawl intelligently? And if they do, could they do so in a way that improves economic opportunity for the poor? Keep in mind, too, that not everyone is going to possess the specific job skills in high demand at the moment.

Along with economic opportunities, the poor need social structures of support. Families, neighborhoods and civic institutions support individuals as they navigate the ups and downs of their lives. These structures are created in the private sector, of course, but government can help. They can partner with non-profit agencies, as Cedar Rapids has with Matthew 25's Block-by-Block home restoration program, to encourage their efforts. More importantly, traditional neighborhood development is more likely to engender these sorts of connections than suburban sprawl.

For many people in American society, the poor are simply invisible. Auto-oriented development, notes Eric O. Jacobsen (The Space Between, Baker Academic, 2012, p. 42), "has increased the distances at which we encounter one another.... And because of the large parking lots and wider streets that are needed to accommodate all of those cars even when we are engaged in the same activity in the same place, the distance between us has increased significantly." A more atomized society harms us all in some way or other, but has especially negative impacts on the lives of those at the margins.

Poor people obviously can't have access to economic opportunities if such opportunities don't exist. It does not, of course, follow that where economic opportunities exist, poor people will have access to them. Including the poor probably will require intentional action on the part of city government. Can they provide incentives to locate jobs that pay well near low-income areas, and discourage large campuses in remote locations? Or to encourage developers to build affordable housing near areas of economic growth? Can people reach out to help poor people access opportunities which they may not know about, or assume are out of reach?

There's a danger that the poor will remain as invisible in this unfolding process as they are in Envision CR.

Envision CR plan: http://www.cedar-rapids.org/government/departments/community-development/city_planning/Pages/default.aspx

Earlier post: Envisioning CR I: A 24-hour downtown

Next: Improving public transportation.