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

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.

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.