Though Portland gets plenty of praise for being a foodie town, numerous Portland neighborhoods are lacking the more essential food resource: a grocery store. I tend to take Safeway for granted and openly curse Fred Meyer, but research has linked lack of grocery stores to less consumption of vegetables and higher obesity rates.
The mayor’s office and Portland Development Commission put out a Request for Interest two weeks ago, soliciting grocery stores to build in neighborhoods that are a half mile or more away from a full-service grocery store. Building a new grocery store can be super expensive—according to a 2008 study of markets, big ones need five acres to build on at the cost of $90-150 per square foot and need 40,000-50,000 people in their “trade area” to make a profit. The city’s request doesn’t discriminate between brands, which means we could likely see urban renewal dollars and city money going to subsidize a Costco or WalMart in one of Portland’s food deserts.
Check out the news story I wrote about this for more details, but also look at this map of grocery stores in the city. Every dot is a grocery store and the gray space around them marks a half mile. It’s interesting which neighborhoods are without—mostly ones of the edges of the city, but also Eliot and University Park in North Portland and Lents in Southeast.
- For food policy wonks, here’s an entire packet of Portland food maps, including poverty rates and other demographic info.
I don’t see the problem, my neighborhood is well-served.
We desperately need a New Seasons in downtown St. Johns. Proper Eats is great and all, but still.
Please remove the Whole Foods markets from the map, as I’m still boycotting them.
Holy shit this is awesome, Sarah. I just complained about this exact thing as a new member of Metro’s citizen survey program, OptIn. I knew I wasn’t alone but it’s nice to have my opinion validated by a somewhat respectable media outlet.
The huge, overgrown vacant lot on Fremont and Vancouver/Williams would be an ideal site for a grocery store for the Boise Elliot neighborhood (New Seasons, please!) Ideally, they would also firebomb the Hostess outlet that currently resides on the corner, dishing out diabetes on demand.
They forgot to include the zoning map for retail in the set. That explains the gaps. I just watched the city heap on expenses and delays to reopen that Red Apple market at SE72nd and Flavel.
That was an existing grocery. You should see the fees if you change store type.
That map really got mangled from its trip from the posted PDF. Where’d the color go?
What I’d like to see is more local, neighborhood groceries – not the 7-Elevens or the Plaids (not hatin’ on Plaids, mind you) but the kind of place that had a good, basic selection of staples, the old mom-and-pop type, that served and knew the local nabe and had regular customers and let the good customers run a tab.
It wasn’t so long ago I live near one. It was on the corner of NE 57th and Tillamook, SE corner, right across from the Rose City Park elementary (current temporary Marysville elementary site). That fellow ran a market that had reasonable (not discount, but didn’t break the bank either) prices, a good basic selection, and gave credit to regular customers. Kind of like a tiny Save-A-Lot that was owned by a guy who lived in the ‘hood. This building has, of course, stopped being a grocery, and become a private building.
I come on many buildings in the SE that look like they may have been “mom-n-pop” stores at one time. Maybe someone somewhere could come up with an initiative that makes these stores more possible?
Also, I’d point out that while New Seasons markets are nifty – and no mistake there – they aren’t a good fit for every Portland neighborhood, in terms of price and a whole lot of other things. What some ‘hoods need isn’t a New Seasons, they need a Kienow’s. Sadly, Kienow’s is gone too.
I gotta call BS on including Sav-a-Lot as a “grocery store.” That mistake totally invalidates the data for my neighborhood, which happens to abut an Urban Renewal Area.
@Paul Cone – I took the color out of the map because market research (meaning: showing it to a couple people in my office) showed that people were completely confused by all the colors without a lengthy explanation. Since what I want to show is where grocery stores are, I made the dots the most prominent piece of the map… also, I made the freeways purple. For context. You know.
Anyway, I highly recommend everyone look through the multiple, colorful maps of the city’s food systems linked below the image.
Ive been envisioning a Trader Joe’s in that empty lot at SE 11th and Belmont ever since those buildings burned down 10 years ago.
@Beer Batter: There *is* a Trader Joe’s there, but it has the ability to cloud men’s minds so they cannot see it.
Fred Meyer is unionized (in large part) and thus I’ll always go there before Safeway. I used to be able to say I went to Fred Meyer because it was ultimately local too, but of course that’s no longer true.
If the object is to eliminate or minimize food deserts, who cares if the stores are run by Wal-Mart or Costco? If anybody can turn a profit on a marginal store, it’s a company that can use their buying power to lower their costs.
That map only works if your a zombie looking for fresh brains. Most people shop at the stores they like, or the one they pass on the way home from work, which probably isn’t the one nearest their home.
Are there large groups of people moving to Portland, and then starving because they have no place to shop? Of course not. The city wants to build some new stores, without adding any more customers. So what the city is proposing is that they will build some new stores which will then succeed – by taking shoppers away from other stores.
Hear hear, @eldepeche.
You know guys New Seasons and Safeway deliver… right?
Demographic maps are fun.
If the object is to eliminate or minimize food deserts, who cares if Soylent Green is people?
+1 eldepeche
I love New Seasons and similar upscale grocery stores; I care about quality and they have it. But they’re much more expensive than Safeway, Fred Meyer, or especially Winco, Food4Less, or Walmart. Being high-minded is a lot more difficult for those where saving $50 or $100/mo on food makes a real difference.
@Samuel: It’s a nice dream, but one that doesn’t make sense anymore. Labor is much more expensive than it was in the past and these small places can’t afford the waste associated with produce and don’t have the volume necessary to make money off the slim margins of the grocery store game. Ethnic grocery stores, like Mexican and Vietnamese grocers, can make a go of it largely because they have such a defined niche not adequately supported elsewhere and because they’re willing to work long hours for low pay because their options are more limited. Most gringos would just get a job at Starbucks or Safeway and make more.
Fruit Cup – New Seasons does not deliver East of 82nd. I know, I used to get deliveries from them and then they stopped service to my house because I’m 4 blocks too far East. They said they stopped delivering to the area because there wasn’t enough demand.
The funny thing was, I emailed them and asked if they could make an exception since it’s only a few blocks and I see their van around on the other side of the “tracks” all the time. They said no, because then others would see the van at my house and want deliveries too. Which, seems odd to me since they claim no one from East of 82nd other than me wants to use the service.
Sarah, you prefer Safeway to Fred Meyer? Let me guess, you live in the downtown core and have been in Portland less than 3 years? Otherwise, there is simply no explanation for such a statement. Both are pretty much equally horrible, but come on, really?
So now every Portlander deserves a local, sustaninable, affordable grocery store within a half mile walking distance? There are so many bigger problems. Like transportation for example. Improve that. We don’t need a grocery store within every half mile. Talk about overconsumption and excessive food miles.