Local residents have been waiting 25 years.
by Henri Gendreau, The Roanoke Rambler
www.roanokerambler.com
Imagine a city of 15,000 to 20,000 people, Elliott Major told the crowd, without a single grocery store.
That’s Northwest Roanoke.
Major, a business owner and developer, spoke at a city meeting last month on behalf of the Northwest Food Access Initiative, a group that has been working for almost five years to address a lack of affordable and healthy food options in the area.
Establishing a grocery store in Northwest Roanoke has emerged as a top contender for some of the $64.5 million in federal coronavirus relief funds allocated to the city. For months, a city panel made up of volunteers has crafted and winnowed a list of recommendations it will present to City Council.
Council has said it wants to invest in a few projects that will prove “transformational.” Under the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), funds can support more long-lasting change — as opposed to immediate COVID-19 recovery — in areas that are impoverished.
Northwest Roanoke — in which 47% of residents make less than $25,000 annually — hasn’t had a full-service grocery store in 25 years. About 80% of residents are African American.
“We’re not asking to transform,” Major told attendees of a public hearing at the Berglund Civic Center last month. “We’re just asking for equity.”
The hope is that a grocery store will serve as an anchor to a larger community hub in the area of Melrose Avenue and 24th Street NW near the Goodwill Industries of the Valleys job campus. Funding would go to set up a hub that might include a health care clinic, access to job training, a bank, a daycare center and a laundromat.
But finding a grocery store operator is key to the whole project.
“It’s one of these things that has always been talked about but has never come to fruition,” Major said in an interview. “I can’t speak for other people, but I could presume that some of that is just out of discouragement from a lack of progress historically.”
For 22 years, a Kroger stood at the heart of the Melrose-Rugby and Loudon-Melrose neighborhoods — at the corner of Melrose Avenue and 19th Street — until closing in 1985, according to a 1996 article in The Roanoke Times. In 1990, Kroger donated the property to the nonprofit Total Action for Progress (then called Total Action Against Poverty), which tried to recruit a grocery store. Three different grocers cycled in and out, none lasting longer than two years.
The grocery business operates on notoriously tight profit margins, as low as one to two percent, said Liz Ackley, an associate professor at Roanoke College who spearheads the Northwest Food Access Initiative.
“It’s challenging in a really affluent neighborhood,” she said. When a store starts operating in a low-income area, “the likelihood of survival goes down.”
For 25 years, Northwest Roanoke has experienced what’s called “supermarket redlining,” in which major chain groceries are disinclined to locate in inner cities or low-income neighborhoods. This also happens when existing chains leave a low-income area for more wealthy suburbs.
“I really think this has more to do with supermarkets being unwilling to go into these neighborhoods because their profit margins are so low and the dynamics of the food system is changing so fast,” Ackley said, noting how the COVID-19 pandemic prompted a surge in people ordering groceries online. “This is a neighborhood that has been disinvested in for generations.”
In 2017, the Northwest Food Access Initiative conducted a survey of 321 residents in Northwest Roanoke to guide an ongoing community discussion about the lack of food access. The survey grew out of a 2015 partnership between the City of Roanoke and Invest Health, a project funded in part by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the nation’s largest philanthropy focused solely on health.
The survey showed 96% of residents said they would support a full-service grocer in the area. More than 90% reported difficulty in finding fruits and vegetables in their neighborhood.
About two out of three residents shopped at outerlying Kroger stores or the Walmart at Valley View Mall. Many residents don’t have cars, which makes grocery shopping far away a hassle.
“The biggest challenge that we face is governments can’t run grocery stores,” Ackley said. “We need to prove the market is viable” to sustain a private company.
Ackley and others have been doing that work. Since the 2017 survey, residents themselves crafted a business plan and came up with architectural renderings for the hub with help from two Baltimore-based consultants.
“We’re really trying to position residents to advocate for this as best we can,” Ackley said.
That’s why Major thinks this time is different for a grocery store in Northwest Roanoke.
“So instead of talking about what it could be, there’s some potential — site selections and conceptual drawings — ‘This is what it could be,’” he said. Those blueprints “could help people galvanize around the effort.”
Councilman Joe Cobb said he senses broad support for the idea, both in the community and on City Council, which must decide how best to allocate the federal funds.
“There’s a lot of grassroots support for this,” Cobb said. “I see a powerful energy around that right now that’s very encouraging.”
While the advisory panel’s recommendations won’t list dollar figures, City Manager Bob Cowell said the community hub might need as much as $10 million in ARPA funds.
If City Council decides to pursue the hub as one of its major investments, Cowell said, the next step would be to find a developer and operator for a grocery store. But all the pieces need to fall into the exact place. Since the city must spend ARPA funds within a certain timeframe, the city may need to go back to the drawing board if it can’t find a grocery operator in the coming months.
“We have to be cognizant of, at what point do you say, it’s not going to happen?” Cowell said. “Do you still proceed even if it means if what you provide is a health clinic, for example, and not a grocery store?”
Cheryl Mosley, director, Feeding Southwest Virginia’s Community Solutions Center on Melrose Ave., thinks the pandemic has made people more aware of the need for food access. Particularly early on in the pandemic, the center’s food bank saw new people come through the doors.
Mosley, who recalls riding the bus with her mother to far-flung grocery stores when the Kroger shuttered, thinks a grocer is integral to a new community hub.
“For me personally, it would be a hard pill to swallow without the grocery store,” she said. “It answers a lot of ills, I think more so than just food access. … It’s almost like a reckoning if we could get there.”
