ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, September 16, 1996 TAG: 9609160078
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LESLIE TAYLOR STAFF WRITER
NOTE: Above
Cleveland had a problem.
Grocery stores and drugstores had abandoned the Ohio city's inner core in the late 1980s, leaving families without convenient services and prey to small stores with high prices and lower-quality goods.
The city's political leadership launched an urban revitalization effort. With funding from both public and private sources, several shopping centers were built that rival anything found in Cleveland suburbs.
They have brought grocery stores and drugstores back to Cleveland's inner city.
"Whatever the issues were that pushed [the stores] out of the central city or pulled them into suburbia, the raw fact was economics still remained in our city," said Terri Hamilton, director of Cleveland's Department of Community Development.
"They'd left people with disposable income who still needed basic services."
A similar neighborhood revitalization effort, though on a smaller scale, was launched in Roanoke in 1987. Total Action Against Poverty headed a community committee that worked to bring a grocery store back to a 19th Street and Melrose Avenue shopping center in Northwest Roanoke - vacated by Kroger two years earlier.
When the store reopened in 1991 as Nick's Market, it was hailed as an economic boon and a necessity for the elderly and low-income people in the Northwest community who had trouble getting to the large, newer grocery stores in outlying areas.
Yet the store has changed hands three times since. Its third occupant - BK Community Supermarket - closed Sept.1.
Willie Mae Brooks was a regular customer. She is 80 and walked to BK at least four times a week to buy groceries.
"Lord have mercy, I miss that store," she said. "I was so glad when [BK] moved in. I was so sad when they moved out."
Now, twice a week, Brooks gives family, church members or neighbors a list of groceries she needs. They go to the larger chain stores, buy what she wants and deliver the food to her house.
"So far, so good," she said. "But I don't know how long that's going to last."
An inner-city neighborhood needs a grocery store, Brooks said. And as Cleveland discovered, grocery stores can thrive in the inner city with the right kind of development.
But in the era of the mighty suburban superstore, is it possible in every inner city?
Yes, said Michael Beyard, senior director of research for the Urban Land Institute, a nonprofit research and education organization in Washington. But he said keeping inner-city shopping centers competitive with mammoth state-of-the-art stores in outlying areas requires constant care and effort, and a lot of store owners don't make that investment. Consequently, the communities don't support the stores.
"Just because someone's poor doesn't mean they're stupid," Beyard said. "They can see [a store] is in bad shape and not the quality they want. So they'll go to nicer shopping centers. Even those people who are trapped will find other places to go."
BK's customers maintain that the store lacked the quality of large chain grocery stores. Shelves were poorly stocked, they said. Prices were higher than the chain stores. The store wasn't "inviting," one shopper said.
Convenience was a trade-off.
S. Singh, BK's owner, maintains that the store was as appealing as any other in the Roanoke area. Prices were reasonable, many cheaper than the larger stores, he said. The store just didn't have the volume of sales that a grocery store needs to survive, he said.
"I didn't grumble one bit," Willie Mae Brooks said. "I was so glad to have someplace to go, so glad to have a store in our community. I had no right to grumble one bit."
A new start
The Kroger Co. - its sights set on superstores - left the shopping center in 1985. The 15,000-square-foot store had been a community fixture for 22 years.
For six years, the building stood empty, used only to house Kroger's financial records. The windows were bricked over.
"The building's uselessness to the surrounding neighborhood has had a demoralizing and negative effect on the local population," read a Total Action Against Poverty report. "The property has become a gathering place for undesirable loitering instead of remaining a hub of economic and social activity."
In 1987, TAP's Community Outreach Department - in company with the city of Roanoke, five area banks, the Southwest Community Development Fund and neighborhood residents - set in motion a project to bring a grocery store back to the 19th and Melrose area.
The group studied the status and problems of inner-city supermarkets locally, regionally, statewide and nationally. A steering committee of community leaders and private businesses identified the old Kroger building as the ideal site for a new grocery store.
Kroger agreed to donate the property to TAP, provided it could find other storage space for its financial records. The committee persuaded Trigon Blue Cross Blue Shield to donate 10,000 square feet of warehouse space to Kroger.
In 1990, Kroger deeded the property to TAP. Roof repairs, interior renovations, new security lighting and cosmetic upgrades were paid for with nearly $700,000 in federal Community Development Block Grant funds and loans from five area banks and the Southwest Community Development Fund.
The committee - by then renamed the ``19th & Melrose Corp.," the entity that owned and managed the shopping center - found its first grocer in 1991. Nick's Market opened in November that year.
It was up for sale a month later. Farm Fresh Inc., the store's corporate owner, announced it was selling its 29 Nick's Market stores so it could concentrate on operating larger supermarkets.
Jerry and Jay Jackson - father and son - opened Jay's IGA at the site in September 1992. The store's business dwindled after the elder Jackson suffered a heart attack, and closed in 1994. BK Community Supermarket, part of the Richmond-based Richfood Inc., opened the day Jay's closed.
Business was steady, particularly good on days when food stamps were distributed, store owner Singh said. But a store of its size required more than a once-a-month influx of food stamps to thrive, he said.
"We weren't doing enough business to pay for expenses."
Martin Jeffrey, TAP's director of community development and outreach and secretary of the 19th & Melrose Corp., said making that grocery store work requires more than unlocking the door and expecting customers to flock in.
Jerry Jackson knew the market and endeared himself to the neighborhood, Jeffrey said. He operated a grocery delivery service. He donated money to the Loudon-Melrose Neighborhood Organization. He charged neighborhood churches wholesale rates.
Singh did none of those.
"You've got to know your market and work that market," Jeffrey said. Singh "didn't appear to have a strategy for doing that. It's more of an issue of lost opportunity than money not there in the neighborhood.
"That money was going somewhere."
Economic strategy
The survival of inner-city grocery stores may require drawing customers from more than their surrounding neighborhoods.
Take the two independent stores in the Grandin Road area of Southwest Roanoke. One of them, Thriftway Supermarket, is owned by Singh. He said it does fairly good business.
"They draw from a good mixture of income market segments, where that might not be the case there at 19th and Melrose," said Bill Skeen, a banker who serves as president of 19th & Melrose Corp.
Drawing from mixed income levels means offering services of a quality comparable to those found outside the inner city, Michael Beyard of the Urban Land Institute said. That again means major investment.
"Without renovation, there's no hope [independent grocery stores] are going to draw very many people who have resources," he said. "But the local independent grocers quite often don't have the deep pockets to keep something like that going. A national chain can nurture one of its stores for years."
Tony Reid, president of Rebuilding Black Communities - a Roanoke organization inspired by last year's Million Man March - wonders if anyone in the Roanoke area would be willing to make the kind of investment needed to bring a grocery store to 19th and Melrose that could draw from a diverse market.
But "it should be up to the community," he said. "Some people need to step up to that."
Encouraging banks to have confidence in inner-city development was a struggle initially, said Terri Hamilton of Cleveland's Department of Community Development.
The real or perceived presence of crime often turns developers and investors away from inner cities, Beyard said. But if a proposal offers something unique, something that people can't find in other neighborhoods, they will come, he said.
Still "it's tough in what's considered a bad neighborhood."
The 19th and Melrose area is considered "high incident," said Maj. R.W. Helm of the Roanoke Police Department.
"But it's not the worst in the city," he said. "It's not targeted by crime analysis officers as an area that needs special attention. Certain areas are plagued by specific types of crimes. But that area is not that high on the list."
The perception that the area is high crime does keep people away, said Georgia Crosen, who has lived in the 19th and Melrose neighborhood since the 1950s.
"Ain't no store going to come and stay. That's the bottom line," said Crosen, who is vice president of the Loudon-Melrose Neighborhood Organization. "The stores haven't been able to make a go of it.
"It's just not going to work. A millionaire can't come up and do that."
Flicker of interest
The 19th & Melrose Corp. has received four inquiries from people who are interested in operating a store at the shopping center, TAP's Jeffrey said. He would not divulge details but said that one inquiry was from a group of people who were "interested in finding people like themselves to invest in a community project."
He said the 19th & Melrose Corp. has plans to make the property more appealing with landscaping and facade treatments intended to give it "a more suburban feel."
Richfood has five more years on its lease on the BK store. It has encouraged the corporation to buy out its contract, Jeffrey said.
Skeen said the corporation is in no way ready to give up on the property. A Revco drugstore and Style Plus, a clothing store, are doing good business in the center.
"I do believe that given more development work by the future owner or operator and interacting with the neighborhood, [a grocery store] will prove to be successful," he said. "Closer interaction with the community perhaps would help ensure the long-term viability of the store.
"We will work diligently to find another grocery store operator or chain that will serve the needs of that neighborhood. That is what we're all about. I believe we will be successful in the long run because there is a market there."
LENGTH: Long : 201 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ERIC BRADY Staff. Martin Jeffrey, TAP's director ofby CNBcommunity development and outreach and secretary of the 19th &
Melrose Corp., said making a grocery store work requires more than
unlocking the door and expecting customers to flock in.