Mable Wilson has been without her community grocery store for over a year now.
It's a problem she shares with her South Side neighbors, who had to find other places to buy their staple foods after the P&C Grocery Store in Valley Plaza on South Salina Street closed. Neither she, nor her neighbors, have been given a straight explanation as to why the store closed. They don't know why another chain has taken the vacant store's place, either.
"It looks so sad on your eyes where P&C was. There were a lot of cars there, and the neighbors would be shopping," she says as she remembers walking down to the store. "I would see my neighbors with their push carts. That's how close it was for us to go to that grocery store. But no more. I miss that."
But Mable, and others on the South Side, are not waiting on those speculations to be answered. They're taking matters in to their own hands, and building a new grocery store of their own.
Filling the VoidWithout a neighborhood supermarket, Mable has had to rely on her daughter to drive her to the nearest grocery store, the Price Chopper in Western Lights Plaza on Onondaga Boulevard. It's not even in the city, but in the Town of Geddes. When her daughter isn't available, she and others who live in the Almus Oliver Towers on Burt Street pool their money for gas and share a car.
It's money "we don't have," Wilson says. "it's just ridiculous the things we have to do to get food in our houses."
Without making that long trip out to Western Lights, Mable sometimes has to rely on corner stores, which she says attract loiterers, invite crime, and often sell over-priced and expired food.
LaRhonda Ealey of Jubilee Homes, a non-profit development agency on the South Side agrees. "There is a stigma attached to these corner stores, and unfortunately, that stigma is perpetuated. And it's true," Ealey says. "And when you go in these stores, a lot of the healthy foods, even canned foods, are ridden with dust."
Filling the Shopping CartNow, community members are taking matters in to their own hands.
Jubilee Homes announced today that they have purchased property at 601 South Avenue, on the city's South West Side. There, they hope to build a community-run grocery store, the funding for which came from a settlement with the county over the building of a sewage treatment plant in a South side neighborhood.
"The goal for the organization," Ealey says, "is for the grocery store to be built from the bottom up. We want it to be community-driven. We want to get the community's input."
Mable's input -- she's glad something is finally being done. "We all are trying to work together," she says, "to get a grocery store, we aren't going against each other, we're just trying to sit down at the same table to have a conversation to get the process in motion."
Closer to Check-OutAt tonight's meeting at the South West Community Center, Mable and her neighbors listened as Jubilee Homes Executive Director Walt Dixie pushed the process along one further step, again asking for the community's help. They hope to build a Pathmark style supermarket, following the model started in Harlem, New York. It was conceived under similar circumstances.
While Dixie says it's important to provide South Side community members with fresh produce at an affordable price and an accessible location, it's a "win-win" situation, keeping the economy of the ailing neighborhood alive. He wants to "keep the dollars recycling in the community, keep the community growing."
The idea is to have South Side residents staffing and running the store. Dixie thinks of that in terms of giving young people chances, as well. "We see them as the investors," he says. "This is their community."
Ealey says that, with that in mind, this is going to work. "When the community is a stakeholder," she says, "they are able to take pride in it. They are able to take care of it. And that will be key in sustaining the project.
Jubilee Homes, and neighbors, will continue to build that sustenance in December, when the next public meeting is scheduled. They say the project can only move forward with the community's continued support.
By Kaci Lindhorst
