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THE CHARLOTTE OBSERVER

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NOWHERE TO SHOP

IN NEIGHBORHOODS OF FEW SUPERMARKETS, LOW-INCOME RESIDENTS ENDURE DIFFICULTY GETTING GROCERIES

Sunday, February 9, 2003
Section: MAIN
Edition: ONE-THREE
Page: 1A
Type: SERIES
KATHLEEN PURVIS, STAFF WRITER - STAFF WRITERS TED MELLNIK AND WENDI THOMAS CONTRIBUTED TO THIS ARTICLE.

PART ONE:

Cross South Tryon Street on Remount Road and go 1.2 miles to the Bi-Lo at Park Road. Easy drive. It takes five minutes.

If you don't have a car and you live in Southside or neighboring Brookhill Village, two low-income neighborhoods with more than 900 families, it gets harder.

You could walk, a trek through two major intersections, hauling heavy bags of food up and down hills past industrial buildings and small houses, a solution that is practical for only a few items at a time.

You could take a bus, which requires going uptown to change buses. Even without shopping time, it takes 90 minutes.

Or you could go to a small neighborhood store, where there is no fresh produce or skim milk and many prices are higher than in supermarkets.

In the retail business, stores go where it's easiest to make the biggest profits.

But as Charlotte's population has shifted into the suburbs, people left on the west have fewer stores. In Southside and Brookhill, 47 percent of the households don't have cars, according to the 2000 Census. In the 14 neighborhoods along Beatties Ford Road, 25 percent of homes have no cars. That means thousands struggle to reach affordable, nutritious food, a struggle that can lead to poor diets and earlier arrival of diet-related diseases.

When The Observer mapped the addresses of 97 chain and independent supermarkets in Mecklenburg County, only 25 were west of Interstate 77. In south-central Charlotte, 2.5 miles from uptown, there are no supermarkets near West Boulevard, an area that includes Wilmore, Dalton Village, Southside and Brookhill.

Along the Northwest Corridor, the section of the city bordered by I-85, I-77 and Freedom Drive, an area with about 21,000 residents that includes Johnson C. Smith University, there is one full-service supermarket, the University Park Food Lion at Beatties Ford Road and LaSalle Street. Beyond that, the closest stores are on Freedom Drive near I-85, a 4.5-mile drive.

Smaller stores in the area, like Wayne's Super Market at 2050 N. Graham St., stock no skim milk, fewer fresh fruits and vegetables and less lean meat.

In Southside and Brookhill, the neighborhood store is Tyson Groceries on Remount Road. Visits by Observer reporters in August and December found fresh meat with no expiration date on the labels, some of it visibly gray. (The Mecklenburg County Health Department gives the store a passing grade and says dates aren't required on fresh meat, although most stores include them voluntarily.)

Tyson carries no fresh vegetables, and a gallon of milk - full fat, no skim - was about 40 cents higher than the typical supermarket price. Owner Saylor Tyson would say only that he sells what people in the area buy.

In west and southwest Charlotte, not all of the people are poor and not all of them are black. But with 153,933 people on the west side of I-77, versus 541,521 on the east, the area holds the city's higher concentration of low-income, predominantly black neighborhoods.

Nationwide, studies show that predominantly black neighborhoods have fewer supermarkets. A recent study by the UNC Chapel Hill department of epidemiology found that predominantly black neighborhoods average one supermarket for every 23,582 people. Predominantly white neighborhoods typically have one store for every 3,816 residents.

"This is an endemic problem that's been going on for 30 years," says Dr. Roland Anglin, director of the New Jersey Public Policy Research Institute at Rutgers University. He dates the situation to the 1960s, when large businesses began to abandon urban areas, leaving behind smaller stores that charge higher prices and often have unsanitary conditions.

"This is a problem in a lot of communities, so the nutrition and health in these communities is compromised.

"The only way to solve this is to reintroduce competition. And that is slowly happening. Chains are starting to realize there is a huge market there."

Costly Rides

"Transportation is the single biggest problem our clients face," says Beverly Howard, executive director of Charlotte's Loaves & Fishes, a nonprofit emergency pantry that provides groceries to families in economic crisis.

Even though Loaves & Fishes has pantries in 16 locations, getting to the food is a big problem. Howard has heard of people paying for a ride with a bag of their emergency food.

"Our clients have a limited pool of money. Their lack of access means it takes a disproportionate amount to meet their daily needs."

For many, when they run short on food, the only option is a convenience store, where much of the food is not only more expensive, but also lower in nutrition.

"People have to have access to food that will not only satisfy them, but keep them healthy," says Howard.

Exposure to healthful food also is important, she says. While stores in low-income neighborhoods sell the food that people are most likely to buy, she points out that making positive changes in anyone's diet, like switching to skim milk, requires repeated exposure, "and that's if I've been offered the choice and been given the opportunity to make the choice."

"The sheer energy it takes"

Two studies by UNC last year looked at the effect of fewer supermarkets in low-income neighborhoods nationwide. The first found there were four times more supermarkets in white neighborhoods, a lack of access that means poor and minority communities have a harder time choosing healthy food.

The second showed that for every additional supermarket in a black neighborhood, people's intake of fruits and vegetables increased 32 percent. In white neighborhoods, consumption of fruits and vegetables was 11 percent higher with the presence of one or more supermarkets.

People in food charities in Charlotte can recite problems that stem from a lack of access to affordable, healthy food: Children who don't get fresh vegetables and skim milk have less energy to stay alert in school. Parents who are worn out from getting to jobs and stores by bus don't have the energy to read to their children at night. Health problems like diabetes and stroke show up earlier, when people are in their 50s.

Lucy Bush of Friendship Trays describes the daily struggle of a typical client:

"I'm a single parent. My job isn't close to home. I get on public transportation at 6 a.m. to get my child to day care and get to my job on time. I get to work and I get a call that my child is sick. I have to leave my job, lose a day's pay, get back on the bus, go and get my child, get her to a doctor, then take a bus to a store to get medicine or something for dinner.

"The average person doesn't analyze the scope of that, the sheer energy it takes."

Business Reality

You can't blame the stores. After all, retail goes where the profits are.

Marilyn Marks of the Gleaning Network, which distributes fresh produce in low-income neighborhoods, used to be a commercial lending officer with a bank. So she understands business reality.

"You cannot put in a (supermarket), pay for extra security, pay more for personnel to drive there," she says. "Grocery stores, when I was in lending, were the lowest-margin businesses. Why should they do that out of the goodness of their hearts?"

"Food retailing is a competitive industry, where the return is less than 1 penny on the dollar," says Todd Holdquist of the Food Marketing Institute, a national organization that represents food retailers and wholesalers.

In the supermarket industry, there are generally three kinds of stores: Chain supermarkets, which offer the most selection, usually have lower prices because they handle high volume. Independent stores are usually older, often located in small buildings left behind by the chains. Because they don't have the buying power of multiple stores, their prices are usually higher and selection is smaller. Then there are small stores such as convenience stores, which base their price and selection on what will sell quickly.

Traffic and Land

Spokesmen for three of the four largest supermarket chains that operate in Charlotte - Food Lion, S.C.-based Bi-Lo, and Winn-Dixie - all say placing stores in any neighborhood is complicated, involving decisions as simple as high-traffic corners and as tricky as finding large amounts of affordable property.

"We get a lot of cities that want us to go to downtown areas," says Bart Coleman, Bi-Lo's vice president for real estate. "But then they don't want us to build the facility we feel we need to build." Urban sites, he says, are often small and have limited parking.

"We have stores in every type of neighborhood. The key is to find a sufficient amount of ground with easy access," says Mickey Clerc, spokesman for Winn-Dixie's regional office in Jacksonville, Fla.

"Every site is different," says Glenn Dixon, vice president of real estate at Food Lion's Salisbury headquarters.

Shopping centers in low-income areas often have a harder time getting the mix of stores that bring traffic for a supermarket, Dixon says. Smaller businesses often can't afford the rent near a successful anchor. And without small businesses like dry cleaners and manicurists, it's difficult to attract larger tenants like supermarkets.

"That's often why developers aren't attracted," he says.

Harris Teeter, which operates 29 supermarkets in Mecklenburg County, refused to be interviewed for this series, saying all information about store locations is proprietary.

Security and Profit

Experts raise two issues when the subject is supermarket locations: security costs and the expected lack of profits in lower-income neighborhoods. But those aren't always borne out.

Security, for instance. Every store, whatever the neighborhood, has to have security.

"We address that in every location," agrees Food Lion's Dixon.

Bi-Lo's Coleman says that even stores in high-income areas can have trouble with theft, particularly if the store is near a high-traffic highway with quick access.

Tom Worshauer, director of business services for Charlotte Neighborhood Development, says security is something stores cite when they just aren't interested in an area.

"It's an easy thing to say, like if you don't want to go to a party, you might say your hair's wet. I don't think that's the underlying reason."

Lower profits may not be the reason, either. A 2001 report by the Washington-based Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, "Exposing Urban Legends: The Real Purchasing Power of Central City Neighborhoods," found that while inner-city neighborhoods have lower per-capita incomes, they also have high rates of spending because they are more densely populated.

Buzz Roberts, vice president for policy with the Local Initiative Support Corp., a national nonprofit group that focuses on housing and retail in distressed areas, says some supermarket chains are starting to find benefits in challenged neighborhoods.

"They're typically very successful markets, from the operator's perspective. They don't face a lot of competition. What you give up in per-capita income, you make up in population density."

However, selling in low-income neighborhoods is more difficult. People who shop with food stamps usually buy fewer nonperishable items like toiletries and impulse items, the things that bring stores their highest profits.

"It can be a different kind of business in some ways, and it takes a savvy operator to serve an urban market," says Roberts.

In putting together more than 20 supermarket projects around the country, he has learned there is more than just nutrition and affordable food at stake.

"When you put together a major retail center in a tough neighborhood, the tax base for the city goes up," he says. "It helps to stabilize and revitalize distressed areas."

The Community Taxi

In Southside Park, you can't look into community efforts to improve lives without crossing paths with Velma Jones. A neighborhood resident, she has worked in several community programs, including feeding children in an after-school program.

In her small townhouse, she keeps a room off the kitchen packed with packaged food, cans of pasta and salmon and bags of rice, ready for neighbors who need help.

"I was a child that went to bed hungry," she says. "I remember waking up to no breakfast, going to school and getting a headache because you didn't get anything to eat until lunch. I've been hungry."

She calls her small green Dodge "the community taxi" because she gives so many free rides to stores.

How does she pay for gas? "I pray," she says. "Sometimes my dollars come short."

Jones helped to get a federal grant to build a shopping center at Dalton Plaza on West Boulevard. The shopping center fell through when no store would commit to the space, even though a private study in July 2000 found that the area could generate annual grocery sales of $8.2 million by 2005, enough to support a medium-size store.

The grant was used to tear down an old Wayne's Super Market on West Boulevard, and a small retail center with a police substation is being built. Plans for a small IGA grocery store slated for the space fell through, and the city is no longer pursuing a grocery client, says Worshauer, of the city's neighborhood development office.

But the need is still there, says Jones. While working on the grant, she surveyed her neighbors in Southside, Brookhill and Wilmore. The No. 1 complaint: the lack of a place to buy groceries.

If people had a store, she says, "they will wear it out. Even people that have cars complain."

"We're going to pay"

The reasons for fewer supermarkets on the westside are complicated and the solutions aren't simple.

Getting a supermarket into the area would take a tremendous effort, says Joanne Stratton Tate, a former community activist with United Family Services, a community-building organization. Instead, she'd like to see people in the neighborhoods organize a co-op that would offer retail and prepared food.

Co-ops, or nonprofit food-buying clubs, would allow people to pool their money to buy food that is distributed among members. Food clubs can have low overhead, and their community involvement can ease security issues.

"I'd rather see people give to develop a food co-op than make a single food donation," says Tate. "It would put food access in the community."

So why should people in areas of Charlotte where the landscape is densely dotted with stores care about the lack of stores on the westside?

"There's a justice issue," says the Gleaning Network's Marilyn Marks. "There's a difference between charity and justice. Justice is when everything is available on the same level. If we think this city is going to be OK and thrive, we have to look at making that divide more narrow, rather than turning our backs and letting it get wider.

"We need to convince people that, bottom line, nutrition matters. If a child grows up on fish sticks and macaroni and cheese, we're going to pay."

MAP: Predominantly white neighborhoods nationally average ONE supermarket for every 3,816 people. Predominantly black neighborhoods nationwide average ONE supermarket for every 23,582 people. In Charlotte's Northwest Corridor, the area along Beatties Ford Road bordered by Interstate 77, I-85 and Freedom Drive, there is ONE supermarket for 21,000 people.

PHOTOS: (1) In her home in the Southside Park neighborhood, Velma Jones keeps a room stocked with food for neighbors in need. "I was a child that went to bed hungry," she says. Jones helped get a federal grant to build a shopping center at Dalton Plaza on West Boulevard, but no store would commit to the space. (2) Paul Abraham, 76, shops at Bi-Lo on Park Road during a trip with a group from the Bethlehem Senior Center on Baltimore Avenue in Charlotte. The center lines up a van and a driver twice a month.

QUEST FOR A MARKET

ONE AREA'S FULL-SIZE GROCERY SHOWS THAT A UNIFIED EFFORT, OVER A DECADE, CAN PAY OFF

Monday, February 10, 2003
Section: MAIN
Edition: ONE-THREE
Page: 1A
Type: SERIES
KATHLEEN PURVIS, STAFF WRITER
Column: PART 2 OF 3 NOWHERE TO SHOP

PART TWO:

It's a suburban experience in an urban location.

The University Park Food Lion, at Beatties Ford and LaSalle Street in the heart of west Charlotte, has become a retail success story since it opened in January 1996. Rising from what had been a crumbling center of blight, the shopping center sits on a busy corner surrounded by locally owned businesses.

That wasn't always the case. The redevelopment of University Park, one of Charlotte's earliest black middle-class neighborhoods, was an unusual project that involved the combined efforts of a dozen neighborhoods, city agencies, a bank and a lot of money. But the key was a supermarket.

"There's no question we were a seed," says Glenn Dixon, Food Lion's vice president for real estate.

"We weren't the only one, but it's having an impact."

So what does it take to get a supermarket in an economically challenged area? In this case, it took a city loan of $900,000, three people - and a phone call.

The System Gets a Push

The gold medallion Eleanor Washington proudly wears around her neck thanks her for service to the University Park Neighborhood Association, which she led as president for 14 years. Today at 69, she's assistant director at the Northwest Neighborhood Service Center, which houses a police substation, volunteer organizations and a few city offices in the same shopping center with the Food Lion she helped get.

"There is a system for everything," she says firmly. "If you don't know how to work the system, you won't succeed."

But sometimes, it helps to push the system just a little.

In the 1950s, when Washington moved to Charlotte with her husband, Robert, "there was no (middle-class) black housing. There was Double Oaks and Fairview Homes (housing projects)." The Washingtons lived on Dearborn Avenue, then moved to University Park. (Robert Washington is a security guard for The Observer.)

There were plenty of stores then, she says. She remembers that there were supermarkets in most black neighborhoods.

As the years passed, the city changed. Development moved east of Interstate 77, and many stores followed. By the 1980s, the old shopping center in Washington's neighborhood had slid downhill.

Ike Heard, now director of the Enterprise Foundation, a nonprofit housing organization, was executive director of the Northwest Corridor Community Development Corp., which represents 12 neighborhoods along Beatties Ford Road. He recalls that the shopping center had become "an attractive nuisance."

"Every other day on the TV news, they started with a rape or a mugging or a shooting in that parking lot. There was more business in the parking lot than in the stores."

In the mid-1980s, a local businessman approached real estate attorney Dale Fussell to put together a deal to buy the land for redevelopment. In the end, Fussell and his partner, Rodney Purser, decided to buy it themselves.

Fussell approached Bank of America - then called NationsBank - but was turned down.

Washington saw his plans and realized the potential. So she picked up the phone and dialed the office of bank President Hugh McColl Jr.

"I didn't say what I wanted." She just left a message with her name, her number and where she lived.

Within a few days, bank executive Jim Leavelle called back. Washington explained that she wanted to talk about University Park.

"I said, 'You've never even seen this place. You need to come out and see for yourself.' "

"Do you know 10 of them rascals came out and none of them invited me? But that's all right."

The group that came was influential. Washington recalls that even Robert Albright, then president of Johnson C. Smith University, was there. In the end, the bank got behind the project, Fussell put up more money and the city invested $900,000.

"It's extremely hard to get financing," Washington says. "You're blessed when anyone takes a chance."

Letting the Money Talk

The other hurdle was finding an anchor tenant. Several chains had turned the project down. Even with a police substation planned for the parking lot, they wouldn't tackle the security issues.

"We had to show - what was it Gordon Gekko said? 'Greed is good,' " says Heard, referring to the financier in the 1987 movie "Wall Street."

"We had to show too much money was being left on the table."

The anchor also needed to be a good fit with the neighborhood. Harris Teeter wouldn't have been ideal, he says. "They are an upscale provider, and frankly, you don't sell that in an inner-city neighborhood."

Harris Teeter refused to be interviewed for this series, saying all information on store locations is proprietary.

After Salisbury-based Food Lion agreed to join the project, CVS Pharmacy followed. It had taken 10 years, but Beatties Ford Road had a supermarket.

Seven years later, everyone involved agrees the University Park shopping center is a success.

"All the meetings I go to, the different groups that are working in that area, they view the shopping center as the key, the focal point for that whole area," says Fussell. "Our center has been 100 percent leased for the last four years. I don't know many centers across the city that have that."

Food Lion and the city of Charlotte won a Neighborhood Partnership Award from the National League of Cities and the Food Marketing Institute for the project in 1996. Some things Food Lion learned have been put into action in other ways. The company now has a diversity department, headed by Natalie Taylor, to identify minority-owned suppliers and potential employees. The company also has a new management training program at 12 historically black colleges, including JCSU.

"It reinforced what we already knew," says Taylor, "that our customer base is diverse, and we had to respond to that."

Difference is Involvement

If a single supermarket has been such a success, why hasn't that kind of project been repeated in other underserved areas in the city, like West Boulevard and North Tryon Street near Sugar Creek?

The difference was community involvement. As a center of black history, the area carries a strong sense of loyalty, and the Northwest Corridor CDC fosters the kind of community activism that gets attention.

In the Lakewood neighborhood off Rozzelles Ferry Road, Dave Nichols is director of the nonprofit Lakewood Community Development Corp. People there have to travel to Freedom Drive, several miles away, to reach the nearest supermarket. Otherwise, the closest store is a corner Fast Stop where a box of macaroni and cheese that typically costs less than 70 cents at a supermarket is $1.29.

Getting people to organize is difficult in small low-income areas like Lakewood, Nichols says. People work long hours or two jobs. And a single neighborhood can't get the kind of attention that a large group like the Northwest Corridor CDC can draw.

"Typically, low-income neighborhoods are so used to settling for whatever they get, they just adapt," he says. "It's not white, it's not black. It's 'I live in a low-income neighborhood, so I have to drive two miles for groceries.' We have to see retail as part of the necessary infrastructure, just as much as sidewalks and curbs."

Voting with Dollars

Convincing stores there's profit in inner-city areas is also difficult. Ron Cotterill, director of the Food Marketing Policy Center at the University of Connecticut, says low-income areas are often overlooked in privately funded marketing studies.

"The major marketing research organs in the food industry simply ignore the families with incomes less than $25,000 a year," he says. "They're not even in the sample. They have no purchasing power, people could care less, so you have an information void as well.

"They're left behind in a market that votes with dollars."

John Palmieri is director of economic development in the city manager's office, a new function that promotes development. He arrived just after attempts to attract a supermarket to West Boulevard failed. No anchor store would commit to a Dalton Plaza project, and an investor canceled plans to open a small grocery store farther up the street.

The failure to get a store for West Boulevard was a disappointment, Palmieri says, but the city has started getting tools like a commercial corridor business association to help neighborhoods attract retail.

"You can't put the burden exclusively on the development community," he says. Stores are part of healthy neighborhoods, and the city can help with that.

Charlotte-based urban planner Michael Gallis says Charlotte's pattern of underserved urban neighborhoods is one he sees in many cities.

"It speaks about something Charlotte is starting to wrestle with: What is public policy? What instruments does the government need to encourage development that the market on its own wouldn't be able to produce?"

"Charlotte, my dream of Charlotte, always was that it's a kind of model city and can do new and innovative things, like the light-rail project. I think (retail support) is an area we need to tackle.

SUCCESS STORIES NOURISH FUTURE

HOW CITIES WIN BATTLE TO PROVIDE ACCESS TO FOOD IN LOWER-INCOME AREAS

Tuesday, February 11, 2003
Section: MAIN
Edition: ONE-THREE
Page: 1A
Type: SERIES
KATHLEEN PURVIS, STAFF WRITER
Column: PART 3 OF 3 NOWHERE TO SHOP

PART THREE:

In the wide produce aisles, there are fresh greens and plenty of fruit. In the fish department, seafood is laid out on piles of ice, and in the dairy section, there's plenty of skim milk for $1.99 a gallon.

Same as any supermarket anywhere. Even the prices are the same as in Charlotte.

But this supermarket is in Newark's Central Ward, center of devastating race riots in 1967 that left 26 people dead and 1,000 businesses burned.

In the suburbs, where almost every driveway holds at least one car, access and ease are a given. In low-income areas nationwide, a lack of reliable transportation puts basic needs like affordable, nutritious food farther from reach.

Bringing stores into neighborhoods isn't just about bringing food to shoppers. Stores can bring jobs, become gathering places and attract higher-income housing. But when a neighborhood doesn't have obvious benefits to attract retail, it sometimes means finding other paths to development, from community-based co-ops to city support of private businesses.

"We can't assume the same model fits all neighborhoods," says Charlotte-based urban planner Michael Gallis.

So how did a thriving supermarket spring up in Newark's inner city, a neighborhood known for poverty and despair in a once-industrial city where 53 percent of the 275,000 residents are black and the poverty rate is 32 percent?

"Nongovernment involvement in solving problems" is what Monsignor Bill Linder calls it.

Linder heads New Community Corp., a Catholic parish initiative started after the 1967 riots. The NCC mission statement: "To help residents of inner cities improve the quality of their lives to reflect individual God-given dignity and personal achievement."

At first, NCC focused on housing and jobs, tearing down the old slums and building low- and middle-income housing. Today, NCC is woven through Central Ward on almost every block: 3,000 units of low-income housing, two charter schools, a recreation center, six buildings of senior citizen housing and a 180-bed nursing home, a small factory to build housing components, job training in fields from computers to auto repair.

And a supermarket.

For decades after the riots, one thing that didn't change was the lack of access to food. Only 25 percent of Central Ward's households had cars, Linder says, and the nearest supermarket was in Belleville, north of Newark. The only local food businesses were sandwich shops that closed by 2 p.m. A New York Times report that compared prices in Newark and in Kearny, N.J., across the Passaic River, found a 38 percent difference.

The neighborhood clearly needed a supermarket. Linder wanted a socially minded company that would work with the neighborhood, but he also wanted a full-size chain that could provide affordable prices.

Pathmark was a good fit. New Jersey-based Pathmark, which later opened the first supermarket in New York City's Harlem, had wanted a partner in Newark.

"We were looking for them, and they were looking for us," says Linder.

Opening the store took almost 10 years. Linder says there was opposition from the city and from other area businesses.

"I think people were afraid of pilferage, they were afraid of violence - all kinds of fears of what would take place if you had a supermarket."

The building was designed to answer the area's issues. A booth outside is staffed by NCC's own security force, while Newark police keep an officer inside. The store entrance is recessed about 50 feet down a short hallway, so you have to walk past a food court and several small businesses, like a Dunkin' Donuts, staffed by NCC employees who dress in street clothes and carry radios.

"Who goes the 50 feet? That keeps out the problems for the most part," says Linder.

To answer transportation issues, NCC runs a van service. Customers can take a bus or walk to the store, then get a ride home. The basic charge is $6, with discounts for the elderly and disabled. Vans leave about every 15 minutes.

The impact was immediate.

"Quality is immensely different," says Linder. "Produce immediately improved. We have a fresh fish section - usually Pathmark has frozen fish - and it was a huge success."

The store also has intangible effects, says Linder.

"I think the fact that nobody will come into an area doesn't make people feel good," he says. "This was kind of like a turning point. And it continues. If you use food stamps and you go to a middle-class area, people treat you badly, and they're not people of your color. If you're using stamps and you hold up the line, somebody always says something. It has a tendency to play up all the negatives.

"Here, you're recognized. You can talk to people. It's a different spirit, a community feeling. You don't need too much of that to make a significant difference."

It Takes Time

One thing stands out in the struggle to get stores into lower-income areas: time. Both Newark's Pathmark and Charlotte's Food Lion on Beatties Ford Road took about 10 years.

In Atlanta, a Publix opened last year in the troubled Eastlake area, also after a 10-year effort. The store has been open less than a year, so it's too soon to gauge its effect. But Bob Lupton, president of FCS Urban Ministries, which pushed for the store, learned a lot about what keeps retail away.

It isn't as simple as "low-income, low-profits," he says.

"It costs more to operate a store in a low-income area," he says. "Security is only one factor."

Low-income shoppers don't just spend less, he says. They buy mostly perishable foods, while stores make their biggest profits on nonperishables like toiletries and nonessentials like flowers.

Low-income shoppers also use stores differently, Lupton says. They shop more frequently but buy smaller amounts, compared with more affluent shoppers who shop once a week, and they do their heaviest shopping at the beginning of the month, when food stamps and benefit checks arrive. That affects staffing.

In Newark, Pathmark offered a bonus for purchases over $20 for the first six months, Linder says. That got the store's sales volume up. The store offers a shopping card system for welfare customers, so they don't have to wait for food stamps to shop. And Newark has an urban enterprise zone, where sales taxes are halved, to keep shoppers from going to the suburbs.

"You're sending a very strong, positive signal about that neighborhood to people outside the neighborhood," says Buzz Roberts of Local Initiative Support Corp., a national nonprofit organization that focuses on housing and retail in distressed areas. "It's all part of a broader revitalization strategy for a neighborhood."

A Matter of Health

For Beverly Howard of Loaves & Fishes, an emergency feeding program in Charlotte, access to food is a matter of health. If people can't get to nutritious food and they don't see it around them every day, they aren't motivated to make the changes that lead to a better diet.

Instead of full-scale supermarkets, which are expensive and can take years, one solution considered in several housing projects is co-ops, or food-buying clubs. Howard sees a number of benefits: Community connections could ease security issues, and co-ops would provide employment and empower local residents.

"It would be the Habitat (for Humanity) of food," Howard says.

Joanne Stratton Tate, who recently left United Family Services' office after more than four years in the Southside and Brookhill neighborhoods, had been looking into some form of co-op. Encouraged by the response to a community-run holiday gift store two years ago, she'd like to see a program that includes prepared food and groceries. She had begun exploring that with the Community Culinary School, a nonprofit group that trains people for culinary jobs. But the plan needs help, including a place to house it and technical assistance.

"It's going to take a while to do a grocery store," she admits. "We could do a co-op in six months."

Basic Services, Basic Needs

"Neighborhoods that work best are close enough to provide basic services," says John Palmieri, economic development director for the city manager's office.

A newcomer to Charlotte, he lives in Plaza-Midwood, where everything from dry cleaning to groceries is within walking distance. Something like that is his ideal for west Charlotte, he says.

He has worked with getting supermarkets in other cities, and it's difficult. "It always comes down to margin or volume," he says. "It's tough to demonstrate that you'll have enough demand and enough households to generate enough sales."

All cities struggle with providing services to aging, lower-income neighborhoods. Charlotte is different only because the problem is so visible. Having more industry on the westside meant that, as people's incomes improved, they moved east.

"This is not an unusual pattern in the U.S., unfortunately," says urban planner Gallis. "It's a pattern typical of most urban centers."

So why should the rest of Charlotte, living in suburbs surrounded by supermarkets, care that many pockets of the city don't have them?

"We have to take people where they are," says Marilyn Marks of the Gleaning Network, a nonprofit food-distribution organization. "It's part of this division in this town, where one side of the town is very different from another. You can't have a city where half are well-fed and half are not and think that's going to be a safe place to live.

"It's not good to have that big of a divide."