Co-op grocery store will be ‘right-sized’ for Hazelwood | The Homepage

New report recommends keeping store smaller; leadership team will leave room to grow

By Juliet Martinez, managing editor

Photos by Juliet Martinez

The Sarah Dixon Innovation Center cooperative grocery store leadership team is focusing on the store being the right size for Greater Hazelwood.

The community groups working on building the store on the 4800 block of Second Avenue received the results of a preliminary retail market study in July. It said a 10,000-square-foot store — about the size of the Second Avenue Rite Aid that closed in December — is feasible for this neighborhood, but no bigger than that.

Pastor Lutual Love said during a July 19 phone call that the project will be pared down to be both more affordable to build and sustainable even if no one outside the neighborhood shops there. He spearheads the project with Saundra Cole-McKamey, founder and CEO of the Hazelwood nonprofit People of Origin Rightfully Loved and Wanted, known as POORLAW. Mr. Love is co-founder of POORLAW’s advocacy arm, Greater Hazelwood Coalition Against Racial and Ethnic Disparities, called by its acronym GH-CARED. He is pastor of Praise Temple Deliverance Church and listed as the project’s development consultant on the POORLAW website, poorlaw.org.

“We were taking a chance that we would be able to support a 15,000-square-foot store,” Mr. Love said. “Now, instead of a chance, we can be confident that the store can be stable at 10,000 [square feet].”

As currently planned, the development will be about the same size as previously envisioned at 40,000 square feet, with room for a credit union, a wellness space and a rooftop farm. The proposed location is on the west side of Second Avenue between Hazelwood and Flowers avenues.

Importantly, Mr. Love said the design will leave the grocery store space to expand.

“Let’s right-size this store based on the population and the dollars they generate,” he said. “If the population grows, we can expand without having to build another facility.”

The population of Hazelwood is expected to grow. Two developers planning housing developments in the neighborhood cleared a big hurdle when they received Low-Income Housing Tax Credits in July. Trek Development plans a 50-unit mixed-income development planned for Hazelwood Green, and the Community Builders plans to build a 35-unit mixed-use, mixed-income complex on Second Avenue. Gladstone Residences, with 51 units, is expected to be ready for tenants later this year.

The report comes from Riverbend Retail Consulting LLC, based in Tennessee. A disclaimer in the beginning of the report characterizes it as a market summary, not a full trade area survey. The report concludes by saying that if the team considers its market share and overhead cost projections realistic, a full study could be warranted.

The market summary did not take any population changes into account, relying on an industry formula to calculate how much of the neighborhood’s grocery dollars a store could reasonably expect to take in. The Sarah Dixon Innovation Center leadership team plans to request the full trade area survey that considers a range of other factors, including population growth, Mr. Love said.

Even before receiving the study on July 11, the project’s leadership was paring down the design and had scrapped the idea of having housing in the development.

“The only other tenants will be the credit union and the wellness center,” Mr. Love said.

Changing designs over time

The project has already morphed several times in its attempt to address the lack of access to fresh groceries in Hazelwood.

In late 2021, POORLAW received site control from the Urban Redevelopment Authority, which owns most of the land where the development is planned, and Hazelwood Initiative, which owns one of the parcels on that land. Like the redevelopment authority, the community development corporation has agreed to sell the land to POORLAW once the money for the project is raised. Both entities have extended the project’s site control until the end of this year.

POORLAW planned for the store to be a cooperative from the start and had connected with the Pennsylvania Center for Employee Ownership in 2021, according to a document on poorlaw.org prepared for the Urban Redevelopment Authority.

The nonprofit announced the plan to the public in early 2022.

At the February 2023 Greater Hazelwood community meeting, the project team unveiled the idea of cooperative ownership. At that meeting, Kevin McPhillips, executive director and CEO of the Pennsylvania Center for Employee Ownership, described the development as a “multi-stakeholder co-op facility.” The building will be a real estate cooperative, the grocery store will be cooperatively owned by members who bought shares, and the workers will cooperatively own and operate the business.

Architect Scott Gerke described a three-story building with two floors of underground parking and the grocery store on the ground-level first floor at that meeting. The second floor would house a wellness space and childcare center. A credit union, greenhouse and community space would take up the third floor.

By spring of 2024, the team said they were taking the design in a simpler direction. They announced at the May Greater Hazelwood community meeting they were “going back to the drawing board.”

“The underground parking was financially unfeasible,” said planning committee member and Hazelwood Initiative executive director Sonya Tilghman. There were also questions about whether underground parking was wise so close to an active railroad line.

Hazelwood has been without a full-service grocery store since D’imperio’s closed in 2009. In 2013, several community organizations and funders tried to bring a supermarket back into the neighborhood in the same location — now occupied by La Gourmandine — but could not find a tenant who thought a store could be successful in that space.

In the hope of raising their odds for success, the project team is learning from the experience of a similar project in another neighborhood that went years without a grocery store. Gem City Market, a cooperative grocery store in Dayton, Ohio, opened in 2021. The team visited in March.

The market summary seems to reinforce one of the lessons Mr. Love shared from that visit: Not to count on shoppers from outside of Hazelwood to support the store. It must rely primarily on its connection with the community.

“That’s why we had that meeting last week.[Gem City Market’s leadership] said, ‘Get your people first, not funders,’” Mr. Love said, referring to the July 10 community gathering. “ A co-op is supported by the membership.”