Wilmington’s Northside could get a cooperative grocery store
For decades, residents on Wilmington’s Northside have pushed for a grocery store.
But the area still doesn’t have one, even as breweries and apartment buildings pop up in the neighborhood.
It all just seems ridiculous, said Sheran Shorter, who lives in Rankin Terrace. Hi-Wire Brewing is thriving blocks from her home, but she has to drive miles out of the neighborhood to get groceries.
“That bothers me that we have a brewery that’s thriving but we don’t have a grocery store,” she said.
Shorter wants to see investment in the Northside that will help the people who live there. Right now, that’s not happening.
Instead, businesses are meeting the needs of “the people who can afford to come to these places that they are putting over here on the Northside,” she said. “I feel like we are the lost and forgot about generation over here.”
Shorter, who currently doesn’t have a car, depends on her aunt to drive her to Walmart on Sundays to do her grocery shopping. When she needs to buy groceries and other household items during the week, Shorter walks about 10 minutes from her home to Family Dollar.
Family Dollar doesn’t sell fruits or vegetables, but it has snacks, drinks and other food items, Shorter said. Some people in Rankin Terrace depend on Family Dollar for their grocery shopping, Shorter said, because it’s the closest thing to a grocery store the area has.
The Northside is considered a food desert.
Northside Food Cooperative is working to change that. The group is working to finally establish a full-service grocery store in the Northside. This summer the group plans to debut a market in a grassy lot near the intersection of Princess Street and N. 11th Street.
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The market will be focused on distributing food to the community, said Evan Folds, the project manager of the Northside Food Cooperative.
“It won’t be a traditional vendor’s market, like a farmer’s market,” he said. “It will be more of food distribution.”
The next step of the project will sell make-a-meal kits out of a storefront around the corner. The meal kits will give community members access to healthy meals and fresh foods at an affordable price, Folds said.
Eventually, the group plans to purchase a building where they will establish a permanent grocery store. They hope to establish the store within the next two years, but that may take longer, Folds said.
“Essentially, all of this is an effort to engage food insecurity now, rather than have to wait two to three years to develop a full-line grocery store,” he said.
In the short-term, the group is working to build relationships with members of the Northside community by holding monthly virtual community meetings, gardening events and community clean-ups.
The COVID-19 pandemic has made connecting with the community more complicated, and so has the history of conversations about brining a grocery store to the neighborhood. For years, there has been talk about bringing in a grocery store, but none of the plans have come to fruition.
There were pushes in the late 1990s and mid-2000s to bring a grocery store to the area, Folds said.
Shorter remembers attending neighborhood meetings at the now-closed Foxes Boxes where community members discussed plans for a grocery store.
She eventually stopped attending the meetings because it seemed like the conversations weren’t going anywhere. Other attendees had been advocating for a grocery store for years, Shorter said.
“That’s a hurtful feeling to know that these elderly people have been fighting that many years and we don’t have it yet,” she said.
Establishing relationships and hope within the community has become a priority and a challenge for the Northside Food Cooperative.
“The community has been left behind, they have been promised and not delivered,” Folds said. “That in a nutshell is really our challenge. It’s not so much building a grocery store, that’s investment in infrastructure and construction. It’s more around how do we connect on a human level? How do we make declarations and follow through? How do we build trust?”
The Northside Food Cooperative is about halfway through studying the feasibility of bringing a grocery store to the area. They recently completed a market study, which showed the population density is about half of what a typical grocery store would have, Folds said.
That’s likely one reason a grocery store chain hasn’t established itself in the area. The area has a relatively low population density, Folds said, and a median income of just under $27,000, according to a 2018 Community Health Assessment from New Hanover Regional Medical Center.
Those numbers don’t necessarily fit the formula that a traditional store looks at when deciding whether to build in an area.
“That algorithm … doesn’t add up for tradition profit-driven grocery stores,” Folds said.
The city of Wilmington has expressed interest in bringing a grocery store to the area as part of its Northern Gateway project, and Folds said the Northside Food Cooperative is open to working with grocery chains or other organizations to bring a grocery store to the area, if needed.
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Shorter, who struggles with high blood pressure and cholesterol, wants to see a store that offers an array of produce, cooking staples, healthy foods and some other household items at an affordable price.
“I know one of the big things would be fruits, vegetables,” she said.
The Northside Food Cooperative currently has more than 330 investors. Each investor can purchase one share of the cooperative for $100. To make investing more accessible, a pay-it-forward initiative allows people to buy $90 of a share. An investor would then purchase the rest of the share for $10.
For more information on how to donate or become a co-op owner, visit northsidefoodcoop.com.
Reporter Emma Dill can be reached at 910-343-2096 or [email protected].
