BY HUGH BAILEY
Hearst Connecticut Media
Food World, at 345 Huntington Turnpike, was not long for this world. After closing in 2011 and reopening soon afterward, the grocery store has again shut its doors, this time, apparently, for good.
It”™s a familiar story east of the Pequonnock River. Grocery stores are hard to come by, and when they open, they don”™t tend to last.
The Huntington Turnpike site has long proven a difficult sell. “It”™s always been a tough location,” said Paul Timpanelli, chairman and CEO of the Bridgeport Regional Business Council. “The word is it”™s closed permanently and has been for a couple of months.”
The site is listed for lease at $22 a square foot from Fairfield-based United Properties, with immediate availability.
To the south, the East End neighborhood is the state”™s longest-standing “food desert,” city officials said, defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as an urban neighborhood without ready access to fresh, healthy and affordable food. The East End has lacked a full-service grocer for some 35 years.
Despite the challenges, there are signs of change. A series of city programs is aimed at bringing fresh food to underserved areas at farmers markets, corner stores and from community gardens. And the ultimate dream of a full-size grocer may be close to fruition.
Tough business
Jim Fagan, senior managing director of Cushman & Wakefield, a New York-based commercial real estate broker with offices in Stamford, said it”™s a rocky time for the industry.
“The grocery business has always been difficult, and more and more people have crept into their space,” he said. “Now you have drugstores, Target, Walmart selling groceries. There are a lot of people eating into your business.”
He said siting decisions take a number of factors into consideration, including parking, store layout, traffic and density, and that smaller stores are having a hard time competing. The closed Food World site is listed as having less than 10,000 square feet of space at a time when a suburban Super Stop & Shop can be up to 75,000 square feet in size.
Grocers operate on profit margins as small as 1 percent, experts said. “This is why a lot of them have gone to a bigger format, why they have more pharmacies, sell greeting cards, charcoal, health and beauty aids, and all the rest,” Fagan said. “All of those have more substantial margins than groceries.”
He compared grocery stores to gas stations, which earn little money selling gasoline but make it up with convenience store items a customer might pick up at the register.
It was not necessarily a surprise the store had reopened so quickly after its earlier closing.
“If you talk to any retailer, they will say some people have better formats than other people,” he said. “It”™s evolutionary. Whenever someone goes out of business, it can be an indication that it”™s not a great retail area, or it could also be the person there before just didn”™t get it.”
Location
There are specific factors that make a poor neighborhood more difficult to place a grocer, experts have said, starting with a low average neighborhood income.
Katie S. Martin, director of the public health program at the University of Saint Joseph in West Hartford, said a major challenge for dense cities is a lack of available land.
“Space is at a premium in densely populated areas like Bridgeport,” she said. “The challenge for a large chain is that they tend to have a standard footprint. There”™s a cookie-cutter approach, and if you can”™t fit that, it”™s more likely to go in a suburban area where there”™s acres of land.”
She said, though, that poorer neighborhoods can have unexpected purchasing power. “Just from the density, you have more people,” she said. “You also have leverage from federal food assistance programs,” including SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, and the Women, Infants and Children program, which provides vouchers specifically for healthy food.
Other programs have been introduced to allow people to double the value of vouchers at farmers markets, which Bridgeport has pursued.
Beyond that is the prospect of a supermarket employing local residents. “Then you”™re talking not just food, but jobs, and that adds to purchasing power right there,” Martin said.
Areas marked by a lack of food options can suffer from poor health outcomes. While supermarkets are likely to sell a variety of healthy foods at less expensive prices, convenience stores usually charge more, and tend not to sell fresh food, research has found. Some studies have linked a lack of access to fresh food with high obesity rates in poor neighborhoods, though other reports have questioned that link.
“It”™s not as easy as just plopping a grocery store in and then the problem will be solved,” Martin said. “We didn”™t get to this obesity epidemic overnight,” adding that full-service grocery stores also have plenty of unhealthy offerings.
Seaview Plaza
Andre Baker, elected last week to the state House of Representatives district that includes the East End, said he has supported efforts to prove the neighborhood”™s purchasing power is greater than its reputation.
“For the last two years, we”™ve had a farmers market on Stratford Avenue every Sunday, and we”™ve been doing what we can to get people to come out and support this,” he said.
“We”™re looking at buying power, to try to utilize the farmers market to see if that would generate some momentum by the numbers of people that have come out.”
But it hasn”™t always worked as planned. For a time, most of the customers came from elsewhere. “It was mostly people from outside the district,” Baker said, adding that some residents were initially put off by high prices.
“I”™m a little fearful of getting a small market here, and being able to sustain it, to have enough dollars coming in,” he said.
Seaview Plaza, a development planned on an old steel plant”™s property in the East End, is the site of the city”™s long-standing plans to bring a grocery store to the neighborhood. After a previous plan fell through, the city issued a request for proposals in 2012 that explicitly requires construction of a full-service grocer and pharmacy.
City officials said last week that Bridgeport Landing, which is developing the massive Steelpointe project, has been chosen for Seaview Plaza and will be able to deliver the grocery store the neighborhood has long lacked.
The original Seaview Plaza plan included a 65,000-square-foot grocery store; details of the latest proposal have not been released. A formal announcement is months away, and extensive prep work may be required before construction could start. It will likely be years before a grocery store opens.
In the meantime, the city has a number of programs aimed at bringing fresh fruits and vegetables to neighborhoods that lack access to them.
Healthy corners
Kristin duBay Horton, Bridgeport”™s director of health, said the city is pursuing different avenues while it waits for a more permanent solution.
The Healthy Corners initiative has used state and federal grant money to buy refrigeration equipment for three small corner stores in the neighborhood to store and sell fresh produce. The $22,000 program started early this year.
“The long-term plan is to get full-service grocer, but in the meantime we have these initiatives to bring healthy food into neighborhoods,” she said.
The program includes three of the neighborhood”™s 30 corner stores ”” two on Connecticut Avenue and one on Stratford Avenue, the parallel one-way streets that bisect the area ”” that were vetted by local residents.
She said the stores are within walking distance from anywhere in the neighborhood. They had to meet certain guidelines to be chosen, like clearing the register area of less-healthy offerings, and are subject to checks to ensure the refrigerators are used for their intended purposes.
In the spring, grant money is supposed to pay for new windows, awnings and logos to identify the stores to passers-by.
Horton said the program has shown early success. “The community is really getting used to fact that they can walk into places that are three blocks from their house and pick up some carrots, some onions, maybe a nice mango to go with your dinner,” she said.
The city has expanded farmers markets in other neighborhoods, in addition to encouraging community gardens for people to grow their own food, among other programs, she said.
“Bridgeport is in a position to be a national model,” she said. “Four years (from) now, I expect that when I look at the childhood obesity data and the adult obesity data that it is going to look markedly different than it does now.”
Hearst Connecticut Media includes four daily newspapers: Connecticut Post, Greenwich Time, The Advocate (Stamford) and The News Times (Danbury). See ctpost.com for more from this reporter.
