To help the grocery store action team, email Owens or Schultz at vancouvergrocery@gmail.com
When Heidi Owens moved to Vancouver seven months ago, she chose a house in the Hough neighborhood because she could tell downtown was on the cusp of greatness. She loved the feel of her new home but noticed it was missing one thing.
“The biggest issue I saw was that there was no grocery store,” she said.
So she went onto nextdoor.com, a social media site for neighbors, and posted a question: “Would you shop at a grocery store in downtown or uptown Vancouver?”
The question has since garnered more than 100 posts — resoundingly, neighbors said they would.
“People said, ‘We’ve had this discussion,’ or ‘We talk about this all the time,’ ” Owens said.
After learning that it had been a long-standing issue, Owens connected with another neighbor, Nancy Schultz, and began doing some research on how to go about attracting a grocer.
They started by reaching out to some people they knew who worked at various grocery stores and were told that if these companies saw a demand, they may do their own study and potentially open a store.
So the two women started a grocery store action team, an ad-hoc group they created to try and address the problem. The area that Owens and Schultz targeted includes multiple neighborhoods: Esther Short, Arnada, Hough, Carter Park, Lincoln, Fruit Valley and Northwest.
“This area is underserved,” Owens said. “It sounds hokey, but a grocery store is the center of life support in a community.”
Though there is a Safeway at 37th and Main Street, the women say that it’s small, with a limited selection and no in-store bakery.
“A lot of people won’t shop there,” Schultz said.
The group wants a grocery store that offers a healthy, locally sourced product line of sustainable, organic and conventional food, as well as other household items.
Because they don’t have the time, money or manpower to do a full market survey, Owens, Schultz and other volunteers are hitting the streets and attempting to prove demand by collecting 1,000 signatures from people who say they will regularly shop at a downtown grocery store.
Once they’ve reached their goal, they plan to put together a packet of information and either work with an economic development agency to connect with grocers or take the information directly to developers themselves.
“This is really about livability,” Owens said. “When there’s easier access and people can walk, it enhances the community.”
Though there may be an assumption that there’s not a population base, Owens said the goal is to send a clear message to grocery stores: “We are your customers and we want it.”
Kelly Love, president of the Greater Vancouver Chamber of Commerce, said she supports the effort and would help the group make connections when it’s ready.
“A grocer is a great idea,” she said. “Obviously, for a robust, thriving downtown, we want services and we want products that will allow us to work downtown, play downtown, spend our days downtown.”
Love added that she would encourage the group to think outside the box to accomplish the goal.
“When we had a natural food co-op, a super awesome store, they didn’t have the volume they needed to sustain,” she said. “What we may need to do — we, as a community — is look at what we’re asking these stores to do.”
She said that the trend in grocery stores in the past 20 years is consolidation, adding that a handful of Vancouver grocery stores have closed in recent years.
“If we try to do a pitch for a full-service grocery store, we will likely not clear the hurdle of having the appropriate volume,” she said.
She suggested that with the development of the Vancouver waterfront in the works, making a case for a store that sells groceries of the picnic and deli variety could be a good start.
“Could we start small and demonstrate need?” she said. “I want the neighborhoods to be successful and you have to think, ‘What is going to work for a business so that they can make an investment in us?'”
So far, the grocery action team has collected 250 signatures and has heard a lot of positive and encouraging feedback. They’ve also heard a lot of misinformation that they’re working to correct.
“We’re hearing from people on the streets that there’s this mythological number, 15,000. They say you need 15,000 people in an area to support a grocery store,” Schultz said. “That’s what everyone believes, but nobody’s trying. Well, damn it, we’re trying it.”
