Future Here Now: The People Need Food
NOTE: I don’t live in this community. If you have additional information and would like me to correct anything, please let me know.
I spent the first 8 years of my professional life (after 2 years failing to get a teaching job) working in historic preservation. I put things on the National Register of Historic Places, lobbied for a local preservation ordinance, even helped start a Main Street program in a town that was known for demolishing anything old.
And I am fully in support of using those tools to keep a chain grocery store in a neighborhood.
Before some of you throw your recovered bricks at me, let me explain.
Gentrification is a complex issue, made up of a tangle of economic, social, urban design etc. issues. And one of the common problems in a gentrifying area is that demand drives costs for rent and everything else higher and higher, until only the most premium goods and services providers can afford to stay in the gentrified neighborhood.
That's not a big issue for wealthy residents, who may complain but who have the means to get what they need (delivery services, drive to the suburbs, etc.). But for others, especially longtime lower income residents, losing a local source for basic goods and services can mean the difference between being able to stay where they have their support network, and being forced to move somewhere where life may be much more precarious.
We under-estimate the value of a basic local grocery store, until it's gone. And if we are in a situation where other options are limited, we will feel that loss acutely.
The grocery receiving the protection. From Bloomberg.
So I think you can make a sound argument that preserving a neighborhood's access to reasonably priced groceries is a legitimate use of preservation tools, regardless of how you feel about chain grocers. Historic and cultural preservation has always lived in a tension between creating museum pieces and supporting places where people live their lives. And we're beginning to see a broader definition of what it means to preserve a place, inching away from an exclusive focus on buildings and toward a more holistic understanding of what makes places worth preserving.
As with so many of our evolutions as we move into the Fusion Era, we're becoming more and more aware that supporting living breathing people provides the most important rationale for our public policy choices. And even though we have always said that in our political statements and master plan documents, we've often held the real, complicated, messy people at arms length.
That's been particularly true in urban design and historic preservation, where we often find it far too easy to fall in love, to obsess over, the ideals of the built environment, moving the part about real life people to a footnote.
So yes, I'm all in favor of extending preservation protections to a chain grocery store. Given our decades of failures to create vibrant urban living environments for people who aren't wealthy, I'm interested to see whether this tool helps keep its neighborhood both preserved and real.
For people.