The affordable grocery that was supposed to open in Seat Pleasant, Md., two years ago is still an empty storefront. Construction of a similar market in the District’s underserved Ward 8 is more than a year behind schedule. And even in the Langdon Park neighborhood of Northeast Washington, where Good Food Markets opened to rave reviews five years ago, the store is not profitable and has managed to survive only because of support from its parent company and public-sector grants.
The struggles of Good Food, a nonprofit chain that aims to bring grocery stores to low-income neighborhoods, show how difficult it is to address so-called food deserts — usually low-income neighborhoods where quality supermarkets are few and far between.
Getting access to capital in neighborhoods that have been historically redlined is one major barrier, said Philip Sambol, the executive director of Oasis Community Partners, which operates Good Food. Access to vendors is another.
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Federal trade and immigration policies under the Trump administration, along with the coronavirus pandemic, have only made the quest more challenging.
“Nothing that we’ve encountered is novel, nothing is insurmountable, but it does speak to why there are not more of these,” Sambol said in an interview.
Full-service, for-profit grocery stores tend to avoid food deserts because they can make more money in more affluent neighborhoods. Oasis Community Partners says it can thrive in such areas, though, thanks to its nonprofit model and grants from local governments.
“The grocery stores are some of the most well-funded, data-driven businesses in the entire world, and they’re not wrong that their model won’t work in say, Bellevue, Ward 8, or Langdon in Ward 5,” said Sambol. “But that doesn’t mean nothing will work.”
More than half of the city’s food deserts are in Ward 8, which has one full-service grocery store; other wards in the District have five or more. And in Prince George’s County, officials identified six areas that are considered food deserts, including Capitol Heights, which borders Seat Pleasant.
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The first Good Food market opened on Rhode Island Avenue NE in January 2015; the 900-square-foot location is staffed primarily by neighborhood residents.
But the operating capital the team thought would last for six months to a year lasted only six weeks. Operating the businesses turned out to be more complex than originally thought, and leaders had to spend more money on training workers and applying for vendors to supply products, Sambol said.
The store is not yet profitable, bringing in between $600,000 and $1 million each year, which is enough to cover operating costs. It stays afloat through grants from Oasis and government officials and through programs it runs, including a food delivery effort for senior citizens and cooking classes.
Sambol said his organization considers the store a social enterprise and does not need it to be profitable. At the same time, he sees a path to profitability once Good Food has more locations and can purchase and sell a greater volume of food more quickly. But getting more stores running has proved more difficult than anticipated.
Good Food planned to open a store in Seat Pleasant in Prince George’s in the fall of 2018, filling a gap left when a Safeway closed in 2016. But plans for funding from the city and from Industrial Bank fell through.
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“It’s horrible, I’m looking at people that don’t have a way to get their groceries,” Carmelita Edwards, 68, said on a recent morning in the parking lot of Addison Plaza, where the store will be located. “People need to have a place to shop and have decent food.”
Alicia Ross, 74, used to buy her groceries at the Safeway before it closed, and she misses it. She is thankful that she has a car and can travel to nearby grocery stores, but she stressed the importance of convenience.
“If you get up in the morning and you need something simple, you just run to the Safeway and come back home,” Ross said. “Instead of going to Martin Luther King Plaza or going to District Heights or going to Largo, I can just run down here and pick up what I want.”
Seat Pleasant Mayor Eugene W. Grant did not respond to requests for comment, and a spokeswoman from Industrial Bank declined to discuss the project, citing confidentiality protocols.
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“There was a false start there where we had one set of funding partners ... that sort of never really came together the right way,” Sambol said. “And it was kind of dormant for a period, and honestly, we thought it was probably not going to happen.”
But then Prince George’s County stepped up, offering more than $1 million in funding, including $500,000 from the county’s Economic Development Incentive Fund and $250,000 from the Revenue Authority. The San Francisco-based Low Income Investment Fund is also supporting the $2 million project, Sambol said.
The grants from the county do not have to be paid back as long as Good Food remains in the community, said David Iannucci, president of the Prince George’s County Economic Development Corp. One-hundred percent of the employees must be Prince George’s residents, and at least 25 percent of the construction work must be performed by county businesses.
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Sambol said construction should be finished in December, with plans to open the store early in 2021.
“We can’t do this all the time; in fact, we probably can’t do it many times, but we were so concerned about making sure that there were quality food products for the Seat Pleasant community, we pushed the numbers as hard as we could,” Iannucci said.
Local officials stepped up to save the project in Ward 8, too.
Construction on a store in the Bellevue neighborhood did not begin until March of this year, even though ground was broken in January 2019. Immigration policies touted by the Trump administration raised labor costs, which was one reason for the delay, Sambol said. And steel tariffs increased the costs of materials needed for the kitchen and refrigeration.
The project costs increased by more than $500,000, Sambol said. The D.C. Department of Insurance, Securities and Banking recently awarded Good Food $500,000 from the city’s BizCAP program to finish construction. That store, too, should open early next year, Sambol said.
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Local advocates said they understand that access to capital is the biggest challenge for nonprofits.
“The only thing we can do is be supportive of their attempt to get the necessary funding to complete construction and stocking and personnel recruitment,” said Calvin Smith, chairman of the Ward 8 Health Council. “People are kind of used to stops and starts.”
In the meantime, some residents aren’t waiting with bated breath. Ruby Luster, 72 and a Ward 8 resident, said she has gone so long without a grocery store nearby that she is used to traveling elsewhere. She takes a bus that drops her off near the Giant in the Eastover Shopping Center in Maryland.
“If one is here, of course we will probably come, but if not, we will keep going where we’re going,” Luster said.
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