Don't Play Politics with Grocery Stores

by Gary Toebben

All over the City of Los Angeles vacant buildings sit waiting for a new tenant. In some neighborhoods, residents are waiting patiently for a retail grocery store that provides healthy and affordable food. So it is a double coupon event when a grocery store wants to open in a building that has been vacant for more than 20 years, in a neighborhood that does not have close access to a major retail grocery store.

In the early 1990’s, the ground floor of Grand Plaza, located next to Chinatown, where Grand Avenue and Cesar Chavez Avenue meet, was zoned for a grocery store. But the grocery store didn’t come. Twenty long years later, Walmart has stepped up and is moving forward with plans to fill that site with a Neighborhood Market. This is a big deal for that neighborhood because residents will soon have an amenity that most other citizens of Los Angeles take for granted.

But there is a dark cloud that threatens to rain on this community's parade. While the site of the future Neighborhood Market is zoned appropriately and has all the entitlements necessary for a grocery store, a special interest group has made the declaration that it will take any means necessary to stop this by right project.

Walmart is not the only target of such threats, just the latest. The politics of grocery stores and business locations has a long history in Los Angeles. Regardless of which side of the political or shopping aisle you are on, a neighborhood grocery store should not be up for debate when the City’s zoning code allows for that specific use at that specific site. Certainty is the key to economic investment for grocery stores and every other type of business in Los Angeles.

If the City of Los Angeles cannot guarantee the granting of permits for a Neighborhood Market at a site zoned for a grocery store that has been vacant for 20 years, then we have a bigger mess to clean up than the one on aisle 5. City leaders must show by example that a by right project means just that — no games, no delays and no politics. This grocery store should be in the bag.

And that's The Business Perspective.