Unravelling the Supermarket

If you live in North Seattle, chances are you have shopped at the Fred Meyer super store in Greenwood. It sells you everything from baked goods to garden hoses. This store is a combination of a supermarket and a Target. It consumes two levels, over 200,000 square feet of space, and acts as the “catch all” store for all your neighborhood needs.

Sounds great on paper, but it’s a complete neighborhood killer.

I don’t mean to pick on this specific store, it’s just an example of a failed land use policy that has turned Seattle into a sprawled out suburb. By consolidating everything under one roof, we have harder times reaching these essential stores and are encouraged — or outright required — to drive.

Every one of these zones operates as an individual store in major cities around the world. My friends in Brooklyn know their baker, who operates a stand alone shop with a storefront. Plus, isn’t it great to walk in a lovely city to experience all these?

Supermarkets and grocery stores need a population of 10,000 or more people to sustain their existence. Most take up anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 square feet. In some cases, like the Fred Meyer, they take up twice that. Now, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Who doesn’t want to shop at their bakery, butcher shop, gardening store, produce stand, beer/wine/liquor store, general store, and many other needs in one single car-free environment? This is done all over places like Brooklyn and Paris. When it’s done here, it’s under one roof after entering from a sea of surface parking lots. Why is that? Because cars dominate our city and we have no other reasonable means to get to this store other than by vehicle. And since it is so aggravating to shop at stores like these, we buy up weeks worth of food just so we don’t have to go back as frequently. A vicious cycle.

People are baffled that America doesn’t have more corner stores and street side cafes like Paris. We travel far and wide to experience them, take photos for our instagram, then return home gushing about it to our friends and family. But look out our doors in Seattle and we see nothing but a stale suburban style neighborhood draped over a city 4x the land size of Manhattan. When we stay in Brooklyn or Rome, you can stop by the local small market to pick up your essentials and you probably did so every day or two just to keep things fresh. It’s easy, walkable, convenient, and provides a rich urban environment that makes it challenging to select which filter will make your friends most jealous of your vacation online. Nobody instagrams the streets that Fred Meyer is on.

It’s time to unravel these uses.

The funniest thing about supermarkets & malls is we all admit the best way to shop is in a car-free environment. With these uses under one roof we can only reach great distances by car. Here, the parking lot takes up 60% of the land.

We talk a lot about “15-Minute Neighborhoods” but we never really get into what makes them here in Seattle. That’s because we are a city of slogans and inaction. I’m sure it’ll make its way into a yard sign in a single family lot someday next to one of those “No Upzones!” signs. Sometimes we tell ourselves this is a “chicken or egg” argument. But I think it’s simple. Seattle is notorious for banning chains & big box retail. When Northgate got a Target and Best Buy it took a lot of convincing city leaders to allow this to happen. Same went for the urban Target locations downtown and in Ballard. Again, we are rightfully skeptical of what these sprawl-encouraging businesses do to our cities. If we allow them, they consolidate all the business inside them, killing any other street side competitor. Now, since they’re all under a single roof, we have to travel greater distances to reach them, which encourages car use. The cars have to go somewhere, so no wonder Fred Meyer in Greenwood has a parking lot that consumes half their land.

Land use plays a critical role.

For Fred Meyer’s 250,000 square feet to be realized, we have to consume so much land if we are dedicated to single family zoned dominance. The furthest walks would take nearly an hour to reach by foot. No wonder they drive instead.

Seattle does allow street side retail, but unfortunately it’s on the busiest, loudest, most dangerous roads. Aside from these narrow spaces of unique retail (ranging from lighting stores, book stores and coffee shops), the rest of our neighborhoods are dominated by single-family zoning. In order to make the Fred Meyer in my neighborhood work, the population necessary to support it requires so much land it will take you an hour to walk to the store and back (if you’re lucky) and who’s going to do that every other day? If we changed our zoning code to allow corner stores, they will fail because there aren’t enough people to sustain it. Or it will force the Fred Meyer to eventually close. Neither one of these things is good, per se, it just shows we cannot sustain a low density neighborhood anymore. If 2 people support 10 square feet of retail, no wonder fruit stands and butcher shops don’t want to open up, everyone is already at the Fred Meyer anyway. Local hardware stores can’t supply you anything if you’re already buying it elsewhere. We need people in our neighborhoods and the only way this will happen is with allowing sixplexes (or more) by right citywide. Doing so will provide the supply of people to support more options other than relying on the Fred Meyer alone.

Ah yes, the cars.

Quiet residential streets are great. The city’s program of Stay Healthy Streets have been enormously popular. In Greenwood, a to-go cider shop opened on one and you would find people standing in the street enjoying each other’s company as kids on bicycles zoomed by. These are the types of streets businesses belong on. Turns out everyone kind of likes sitting outside — even in winter! Street side dining has flourished in this pandemic, so why do we limit these spaces to the loudest and worst streets our city has? By moving these internal, we can make more enjoyable experiences. You can pick up some fruit and never have to hop in your car.

How we make this work.

This amazingly wonderful and dense neighborhood in Copenhagen has shops on every corner. They don’t have some behemoth supermarket consolidating the uses and they have the population to support these businesses.

Nobody is going to ask the Fred Meyer to shut down. We just need some competition. In the future, limit the size of the stores and limit the amount of parking required. That will convince smaller grocery outlets to take up a modest space in a rapidly densifying area and not fear the competition of Target or Fred Meyer squashing them into oblivion. Let the corner stores pop up in Greenwood and Phinney Ridge by allowing this zoning use on any corner in the city, let us walk on quiet neighborhood streets and grab a cup of coffee and sit on the patio. Stop convincing us we have to go get the car and make the dreaded once-a-week journey to the annoying supermarket. I’d love to grab the supplies for dinner on a walk home from the bus stop any given week night, just like I did when I was in Rome. Stop forcing us to the busy arterial to sit out side and have a nice sandwich on a narrow sidewalk stuffed with trees, power poles, people walking, and other utilities because you sacrificed 90% of the road for cars.

Why don’t we want this? The enormous outpouring for Yonder Cider, a small cider-to-go shop in Greenwood, proves we absolutely are dying for this shit. So let’s allow it and with it, let’s unravel the supermarkets and build a sustainable walkable neighborhood.

Speaking of, maybe I should make this a yard sign?