Will South Park ever see another grocery store? Probably not, according to local officials

The more local leaders talk about revitalizing Port Huron’s south end, the more an old conversation re-emerges: What about getting a grocery store to South Park?

More than 11 years after the former River District Market burned down — at a site off Electric Avenue later adopted by the city for a future housing development — the question came before a panel at a meeting for the Southside Neighborhood Improvement Authority last week.

And after a lengthy community development talk shifted to the potentiality to bring a store back to the area, Port Huron City Manager James Freed said he thought it was important to be “honest and completely realistic.”

“The grocery store business is incredibly tough,” he told the group during the meeting Thursday.

“So, we met with a lot of grocers in the last decade for downtown and throughout the city,” Freed said. “I talked to a guy who owns a grocery store (that accommodates) rural areas, so smaller communities out (in the county). And he said the average ticket price is 25 bucks. If you’re (making) a Saturday or Sunday morning grocery trip, you’re going to big box stores — Meijer, Walmart, Save A Lot, or Aldi. Aldi’s my favorite. But folks are going to (smaller stores) to get something they forgot, or they want to make dinner that night. They wanted about 25 dollars’ worth of stuff. That was their niche.

“Then, COVID happened, and technology’s emerged. Now, you have Shipt and DoorDash. Now, even these isolated grocery stores, which are geographically a great distance away from box stores, which inoculated them from a lot of the market pressures, even they’re telling us Shipt is delivering from Meijer to our area.”

And so, the city manager said, it’s difficult to get a store to come to the area.

Along with Freed, Marilyn Chrumka, vice president of development of Michigan Community Capital, was one of five panelists to talk with the neighborhood authority last week.

Earlier in the meeting, she’d referenced projects her agency helped arranged financing for, including a mixed-use development in Mount Pleasant that included a grocery store.

There’s plenty of subsidiary funding and grant money for, as well as a willingness to build new markets, she said. However, on Thursday, she agreed the bigger problem is, whether they’re talking about grocery store access in Saginaw or the Upper Peninsula, finding a grocer to occupy a space.

“The challenging thing is there is not enough grocery stores going where we need them to go in low-income census tracts, in food deserts,” Chrumka said. “So, even though we have subsidies to encourage the build out of these grocery stores, having frequent conversations with (stores like) Meijer, Aldi, they have a formula that they look at and they don’t care that you want a grocery store. They care about where it makes them money.”

So, will a new grocery store be built on the south end? Most officials said it isn’t likely.

So, then, what are the options?

In Mount Pleasant, Chrumka said it was a local food co-op that operated a grocery store in the mixed-use development near the city’s downtown.

With the emergence of new technology, Freed said it was just about rewording the south end’s goal.

“The grocery store market is incredibly tense. So, define the mission. The mission is how do we get fresh meat and produce and groceries to people?” he said. “Is it a grocery store or a partnership with Amazon Fresh or Shipt to allow those people to have food delivered to their homes?”

Fellow panelist Randy Maiers, president of the Community Foundation of St. Clair County, agreed with Freed, asking what’s the most affordable way to get food in neighborhoods, such as the nonprofit previously helping bring a refrigerator truck to the area.

Maiers also asked whether organizers could go to existing stores and ask they increase what they offer.

Freed recalled that’s what happened with the South Park Dollar General. Months after the city pushed Dollar General corporate, the store brought limited produce to the Conner Street location.

Joe Bixler, who co-chairs the neighborhood authority and is president of the Southside Initiative, wasn’t initially satisfied with the Dollar General idea last year, admitting Thursday the selection he’d seen confirmed it was “not a replacement for a grocery store.”

Still, he said he appreciated panelists comments: “Don’t start with a grocery store.”

One way or another, Bixler said they’ll figure it out.

“A lot of folks have poo-pooed the idea of even a co-op. There are lots of ideas out there. It doesn’t even have to be a co-op,” he said. “We can start it in a damn church, a parking lot. Or we could do the farmers market, a two-day-a-week kind of thing. You know, start there.”

The Southside Neighborhood Improvement Authority meets the second and fourth Thursday monthly at the Harvey Reinvestment Center on 24th St.

Contact Jackie Smith at (810) 989-6270 or jssmith@gannett.com.