August 24, 2007 | Chicago Sun-Times (IL)
By Sally Duros
Something has happened to my corner bar and grill in Ravenswood. Three years ago it was a corner sports bar with OK food and too many smokers. Two years ago, they built a comfortable street patio. Nicely decorated with window-boxes and with quiet tree-covered spots near the back of the sitting area, the cafe was the perfect clean well lighted place to sit and write.
That first summer though, it was almost too quiet. I was often the only customer, and I wondered if my neighborhood cafe would survive.
Two years ago, old buildings started to come down brick by brick on the wide commercial avenue where the little bar and grill stood. One by one the small, modest storefronts occupied by junk stores and embellished with safety cages shuttered up.
Then the condo buildings rose in stories of three and four. About 18 months ago, the big new plum for the neighborhood emerged from a long abandoned lot on the northeast corner of our major commercial intersection — a ground floor CVS Pharmacy.
When it opened, the CVS joined existing commercial businesses on two other corners: a convenience store, the kind where you have to check the date on the milk; and a bar notorious for bloody brawls and paddy wagon visits.
Today the rummy bar is gone, replaced by a cell phone dealer, and the convenience store is in transition into something else — I am rooting for a vegetable market. It can’t hurt to dream, can it?
And my corner bar and grill cafe? On a recent summer night, I had to wait to get a seat. While I waited, I watched the considerably increased street traffic: groups of men and women in their late 20s and 30s, new condo owners — out for a night in their new neighborhood.
In this case, all the changes were welcome, especially the CVS. Prior to that, my neighborhood really had nothing in the way of actual retail stores. But seemingly overnight it changed. What happened?
“Retail attracts retail, and like attracts like,” says Mari Gallagher, who heads her own research and consulting firm with expertise in a number of policy areas as well as in commercial site assessments and redevelopment. “Retailers and grocers — nobody wants to be the first. Grocers are incredibly risk adverse.
“The people in the industry are out to steal consumer dollars from other successful retailers, so they agglomerate.” Oh, sure, they what? “Agglomerate. Agglomeration is the attraction of retail to more retail.”
And what we have with my new neighborhood CVS is what is called the bell cow that starts the agglomeration. The bell cow is the first business that enters a neighborhood because they’ve found there are customers to woo and cash to be had.
“The bell cow is the cow with the dinging bell that makes the noise that then wakes everybody else up,” Gallagher says. “Some retailers just follow other retailers”
Starbucks is a good example of a bell cow, and that’s why it has become both the despised and beloved image of a neighborhood gentrifying. Lately I’ve been thinking pet grooming shops are following the Starbucks into neighborhoods where the median income is rising.
In my neighborhood, the bell cow CVS is affecting its intersection.
“Now the other corners are more valuable to the extent that a CVS is more valuable on a real estate level,” Gallagher says. “You’ll have more competition on those corners.”
Gallagher has researched extreme states of retail plenty and scarcity. The Clybourne Corridor is an example of where there is too much retail, and it brings a host of problems. The other extreme — and one that has significant repercussions on health — is the Food Desert, which Gallagher defines as a large geographic area with no or distant grocery stores. Location of fast food and grocery stores have diet-related health consequences for the people living in the neighborhood.
Oh — what I wouldn’t give for a place to pick up fresh broccoli on my way home from the train every night. But there isn’t a flowerette to be found for miles around in my solid working- to middle-class neighborhood. But still, technically I do not live in the food desert, because there are many smaller, convenience style grocers around. You know the kind, with onions on the way out.
“Something sets the tone, and everything goes with that tone,” Gallagher says. “In the food desert it’s a kind of fringe tone, and fringe attracts fringe. So you will have a pawn shop. You might see a shuttered building. There’s not enough mass going on.”
Retailers want a no brainer. This cowardice — my word — means that they miss opportunities.
Gallagher tells a joke to explain this: “Two economists are walking down the street, one says to the other: ‘Wasn’t that a $20 bill we just passed?’ The other economist says, ‘No, or someone would have picked it up’.”
Gallagher says: “That’s the oxymoronic dilemma. Retailers won’t go there until others have.”
The highest level of retail use always sets the tone, Gallagher says. And existing retail use sets the first tone.
“So if your tone is this food desert tone — maybe you’ll see a pharmacy there, and paper blowing down the street, and some of the buildings are shuttered,” she says. “It is going to be hard to [get retail]come in. You will need some special subsidy or plan.
“That’s why government really needs to take a fresh look at what it can do,” she says. “Grocers are anchors. There is an hierarchy of land use, a hierarchy of retail, and any kind of use effects the hierarchy of land value.
“The market is not perfect,” Gallagher says. “You’d think if there were a $20 there, somebody would have picked it up.”