Quote:
Originally Posted by tsarstruck
As an IRL friend of New2Fishtown, he is absolutely a villain who hates groceries. Kidding, kidding: I'm very sure he meant it in the "embarrassment of riches" way.
It is pretty fascinating the way some areas (Fishtown and South Philly in particular) have gone very quickly from having few groceries to so many that you have to scratch your head to understand how they all can all survive.
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Tsarstruck? Never heard of him. JK. Thanks, ye-whose-real-name-shall-remain-withheld, you are correct that I meant it in an overwhelmingly positive way.
I look at city development a lot through the lens of reducing car reliance, and the best way to do that is to bring the things people need most closest to their homes or to within seamless reach by something other than a car. The single biggest thing that could be done to both reduce reliance on car ownership and encourage use of other modes would be to increase the share of regional jobs located in CC, UC, and other maximally accessible locations. Since that's a long-term and slow-moving battle affected by lots of macroeconomic forces including tax and housing policy, I'll leave that alone and say that the next best things we can do to at least reduce car TRIPS, if not OWNERSHIP, is to make it as easy as possible to reach supermarkets and daycares (and probably pharmacies and a couple other things, but those are the biggies that trigger additional multi-mile trips for many people). Related, I'd argue it's never been easier to not own a car between e-commerce, ridesharing, and the covid-accelerated move toward hybrid and remote work. Despite all these things making it easier to use cars only on an occasional basis (a rental for a vacation, a zipcar for a Home Depot run, etc), it doesn't appear that rates of ownership or general NIMBY sentiments around parking and congestion have changed. But I digress. SUPERMARKETS.
I'd happily welcome half a dozen more grocers in the area if there's spending power to support them, but I was pointing out it's interesting that the 19123 zip code will soon have five medium-to-large, full-service grocery stores (Target, Sprouts, Amazon Fresh, Acme, and Heirloom...and I'm aware of a potential 6th, and I'm not including the Asian supermarket at 4th and Spring Garden). That's about...at least 150,000 s.f. of retail space for groceries, probably more. 19125 zip code has...a tiny Riverwards Produce and then the not-particularly-walkable IGA, and Old City/Society Hill has one small Acme and a soon-to-arrive-but-still-pretty-small Riverwards. And so the only downside to the embarrassment of riches in 19123 is that having 5 or 10 or 20 supermarkets in NoLibs doesn't do much for walkability/livability in Old City or Fishtown. So what I'm hoping for is more grocery stores everywhere, ideally following the Riverwards and Heirloom models, both of which emulate the Tesco / Sainsbury's / Franprix / G20 models from Europe where they have zero parking, flexible-format stores that can fit in very small spaces, because the idea is maximizing coverage and shortening distances between grocery outlets, not creating one enormous car-oriented supermarket. We've got amazing momentum on this front with the proliferation of these different grocery concepts and i hope it continues!!
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