Detroit, A City Without A Supermarket

Things don't seem to be turning around in my hometown:

If no grocery stores buy the Farmer Jack locations from the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co., Detroit will be left without a single national chain supermarket, much less a Wal-Mart or Meijer superstore or a Costco-style warehouse store.

Analysts say no other major city in America is such a supermarket desert. And it's not likely to change anytime soon.

HT Organizations and Markets

Comments

[Mark]

Yup, desertification pretty much describes Detroit. Who to blame? Well, for starters, we can follow the lead of mayor Kwame and blame anyone else; How dare people use our high crime rate as an excuse to stay away! Let's try that for a while and see how that works.

[ShortWoman]

Detroit is a strange place. I used to live in Dearborn, just outside Detroit, maybe 5 miles from Ford Motors' World Headquarters.

There's a lot of abandoned housing in Detroit. That means a depressed tax base. The roads are crappy, the schools are decrepit, the power is unreliable (a good storm can mean multi-week outages for hundreds of thousands across the region), the water is such that residents get an annual reminder to let it run for a minute before actually drinking but otherwise it's ok. About the nicest thing I can say is that the city no longer burns every October 30 (a plot point in "The Crow", if anyone recalls). Granted there are a convention center and some concert halls and museums in/near downtown, but you have to go through some scary seeming neighborhoods to get there. Nobody wants to live in or start a business in the city because the infrastructure is so lousy, but the tax base is so bad that there is no money to fix the infrastructure.

And this news will only make things worse. The city burning down might be an improvement.

[David]

when do we get the promised report on the gluttony fest in brooklyn?

[chesterblog]

Its like you read my mind! You appear to know so much about this, like you wrote the book in it or something. I think that you could do with some pics to drive the message home a little bit, but other than that, this is great blog. A great read. I will certainly be back.