How can we bring back neighborhood stores in Harrisonburg?
Once community anchors for the surrounding neighborhood, corner stores are now all but extinct. Is a revival possible?
Before Red Front closed in 2020, I could walk to an independent grocery store just a few blocks away from my house. Having a small grocery store that neighborhood residents can access without a car has become increasingly rare in most places in the US due to auto-oriented, use-separated development.
recently wrote about the use-separated suburbanization of grocery stores.[W]hile mainstream American grocery chains have largely supersized, suburbanized, and left the small-format grocery store segment behind, that segment survives in immigrant-owned independent small groceries and in the German imports Aldi and Lidl. Meaning, it’s still possible to do grocery retailing in this format.
That tracks with what I’ve observed in Harrisonburg. When it comes to small grocery stores that are easily accessible by foot from residential neighborhoods, El Chaparro and Tienda Hispana la Amistad are the only two in Harrisonburg that come to mind.
In 1937, two years before Harrisonburg adopted its first zoning ordinance, Earl Hess built what we now refer to as a mixed-use building on the corner of North Brook Avenue and West Wolfe Street. It had a small grocery store on the ground floor and three apartments for rent.
“Earl Hess, owner of the store, has erected a two-story brick building which contains three apartments in addition to the space occupied by the grocery and meat market … The Hilltop Grocery occupied the corner north of the Stehli Silk Mill for five years … The store is located conveniently in a populous neighborhood and the business continues to grow.”
The business-with-residential design of the building ensured that there were two sources of income: grocery store profits and rent from tenants. It also made the grocery store commute very short for residents of the surrounding neighborhood.
I spoke with Juanita Taylor, who rented an apartment at 133 N. Brook Ave. for almost 70 years. Juanita said there was a butcher counter in the back of the store, and most everyone in the neighborhood shopped there. Her son and his friends would often stop by on their way home from Waterman school and get candy or a soda from the store and then do their homework at her kitchen table.
At that time, there were still houses along West Market Street where the parking lot for the Artisan plastic bottle factory is today. Juanita said the houses were demolished to make way for the factory parking lot, so there was some loss of residential density in the neighborhood.
Harrisonburg implemented off-street parking minimums for grocery stores in the 1950s, which tilted the market in favor of bigger stores like Mick-or-Mack and Red Front. Juanita said more of her neighbors started shopping at the bigger stores to save money. By the 1970s, the Smith family, who owned Hilltop Grocery, threw in the towel: “We either had to expand and compete with the big stores or get out of the business.”
The former commercial space was converted to apartments, and the property is now zoned R-2 (residential). The mixed-use design of the structure allows it to be re-imagined and repurposed for different functions as community needs change. However, under the city’s current zoning ordinance, it could not be turned back into a corner store without a rezoning (and likely a parking variance).
Mixed-use buildings change with the times
Use-separated zoning tends to make buildings less adaptable. It’s hard to imagine grocery stores as we know them today being used for anything other than grocery stores, or possibly a church or event space. Generally speaking, a house stays a house, and a store stays a store, regardless of whether it’s vacant. Harrisonburg needs more buildings like Hilltop Grocery that serve both business and housing functions. Not only does the business-with-residential combo make structures like this more financially resilient and adaptable to future uses, they also have the potential to bring in more property tax revenue per acre for the city than use-separated developments with lots of parking.
North Dakota is not a state that is renowned for its urbanism, but ND Governor Doug Burgum recently made some surprisingly insightful statements about the damage use-separated zoning has done in the US. “We built cities all over America that are designed for automobiles and not designed for people … our housing costs are high, in part because of the way that we've designed our cities.”
The first step to bring back neighborhood corner stores would be to get out of our own way. Harrisonburg’s zoning ordinance currently prohibits commercial uses in buildings like this in most areas of the city. Even if the corner store use were allowed, the city requires one car parking space for every 200 square feet of gross floor area. I don’t know the square footage of the old store, but it’s unlikely that Hilltop would be able to meet our current off-street parking requirements. (Midtowne Market on Water Street is in the downtown central business district, which is exempt from parking requirements.)
As we re-examine our zoning ordinance, we have an opportunity to stop doubling down on car-centric, use-separated zoning. Harrisonburg should learn from the mistakes and successes of our past and build a better, more people-centric city for future generations.