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CHOOSING SIDES: WHY DO BUSINESSES FAVOR THE WEST SIDE OF THE CITY? - LONG AFTER LEGAL SEGREGATION ENDED IN GREENSBORO, THE CITY'S EAST SIDE REMAINS OVERWHELMINGLY BLACK - AND, IN ALMOST EVERY CASE, UNDERSERVED BY BUSINESSES THAT ARE PLENTIFUL ON THE PREDOMINANTLY WHITE WEST SIDE. THERE ARE FEWER BANKS, LESS SHOPPING AND FEWER ENTERTAINMENT OPTIONS IN EAST GREENSBORO, FORCING MANY TO DRIVE ACROSS TOWN TO GET THINGS THE REST OF THE CITY TAKES FOR GRANTED. GREENSBORO'S DIVIDING LINE: PROFIT MARGINS, PERCEPTION OF CRIME AMONG BARRIERS
Connie Harris avoids the grocery stores near her home in east Greensboro.
The store where she used to shop , Harris Teeter, pulled out of its space in the Northeast Shopping Centerat Summit and East Bessemer avenues; an independent chain later filled the space. There, the bakery shelves are bare, there is no full-service butcher and there are only a handful of varieties of frozen fish.
So Harris, 78, has her daughter drive her across town to the Harris Teeter atFriendlyCenter . That store, more than twice as big as the one near her home, has free samples, a sushi counter, fresh-baked bread, high ceilings and a built-in Starbucks coffee shop .
"The help there is so nice. They take your groceries out to the curb and treat you like a queen," Harris said. " At the other one, you're dodging hoodlums and hoping you won't get hit over the head."
Why aren't there more grocery stores like the one atFriendlyCenter in east Greensboro? The Northeast Shopping Center 's owner, Trip Brown, attributed Harris Teeter's move to the different profile of customer in the "inner-city market."
"Northeast Shopping Center and that clientele is just not Harris Teeter's cup of tea," Brown said, referring to the area's lower-income residents.
Basic services - from urgent-care centers to grocery stores, banks to movie theaters - are easy to find in the city's majority-white areas. But east of Summit Avenue and Freeman Mill Road, where black people make up 77 percent of the population, those businesses are nonexistent or widely scattered, a News & Record computer analysis shows.
According to that analysis:
*East Greensboro has less than half as many federally insured banks per person as the west. For instance, Wachovia has 13 bank branches on the city's west side, two on the east side.
*There are a third fewer grocery stores per person on the east side. The few grocery stores there are older and smaller, and they offer fewer choices to shoppers than the newer superstores to the west.
*There are 18 major retailers - big-box and department stores - in the west. There is one in the east.
*When residents need a doctor after hours, all eight of the city's urgent-care centers are in the west. The city's three hospitals also are outside of east Greensboro.
*To catch a movie, residents of east Greensboro must drive across town. There are 60 screens in the west, none in the east.
In the days of segregation, east Greensboro had a stable of mostly black-owned stores where residents could pick up some food or take in a movie: The Skylight Cafe. The Community Grocery. Chef Eddie's. The Palace Theater.
Elsie Jacobs, who still lives near the old East Market Street business district, remembers shopping on East Market Street when she was a teenager in the 1950s. On the mile-long streetcar ride from downtown, she passed an A&P grocery store, curb markets, cafes, doctors' and dentists' offices. Everything she needed was right in her neighborhood.
Now the old business district, wiped out by federal redevelopment efforts of the 1960s, has fewer of the businesses that used to serve the primarily African American neighborhoods of east Greensboro. Jacobs has worked on an effort to revive the corridor, but she still asks, "When you walk down Market Street, where are you going to go?"
Long after legal segregation ceased to divide the city between east and west, most of the city's minority population still lives in the east. About 30 percent of the city's residents live in the east, and black people make up 77 percent of that population, according to census figures. The western half of the city, in contrast, is 71 percent white.
Crosstown food run
When buying food, residents of the east have fewer choices and smaller stores to shop in. High-end grocer Harris Teeter has built new stores and rehabbed others in predominantly white neighborhoods but has closed its locations in mostly black neighborhoods. Harris Teeter spokeswoman Jennifer Panetta said she couldn't divulge how the company selects its locations but said the company is "always pursuing sites in many areas."
Developers and shopping- center owners say major chains care more about disposable income than race. They're more likely to court a fast-growing area with high incomes than a slow-growing neighborhood with low incomes, they said. But in Greensboro, the neighborhoods that are overwhelmingly African American are also the poorest.
Commercial real-estate manager Marty Kotis said most retailers try to target a certain market and will close their store when conditions change. Harris Teeter and Lowes aim for the higher-income neighborhoods, with Bi-Lo and Winn-Dixie in the middle and Food Lion and discount food stores such as Save-A-Lot serving lower-income customers, he said.
Everybody's got to eat, but higher-income buyers are more likely to buy the higher-margin products such as seafood, expensive wine and cheeses the bigger stores offer, Kotis said. Chains on the less-affluent east side can't support a large store on their more cost-conscious customers, he said.
This calculation drove Winn-Dixie to close its 21,000-square-foot store on Phillips Avenue in 1998. The chain was phasing out its smaller stores and building new ones twice that size elsewhere. When the store closed, the company directed its employees and customers to its new location: eight miles across town on New Garden Road.
That move left residents of the neighborhood, many of whom are too old to drive or can't afford a car, without any place to shop for the first time since the 1960s. Residents of east Greensboro are five times as likely to take public transportation to their jobs as those elsewhere in town, according to census figures, so stopping for food on the way home isn't always an option. The nearby Family Dollar started stocking such essentials as milk and other basic needs, but nothing close to what a true supermarket would offer.
Goldie Wells, a neighborhood activist who has worked to recruit another store for the shopping center , said locating stores in west Greensboro is a form of invisible racism that makes just about everything a struggle. Residents without a car can either pay much more for food at a convenience store or spend money and time to take a bus or taxi to another part of town to shop .
"The people that don't have (money) have to spend more to get what they need," Wells said, adding that the situation "continues to make the poor poorer."
Dick Grubar, a former City Council member who serves as the leasing agent for the Phillips Avenue shopping center , said major chains are not interested in the location because the average income of residents in the surrounding three- to five-mile radius is too low.
"I guess there's not the income to build those big stores," Grubar said.
That formula holds true in Greensboro, with most shopping centers clustered around more affluent neighborhoods. Stand in Irving Park and you'll find a country club, expensive homes and an average household income of $122,000. You're also a mile and a half from seven grocery stores, including three Harris Teeters and two Food Lions.
On Phillips Avenue, where the average household income is $25,000, the closest store is a Food Lion a mile and a half away.
In Winston-Salem, a similar opening in the market spurred a group of grocery-store managers to break with their company and start a new store. Harry Hankins and four other former Food Lion managers saw the same situation unfolding in that town's minority neighborhoods. The major chains were pulling out or neglecting investments in their stores. There was an unfilled need in the area, so he and his partners left the chain and started their own full-service grocery, 5 Star Supermarket.
"The chains now are going out into the rural areas," Hankins said. "I knew that the competitors weren't going to come into that area."
Hankins found an abandoned shopping center but knew that if his store succeeded, it could revive the neighborhood.
"I wanted to see, if you put it in there, would it reverse the trend?" he said.
The idea worked, and now the formerly empty center is thriving with small businesses, a credit union and restaurants.
And a funny thing happened when his store started winning customers, Hankins said. Food Lion built a brand-new store nearby, replacing one of the chain's oldest. That wouldn't have happened without the competition from 5 Star, he said.
More payday loans
In even shorter supply in east Greensboro are banks, where there are less than half as many branches per person than in the rest of the city. Most of the 13 federally-insured banks are clustered in two areas: along East Bessemer Avenue and near the city's edge along Randleman Road. On the west side, 76 bank branches line busy corridors such as Battleground Avenue, High Point Road and West Market Street.
Rocky Mount-based RBC Centura has five branches in the city, all of which are located outside the black community. Federal banking rules require banks to serve the entire community where they are located, but spokeswoman Kristen Burnette said Centura's downtown location is close enough to serve east Greensboro.
That's not to say east-side residents are without financial options. There are more check-cashing shops , pawn shops and payday-loan operations than regular banks. Those operations charge high interest rates for short-term loans for customers who don't have access to a bank.
The Rev. Walter Richmond, who has worked to fight predatory lending, said banks don't meet the needs of poorer workers trying to save money. For example, he said, some banks charge a monthly fee to open a certificate of deposit if the customer has less than $150 to start with. The fees wipe out the benefits of saving.
And when it comes to loans, Richmond said, many residents avoid a regular bank to visit a payday lender or pawn shop . There is no shortage of those businesses in black neighborhoods.
"The banks don't seem to be able to design a product to compete with the cash-advance places," Richmond said. "I don't even think the bank wants to fool with them."
A trip to the doctor
The imbalance of medical services may have more to do with inertia.
Eagle Physicians, a Greensboro-based practice of more than 80 doctors, started in 1995 with the merging of five group practices, all in the western half of the city. CEO Bruce Brenholdt acknowledged that there is a shortage of doctors in the east, but he said it's difficult to start a new location. So instead of spreading to more locations inside the city, most of the company's growth has been expansion at its original offices.
Offices of such specialists as cardiologists or neurologists, he says, usually are clustered around hospitals, all of which are outside of the black community.
Finding entertainment
The disparity in services between east and west isn't limited to grocery stores, banks or doctors, said Bob Davis, a sociology professor at N.C. A&T and the chairman of the nonprofit East Market Street Development Corp. When a colleague visited him from out of town, Davis couldn't find a sit-down restaurant for them to have lunch anywhere near the college campus, even though it's home to 10,000 students and several hundred faculty.
When he wants to take his son out after work, Davis said, he has to leave the black community to find a bowling alley or movie theatre.
For the community to survive, businesses have to get over the perception that there's excessive crime, Davis said. Once a few businesses come in and succeed, others will follow.
"If the developers don't step up, it's never going to happen," Davis said. "Nobody wants to be first. Everybody wants to be third."
Richard Bowling, a Greensboro businessman who started SEEDS, a nonprofit group devoted to developing southeast Greensboro, said the disparity between the two sides of the city is caused by the lingering effects of racism. The black community has always gotten stuck with the things that the white community didn't want to live with, such as the landfill, sewage-treatment plants and the Lorillard Tobacco plant, he said.
"Everything that is positive in this city is located outside east Greensboro," Bowling said. "How can you survive when the city has created a negative image for (east Greensboro)?"
East Greensboro's ticket to more businesses might be the new homes that retailers covet. With available land dwindling west of town, developers are quickly putting up new homes on the eastern edge of the city, such as Starmount Co.'s Reedy Fork Ranch on U.S. 29 and other neighborhoods sprouting near the future Urban Loop.
The city's east side has been overlooked in past decades, UNCG geography professor Keith Debbage said, but a shift in city policy to extend water lines and improve roads would add more population and more customers for retailers.
"The city has made an explicit statement that we will reward capital investment on the East. And that is new," he said.
The city has also provided money for the redevelopment of East Market Street, including a partnership with Project Homestead to tear down an aging retail strip and replace it with modern space for small businesses. That project, the Dudley-Lee Center , is nearly full with a Krispy Kreme franchise and soon a sit-down restaurant many residents have asked for.
And in what could be retailing's equivalent to a seal of approval, Wal-Mart will tear down the defunct Carolina Circle Mall on U.S. 29 and build a new superstore there.
The announcement, and speculation that more development could follow Wal-Mart's lead, is hailed by residents who feel they have been neglected too long.
"Everything they've got," Connie Harris said, motioning westward, "we want that, too."
Caption: MAP AND ILLUSTRATION BY DOUG COX, BENJAMIN J. VILLARREAL/ News & Record
High-end grocer Harris Teeter has built new stores and renovated others in predominantly white neighborhoods but has closed its groceries in mostly black neighborhoods.
Compare Foods, formerly Galaxy Foods, is one of nine grocery stores in east Greensboro. These stores are older and smaller, and they offer fewer choices than the ones on the west side.
WHERE BUSINESSES LOCATE
Memo: BUSINESSES ON WEST SIDE
Banks 76
Grocery stores 31
Major retailers 18
Urgent care 8
Movie screens 60
Payday loans,
check cashers
and pawnshops 18
Dry cleaners 41
Fast food 52
BUSINESSES ON EAST SIDE
Banks 13
Grocery stores 9
Major retailers 1
Urgent care 0
Movie screens 0
Payday loans,
check cashers
and pawnshops 14
Dry cleaners 13
Fast food 22
High-end grocer Harris Teeter has built new stores and renovated others in predominantly white neighborhoods but has closed its groceries in mostly black neighborhoods.
Compare Foods, formerly Galaxy Foods, is one of nine grocery stores in east Greensboro. These stores are older and smaller, and they offer fewer choices than the ones on the west side.
WHERE BUSINESSES LOCATE
Memo: BUSINESSES ON WEST SIDE
Banks 76
Grocery stores 31
Major retailers 18
Urgent care 8
Movie screens 60
Payday loans,
check cashers
and pawnshops 18
Dry cleaners 41
Fast food 52
BUSINESSES ON EAST SIDE
Banks 13
Grocery stores 9
Major retailers 1
Urgent care 0
Movie screens 0
Payday loans,
check cashers
and pawnshops 14
Dry cleaners 13
Fast food 22
1 comment:
Thanks, lots of stuff I can use here. The Goldie quote especially.
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