Councillor wants to see zoning that enables community grocers
A Vancouver city councillor thinks corner grocery stores deserve much more attention and respect.
Sarah Kirby-Yung wants her fellow councillors to support her motion on Tuesday to encourage more corner grocery stores in the city and help create walkable, sustainable communities.
The COVID-19 pandemic, she said, has “shone a spotlight” on the importance that corner grocery stores can play in providing for people’s daily needs. “I think that’s one of the silver linings to the COVID cloud — it has really turned people’s attention to the importance of shopping and buying local and recognizing your dollars stay in the community,” she said.
Kirby-Yung said she lives in the Cambie area, where there are no small-scale food retail stores despite the amount of redevelopment that has gone on in the past few years.
To buy simple basics such as bread, milk and eggs, she has to leave her neighbourhood, which goes against the city’s goal of establishing complete local communities.
“From that perspective, it is really relevant to look at zoning and development bylaws that (have restricted) a lot of this kind of retail and limited it to main arterials and not integrated them in the heart of residential communities,” she said.
Her motion cites three local examples of stores that combine a grocery with a café: Le Marché St. George and The Federal Store in Mount Pleasant, and Wilder Snail Neighbourhood Grocery and Coffee in Strathcona.
Other examples of green grocers are Sunrise Market in the Downtown Eastside and Sunshine Market at Oak and West 15th.
Corner grocery stories, she said, have a long history in Vancouver of providing specialized ethnocultural foods not available elsewhere. They are also part of the multicultural diversity of the city.
“From my perspective, it is really about building sustainable, complete neighbourhoods that you can live in and where you have parks, community centres and facilities, live or work, have access to transit, and get your groceries as well,” she said.
The motion calls on city staff to include corner stores and food-friendly neighbourhoods as part of engagement for the Vancouver Plan, a long-term planning process looking at areas such as housing, jobs, parks, transportation, and reconciliation, and to report back to council by this fall on potential early actions and policy directions.
In 2019, a report about smallscale retail stores found that the city had 25 neighbourhood grocery stores, 100 non-conforming retail outlets, and 364 demolished neighbourhood retail sites.
Jacqueline Hunter said in the report that the small-scale neighbourhood retail stores are associated with a time that was less focused on cars and “people walked to the corner store for their daily needs.
“The shops that survive today are valued for their character and contribution to neighbourhood identity,” Hunter said in Smallscale Neighbourhood Retail in Vancouver.
“Despite their charm, neighbourhood shops are highly vulnerable to loss because they are not well-recognized in current policies and procedures.”
The report suggests that introducing more uses to zoning districts could encourage more opportunities for neighbourhood retail.
“This could foster the emergence of new shops around already existing neighbourhood-based stores,” the report says.