• Plans for grocery store will take time,
During a press conference Monday afternoon, T. Sheri Dickerson, head of the local chapter of Black Lives Matter, listed demands for the city to meet as the group continues its protest against police killings of blacks and historic discrimination.
One demand is for a grocery to be opened on the east side of Oklahoma City — within six months.
Only one location could feasibly house a modern grocery is in the requested timeframe, one that was briefly home to Sav-A-Lot at NE 36 and Kelley. The operators of Uptown and Buy- for- Less, long promised a new Uptown Grocery to replace their decades- old store at NE 23 and Martin Luther King. Years passed and the owners, Hank and Susan Binkowski, pulled back on that promise, closed the store, and prepared to demolish the building.
In response to community protest, the Binkowskis met with local black leaders and promised to open an Uptown Grocery in the former 18,000-square-foot Sav-ALot store. As of June, the only construction permit filing was in October for a sign. The Binkowskis have not returned multiple calls asking for an update.
The new 30,000-squarefoot Homeland store at NE 36 and Lincoln Boulevard will employ 75 people and is located along an EM BARK bus route. If built, it will be the first built-from-scratch new grocery to be opened by Homeland since it became an employee-owned company in 2011.
Marc Jones, HAC CEO, said plans for the store layout
are completed and construction i s set to start t h i s s u mme r w i t h a n o p e n i n g b y f a l l 2 0 2 1 . Cathy O'Connor, president of The Alliance for Economic Development of Oklahoma City, said the deal is pending approval of new market tax credits needed to make the project possible.
In the meantime, Jones met on Friday with Ward 7 Councilwoman Nikki Nice on Friday to discuss how to improve access to food and groceries i n northeast Oklahoma City, an area zoned in January as a recognized “food desert.”
Larger box stores l i ke a s u p e r market u s u a l l y take about a year to build, and the Homeland is no exception.
“W e ' r e c o m m i t t e d to opening as quickly as humanly possible,” Jones said Monday afternoon. “We are constrained by it not taking a day or two to build a supermarket. Everybody, the city, the developer, Cathy O'Connor and her team, would like to open it as soon as possible. We want to too.”