Courtesy of Brahm Ahmadi

Side view of rendering of proposed design of People's Community Market

Brahm Ahmadi wants to open a grocery store in West Oakland. But not just any old store: one that hires local residents and pays them a decent wage with benefits; one that stocks healthy, affordable and ethnically appropriate foods; and one that is financially sustainable.

The trouble is, to do that will take at least two to three years between getting the financing in place, signing a lease, building out the store, setting up a supply chain and hiring staff. That's time that city and state officials, under pressure to address the problem of urban food deserts—pockets of urban areas that have no access to fresh food—aren’t inclined to spend.

The Obama Administration has shone a light on the food desert issue with the Healthy Food Financing initiative, a program announced this February as part of the proposed 2011 federal budget, which would devote $400 million to funding grocery stores in low-income and rural areas. While the initiative is intended to fund a variety of food options, including grocery stores, community-supported agriculture (CSAs) and farmers’ markets, larger corporate stores, like Kroger’s or Walmart, are poised to take more advantage of this public help than independent efforts, as there are no requirements in the funding that would preclude them, and they can get stores up and running faster.

Meanwhile, nonprofits and food access activists are pushing for more farmer's markets or urban farms as the solution.

Ahmadi, though, has no plans to give up his dream of opening the People’s Community Market, a full-service store.

The idea came from Ahmadi’s time as the executive director of People’s Grocery, a nonprofit food-access organization started in West Oakland in 2003. The organization provides food outreach, and supports a number of food businesses, including a CSA program that aims to provide fresh food not currently found in the neighborhood. Ahmadi left the organization last year, frustrated by the limitations of their delivery model.

A number of other groups are similarly trying to tackle West Oakland’s food access problem via everything from farmers’ market stands to partnerships with local schools.  City Slicker Farms, for example, runs produce stands throughout West Oakland and helps local residents to build and maintain backyard gardens. Like People’s Grocery, City Slicker charges those who can afford it a premium for its organic fare, which allows them to provide low-income residents with more affordable produce.

Courtesy of People's Grocery

An outreach effort by People's Grocery brings kids and chickens together

The closest any group has come to what Ahmadi proposes is Mandela Foods Cooperative, which opened a retail store across from the West Oakland BART station last June. The store aims to stock affordable, healthy local food for the residents of West Oakland, although as detailed in 2010 East Bay Express story, staff often outnumber shoppers.

The lukewarm reception of Mandela shows one difficulty of solving urban food desert issues — namely, gauging resident interest in small-scale independent offerings. Nikki Henderson, current executive director of People’s Grocery, says low-income communities simply want the same thing every other neighborhood has: a range of different food options. “But no matter what you do, someone will accuse you of paternalism and trying to dictate what the community wants,” she says.

But Ahmadi says that during his time at People’s Grocery, he often heard from residents that they wanted the convenience of one-stop food shopping, a thought echoed by an Oakland resident in a recent KQED interview: “I can’t spend my whole day going to different grocery stores.”

For now, it seems that chain stores have rushed in to fill the gap. In San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood, officials have heralded the coming of Fresh and Easy into the area. It would be the Bayview’s only grocery store. The chain, owned by giant UK grocer Tesco, promises affordable, mostly prepared-and-packaged foods.  In Oakland, city officials are wooing Kroger with $7 million in bond money to encourage its opening of three Foods Co. stores —two in East Oakland and one in West Oakland. Foods Co. is Kroger’s discount chain.

The problem with bringing in a chain grocer, according to both Henderson and Ahmadi, is not that a chain is necessarily bad or that residents don’t want a discount grocer, it’s that officials are counting on these stores as the only solution to the food access problem. “If the neighborhood becomes dependent on this one grocer and then two or three years later it shuts down, that’s not a solution,” says Henderson.

Ahmadi points out that chain stores have also been shown to be bad for communities, more often than not: They pay low wages, and rarely build relationships with the members of the community.

In fact, West Oakland has already suffered through the opening and closing of several chain grocers. Back in the early 1990s, the city backed the development of the Jack London Gateway at the corner of 8th and Market. City officials teamed up with several local, large churches to pull together a decent subsidy package, and they brought in a grocery operator who ran it for a few years then closed. There were four successive operators, each following the same pattern—operating for a few years and then shutting down about the same time that subsidies from the city began to dry up. It has now been closed for two years.

According to various studies, though, there’s money to be made in capturing low-income food dollars. While still at People’s Grocery, Ahmadi commissioned a study of food dollars in West Oakland and determined that the market there was $65 million. That’s $65 million spent on groceries alone; the figure did not include take-out food or restaurants. Shocked, Ahmadi had the group put together similar figures on Rockridge, a more upscale Oakland neighborhood, which also spent about $65 million annually. The difference? West Oakland has about twice as many residents.

After figuring out the size of the market, Ahmadi had a team of interns and graduate students figure out how much of that market was being served by businesses within West Oakland, and determined that 74 percent of that $65 million was being spent outside the neighborhood.

But to make the People’s Community Market a reality, Ahmadi needs $2 million or more in funding to get the store off the ground; he’s currently talking to angel investors, banks, and some of the same foundations that helped fund People’s Grocery. He has also talked to the City of Oakland, which told him it had no resources just weeks before offering $7 million to Kroger.

“That was frustrating,” Ahmadi says.

It remains to be seen whether he’ll be able to get it off the ground quickly enough to compete with the likes of Kroger. Funding could come through in the next few months, according to Ahmadi, or it could take up to 15 months, and then leasing and building out the retail space will take time as well. By the time it’s open, his store could be competing with one or more discount grocers for West Oakland’s food dollars.

“That’s the whole crux of the issue with food access projects,” Ahmadi says. “If they never scale, they will never provide a real alternative to these [chain store] guys. We can moan about them all day long but it doesn’t matter if we can't pull it off ourselves.”