Marathon Pundit: Chicago food desert update: Hyde Park Co-op to close

Sunday, December 16, 2007

Chicago food desert update: Hyde Park Co-op to close

Although Chicago has been covered in snow for over two weeks, remember that there are food deserts throughout the city. The generally agreed definition of a food desert is an urban area with no nearby store selling inexpensive groceries.

Late last year the Mari Gallagher Research & Consulting Group identified a whole bunch of food deserts within Chicago, and it must have been less-than-impressed, as I've been, with the Hyde Park Co-op, because that grocer is right in the middle of a food desert.

Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood, home of the University of Chicago, is well-stocked with intellectuals. Until making that ill-advised move to his Kenwood mansion a few blocks away, the Obama family lived in Hyde Park, right in the middle of the desert.

This is the same Obama who opposes Wal-Mart, a company that wants "in" on Chicago's food deserts. Wal-Marts use a non-unionized workforce.

But the co-op, which presented itself as more than a grocery, will be closing soon, perhaps as soon as next month. Members of the co-op were presented with two choices, dissolve, and the university will forgive its debt, and let the university lease out its retail space to another grocer, or go through a painful restructuring--with no guarantee of success.

From the Chicago "free registration required" Tribune:

The co-op was founded during the Great Depression as one of a number of alternatives offered for what seemed like capitalism's failure. The U. of C., now known for its intellectual sponsorship of free-market economics, was an incubator of political freethinkers in the 1930s, most of them left of center. Among them was Paul Douglas, an early co-op member and subsequently a U.S. senator.

The co-op's ideological roots date to 19th Century England, where factory workers opened their own grocery as an alternative to the owner's company store.

Despite that idealism, the co-op more recently succumbed to a heady expansion that some found at odds with its philosophy. The co-op opened two satellite stores, whose failure saddled the membership with an unbearable debt load. It owes the university $1.2 million in back rent.

The Chicago Sun-Times adds this hors d'oeuvre:

Meanwhile, some Hyde Park residents, who complained about the co-op's above-average prices and sometimes subpar service, didn't see what was worth saving at all.