Hy-Vee closings hit working-class neighborhoods hard

It certainly made the news.

Last week, the Hy-Vee grocery store chain announced it is closing stores in three eastern Iowa communities and recently reduced operating hours at a fourth store in Des Moines.

Waterloo’s Logan Avenue store will shut down June 23. The supermarket chain says all employees will be offered jobs at other locations. Cedar Rapids took a similar hit. Put Davenport on the list as well.

“Unfortunately, these locations have not met our financial expectations over the past several years,” Hy-Vee spokesperson Tina Potthoff said in a statement. Editor’s note:  See the end of this column for an updated statement from Hy-Vee.

The nearest grocery store to the Logan Avenue location is All-In Grocers, two miles away on Franklin Street. The Walnut neighborhood surrounding All-In was classified as a food desert by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for 47 years before that store opened in October.

The Cedar Rapids store serves two neighborhoods the U.S. Department of Agriculture classifies as low income, the Gazette reported. Hy-Vee received $915,000 in tax incentives in 2002 to purchase the land for the store and replace an old store nearby.

The downtown Des Moines store also was built with incentives. It recently cut its operating hours despite a 2015 development agreement with the city that requires a longer schedule. Potthoff told Axios in February theft and loitering have been a problem at the store with police being called more than 200 times in a six-month span.

Is it simply a coincidence that all these stores are in middle-, moderate- and low-income family areas? If you live in this part of town, you won’t have a grocery store. The overall effect of these closings is that this giant corporation just started putting red lines in Iowa.

Redlining, if you have forgotten, was practiced after the Civil War through the late 1960s. Financial institutions refused to provide mortgages and insurance based on where a person lived. Landlords loved it. They could provide substandard housing and raise rents because dwellers couldn’t access the money to buy homes themselves. It was highly discriminatory, and it kept poor areas poor.

Congress finally acted. The 1968 Fair Housing Act outlawed racially motivated redlining. Unfortunately, at present it only includes discriminatory conduct in housing and does not yet extend to other commercial practices. But, make no mistake, should they be made, these store closings are an extraordinary discriminatory act by Iowa’s largest grocery chain.

Still, cities are not without remedy. The cities should organize job fairs for all the dislocated workers. This means in one place, at one time (or multiple times if necessary) providing guidance on applying for unemployment compensation, other employment in the area and job training at community colleges.

Finally, the cities might well reconsider their relationship with the grocery chain. The city of Waterloo and private developers have spent more than $40 million over the last decade improving the area around the store being closed. Road reconstruction, strip malls, new stores, all were designed to enhance the area and help Hy-Vee succeed.

Cedar Rapids subsidized its store, and the company just walked away. Des Moines had a development agreement stipulating that store would be open from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. The city has agreed to a 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. schedule and remains in talks with Hy-Vee.

All cities should look at recapturing tax money that assisted this multimillion-dollar corporation. Any tax dollar assistance should be reviewed. That includes discounts on property or free land, since this company doesn’t seem to care about its customers or employees.

I guess you can still expect to see “a helpful smile in every aisle.” It will just depend on where you live.

This column was originally published by the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier.