Trader Joe's opening, Brookland Pint closing

I’m Gordon Chaffin, a job searching community volunteer and public policy advocate. This is my newsletter with local news and researched opinions.

Back to Basics on Evaluating Brookland’s Neighborhood Progress

My neighbors and I have a bittersweet feeling this week: we celebrate the opening of a grocery store promised almost 20 years ago and mourn the closing of an accessible neighborhood bar across the street. A Trader Joe’s location opens May 15th in the final building of a multi-stage, mixed-use development with rental housing above ground floor retail and artist loft space. This mega-development turned the Southwest side of WMATA’s Brookland-CUA Metrorail station walkshed into a thriving residential community. This change was envisioned two decades ago by local land-use plans hoping for conversions from light industrial use and lifting the neighborhood of historically affordable houses.

Brookland Pint’s closing leaves a foreboding stench of decline. The Barnes and Noble bookstore up the street closed, despite it serving as Catholic University’s official bookstore. The purpose-built retail space for a bike shop and coffee house lost both the bike shop and coffee shop within a few years. The coffee side got life again with a local D.C. chain, but they didn’t last long. The national chain Tropical Smoothie Cafe has come in since then and built a serious wall between its space and the former bike shop. From my observations, TSC doesn’t seem to be thriving, but one can hope. The bike shop space remains frustratingly vacant, and I daydream of opening a community space there for my nonprofit, Friends of the Metropolitan Branch Trail (FoMBT).

So, yes, people who bought new townhomes 15+ years ago on a promise of local grocery store can now walk over to Trader Joe’s. I’m personally grateful that the small retail space didn’t attract a chain pharmacy instead. The nearby Yes! Organic Market probably has the most customers overlapping with the new Trader Joe’s, but Yes! is a small store with high prices and limited selection.

I’ve learned that modern, full-service grocery stores are hard to accommodate monstrosities, and the economics of small-format grocery stores are abysmal. The Giant at nearby Rhode Island Avenue is good on price and selection, but is freaking huge and has a physical layout and parking lot hostile to neighborhood shopping. Completing the dynamics of neighborhood groceries within a reasonable walk is 2006 Rhode Island Ave NE. That is a very, very small storefront space that just lost its second straight attempt at a small grocery store. Owners of the recent closure tried to pivot to cannabis sales, and the first closure tried to supplement sales revenue with grants. Commercial real estate, in general, is hard, and local grocery stores are really hard. I could rant for paragraphs now about supply-chain economics, the attempted Kroger-Albertsons merger, and the car-obsessed design preferences of Big Grocery. Even this new Trader Joe’s required local elected officials to support parking rights transfers between buildings. But I’ll spare you. Please buy as many packs of Jo-Jo cookies so that TJ stays here.

Brookland Pint closing stinks, and comes in a line of bad news for local haunts. This is the second family-friendly bar to close in Brookland this spring. And only a few more months after a third brewpub closed in December two miles up the Met Branch Trail. Add to the heap that City-State closed beer production; that’s a fourth community-oriented bar in the vicinity and close via the Met Branch Trail. I wrote glowingly in December about a 5th similarly featured bar down the trail, which, knock on wood, is doing well in business. If it weren’t for nearby metrobar, the Metropolitan Beer Trail would be suffering for northside member institutions. My competition policy knowledge doesn’t include alcohol businesses, but I know microbrews had a boom, and many of the successful operations got bought up. Fewer Americans drink beer now in social settings. Only so many people will buy hard cider at the farmers market from the place across town for X% more than you could buy an Angry Orchard at Giant.

There’s an interesting analogy here where (brew)pubs are nominally for-profit businesses but, in practice, became neighborhood “third spaces” — hence their closure being painful — in the same way that farmers’ markets became the go-to strategy for reducing food deserts where grocery companies wouldn’t set up shop. What I know of the research is that farmers’ markets were not very effective at allaying food deserts but have value to the community in a more holistic — and indeed nonprofit — manner. Bars, though, gotta make money.

The upshot so far seems to be “it’s complicated” when trying to render a verdict on the economic health of the neighborhood I love. For a “back to basics” newsletter, that’s not a great knot to tie. A census of canaries in respective economic development coal mines does not yield positive results. I say that we should feel our feelings this week: celebrate a new grocery store, juxtaposed with the kids from the neighborhood graduating from Catholic University; and mourn a reliable place to watch a game or drink on the patio in warm weather, watching MBT users pass.

I’m working really hard with friends and neighbors so that the trail that connects our community only gets better. Non-car mobility is a necessity for place-based prosperity. When we look to the other neighborhood necessities and dream of the nice-to-haves, maybe we should channel our emotions into cautious decision-making rather than rash declarations on social media or herky-jerky public policies based on the optimism of over-promised solutions. If you’re wondering, yes, that’s my allusion to D.C.’s proposed RFK Stadium Deal and the Mayor’s “growth agenda” built on the second legislative repeal of a twice voter-approved initiative on tipped wages.

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DISCLAIMER: All opinions and analyses in this newsletter are those solely of Gordon Chaffin and do not represent his employer or community groups with which he’s affiliated.