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The struggle is real, even if you raise $48,000 at GoFundMe and $70,000 from other backers of a Detroit grocery store vision, as Rafael Wright has done.
The 30-year-old entrepreneur, a graduate of Martin Luther King High and Marygrove College ('13), talks with local journalist Tom Perkins at Civil Eats, a daily "food movement" news site.
Rafael Wright: "It's been a real struggle." (Photos: Facebook)
The prospective business owner, whose nickname is Rafa, pinpoints a key challenge: "The only issue has been land."
Wright, currently supporting himself as a CVS drugstore manager and studying at Walsh College, envisions "a grassroots store where we have growth opportunities at home, we circulate the dollars at home and we really just build as locally as possible."
Perkins, who is Metro Times dining editor as well as a freelance journalist, tells how Wright "has proposed a 5,000-square-foot grocery store in Detroit’s Islandview neighborhood, where most food is currently sold in convenience stores."
The store would be part of a larger mixed-use development, but those plans have yet to be approved. In the meantime, Wright is continuing to look for other locations and began building out a bodega in a different underserved Detroit neighborhood.
His ventures are about more than selling meat, vegetables, poultry, fish, dairy products and other basics of daily life. "Whoever feeds you really controls you," says Wright, who expands on that thinking in a self-published book. "Make the Hood Great Again," a 127-page papereback issued two weeks ago, is descibed as a "manifesto on how to make America’s inner cities better based on his journey to open a grocery store in Detroit."
The book expands on observations shared with Perkins, such as:
"There’s much more at stake when black people don’t control food. There’s our health, our culture—everything is at stake when we don’t control the grocery store."
"The real estate process in Detroit for a minority ain't really easy."
Here are more excerpts from the seven-question conversation, which touches on inequality, empowerment and the social-economic role of neighborhood markets:
♦ Highest hurdle: "The real estate process in Detroit for a minority ain't really easy. Most of the land that could be utilized as a grocery store is owned by the same people who never gave us opportunities to begin with. So just imagine how tough that is. I've been in I don't know how many negotiations with those people and it doesn't work.
"There are other people who are open to taking on this project, but then the price—speculation is at an all-time high in Detroit. It is extremely expensive to get into many of these places. I won’t be able to survive [paying rent] in the places that are perfectly suited for this project, so it's been a real struggle.
♦ Opportunity gap: "Most of us are poorer than the average [people]. We don’t have access to capital and other small business resources. That has really resulted in long-term consequences. . . .
"You have fried chicken spots in the hood, but they're [onwed by outsiders]. Your grandmother cooked this food your whole life. Why doesn't she have a chicken spot?"
♦ Street impact: "The grocery store will be a good first shot in the air to say, 'Hey, this is how we fix our neighborhoods and communities.' And you can't do that without feeding people first. This is a good start; with the right fuel in our bodies we can really start repairing our neighborhoods. . . .
"Devastation of our neighborhoods [is] partly because many of them don’t have grocery stores, or good ones. You get to see the DNA of a neighborhood with what type of grocery store it has. Having a grocery store opens up opportunities for the other things that need to be in the neighborhood."
♦ Outside owners: "The people who run those stores, they aren't from the community, so they're doing more extracting than investing. That money leaves the neighborhood once it goes in the cash register. It never gets reinvested. Jobs aren't really created fairly.
"Nepotism is heavy in our grocery stores, because they are run mainly by [people] who don’t live in the community. The good jobs go to their family and the bad jobs -- the low-paying jobs, the ones with no real growth opportunities -- go to the people who actually live in the neighborhood. . . .
"But a lot of things are changing and there are better opportunities."
