The Stranger has an interesting article by Charles Mudede on the gradual disappearance of ghetto neighborhoods in Seattle, where real estate prices are driving low-income residents into the southern suburbs.
Mudede is from Zimbabwe, and he has this to say in comparing Harare with Seattle:
What made the Central District and Columbia City more miserable than any of our home country’s High Density Areas - that’s Zimbabwean for slum - was the almost complete lack of businesses that serviced basic needs. Even in the most impoverished parts of Harare, you could always find a shop tha sold things you actually needed to live (beds, blankets, a variety of home appliances); in the most impoverished corners of the Central District and Columbia City, all that thrived were businesses that sold things you could very well live without.The ‘hood had stores that shelved snacks with zero nutritional value, raggedy porn videos and magazines, and the cheapest booze a human being could possibly stomach. If a business wasn’t a convenience store filled with useless things, then it was either a bar that required a great deal of courage to enter or a beauty business (barbershops for males; nail boutiques for women) that promised to make you look like a million bucks with the little you earned at your minimum-wage job. In these desperately poor parts of town, you could get your nails done like a queen at five different locations, but you had to work hard to find a place that sold toothpaste. Link
Mudede is writing of his impressions upon arriving in Seattle in 1989. Since then, the CD has cleaned up considerably, and Columbia City has experienced nothing short of a rebirth. There are now chain drugstores in every neighborhood which provide the small appliances and basic goods that people need to live. However, they’re all along Rainier Avenue, with very few stores (other than “useless but convenient” stores) in the neighborhoods off to the side.
If you go into one of these drug stores (Bartell, Long’s, Rite-Aid, Walgreens), you will find people of every ethnicity and social class. The neighborhoods that were once mostly black are now truly diverse, though the high cost of living is pushing the demographic trend in my direction (yuppie caucasian). You can buy toothpaste and hair dryers and do-rags and cans of soup, not just cigarettes and 40s of Olde English 800 (which, in case you didn’t know, is not furniture polish like Old English).
The real problem today, sixteen years after Mudede arrived in Seattle, is the lack of access to healthy food. Every store sells chips, crackers, and other never-spoiling carbs loaded with partially hydrogenated soybean oil and calories but no real nutrients. It’s not that fresh fruit, veggies, and other good foods aren’t available; they just aren’t convenient. And when you’re a kid with the munchies and no baggie of carrot sticks from mom, Doritos are the easy answer. So they eat them. And they eat candy and soda. And we wonder why they’re fat.
It will probably take a big federal grant or something to get healthy food into our convenience stores in the Rainier Valley. Any ideas?
I was thinking about this one more today. One of the key differences between third-world slums and American urban ghettos is that virtually all urban areas in the US have mass transit, as well as a lot of car traffic.
This means that there is no market for the kind of small businesses that pepper the sprawling slums of cities like Rio, Mexico City, and Harare.
I suspect that most of these businesses are independently (even illegally) owned and operated, unlike the vast majority of drugstores in the US (which sell a similar range of goods - though convenience stores in the ‘hood are often independently owned). So, rather than many little stores selling lots of stuff that’s useful for poor people, we have fewer, bigger stores selling more middle-class stuff. But those stores are farther away from people’s homes, because most people can either drive or use mass transit.
But this access to transportation also means that certain types of products are only sold in megastores like Home Depot, Wal-Mart, etc, which may be hours away by bus. I suspect that you can find a little store selling just about anything in a third world slum. These stores can’t survive in the US because most people will just drive to Wal-Mart, leaving the people who can’t with no access to those products. Try buying a water pump or a drill or anything they don’t sell at a drugstore in the ‘hood. Not fun.
This website is so huge and extensive that I am overwhelmed. I have no idea of it’s purpose, who’s involved and what you are doing. Can you please write me or call me and explain? I am intrigued.
Emily
(206) 465-8759
I was about to open a candy store in the ‘hood’ until I read this. I wonder if ahelath food store will work in the hood what could I sell that would be profitable, tasty, and healthy