When a Whole Foods or Trader Joe's moves in, there goes the neighborhood

When a Whole Foods or Trader Joe's moves in, there goes the neighborhood


There are four grocery stores within five blocks of my apartment. This once seemed like a selling point. It’s the opposite of a food desert — a food oasis, if you will, with national and regional grocery chains, a co-op, and a Trader Joe’s nearly in spitting distance of my front door. But it’s also one of the most expensive zip codes in Seattle — so expensive that the rent on my 300-square-foot shitbox of a studio is more than the mortgage on a sprawling suburban McMansion in most states. I’ve always assumed there was a correlation between the abundance of grocery stores — all of which have pleasant lighting, organic produce, and local kombucha in the cooler — in my neighborhood and the high cost of rent. Now there’s research to back me up.
A new study finds that grocery stores don’t just show up in expensive neighborhoods — they actually create them, especially when that grocery store is a Trader Joe’s or a Whole Foods. CityLab reports:


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