18-05-2025
An Anchorage neighborhood is fighting food-desert status after the closure of a historic grocery store
May 18—Residents of the Fairview neighborhood near downtown Anchorage are fighting to protect their access to grocery stores and pharmacies after the historic Carrs on Gambell Street closed this month, leaving an empty, boarded-up building.
Many people in the diverse, low-income neighborhood don't own a car, and the closure makes it hard for them to reach other stores outside the neighborhood, said S J. Klein, a board member with the Fairview Community Council.
"Pulling the store out really rips the heart out of the neighborhood," Klein said. "So we'd really like to see that site reactivated as a grocery store, even if it's on a smaller scale."
In just one of their efforts, Fairview residents helped convince the Anchorage Assembly to pass a preemptive ordinance that aims to prevent the creation of food deserts in Anchorage, high-poverty areas with limited access to affordable and nutritious food.
The measure prevents certain grocery stores that are closing from using restrictive language in sales or lease deals to prevent another grocery store from moving into the same spot.
Lower 48 stores, including those owned by Safeway and parent company Albertsons, have used such terms to prevent competition, according to news accounts.
"If no one could ever put a store there, that's doing twice as much damage as the store just pulling out," Klein said.
Sara Osborne, a spokesperson with Carrs-Safeway, did not respond to a question about whether the company would attempt to pursue restrictive language in a future sales agreement.
In other steps, the neighborhood has won support from Anchorage leaders for programs to facilitate trips for needy residents to grocery stores and pharmacies in the Midtown Mall area.
The plans consist of redirecting a People Mover bus route later in the year, and providing short-term shuttle service for households, following a $75,000 budget revision by the administration of Mayor Suzanne LaFrance.
The shuttle will "provide temporary harm reduction so that people from Fairview who maybe don't have access to a vehicle can still get to the grocery store or the pharmacy for their life-sustaining medications," said Daniel Volland, the Assembly's representative for the district that includes Fairview, along with Chair Chris Constant. Volland said he brought the idea forward at the request of Fairview residents.
LaFrance said in a statement that she's "deeply concerned by the impact of the Carrs closure" on the community of Fairview and the nearby neighborhoods of Government Hill and downtown, which also relied on the store.
"People need access to food and medicine, and these neighborhoods have supported this business for decades," she said. "We're talking to Albertsons/Safeway about potential options for the site. And we're doing everything we can to ensure the community has continued access to food and medicine, including rerouting transit."
'A huge blow'
The Carrs store on Gambell was built in the 1950s, launching a homegrown Alaska chain that would grow to consist of more than 15 stores. It was later bought by national giants Safeway and then Albertsons.
The store at Gambell played a big role in civil rights in Anchorage in the 1960s, hiring the first Black person to work in retail in a public-facing position in the city, after picketing by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
The store also survived the disruptive decision by road planners to connect the Seward and Glenn highways through the neighborhood in the 1960s, even as the the highway corridor caused business closures and hurt neighborhood appeal and investment.
Carrs-Safeway announced the store's closure last month, giving Fairview residents little time to react. The grocery chain said in a statement the store was "perpetually unable to meet financial expectations."
The property is now encircled with a chain-link fence. The 43,000-square-foot building and the lots are on the market for $5 million.
Resident Kyle Mielke said the announcement "was a huge blow" to his family.
He and his wife, Rhianna Murphy, had moved to Fairview only days earlier.
They'd intentionally found an affordable apartment near the store so they could walk or bike there. Their old Toyota Prius is an unreliable, "last-ditch" option, he said.
Murphy is pregnant with their first baby, a girl. She has gestational diabetes with the pregnancy, so they needed to be near the store's pharmacy, he said.
"Being able to get refills as quickly as possible is dire for her and for the baby," he said.
But what was once a six-minute walk now takes 30 to 45 minutes to reach the Carrs in the Midtown Mall, he said.
"It's pretty disappointing that something we were relying on got pulled out from under us," he said.
Mielke, a member of the municipality's Public Transit Advisory Board, proposed rerouting a People Mover route in Fairview and downtown — Route 11 — so it also loops into the Midtown Mall area.
Bart Rudolph, director of Anchorage's Public Transportation Department, said that's viewed as a long-term solution that the department was already considering. It's looking to implement the rerouting in October.
"As soon as we heard that the Carrs was closing, we started thinking about how we can adjust service," he said.
More immediately, Rudolph said, the money the city is providing for a shuttle would pay a third-party entity to drive Fairview residents to the Midtown Mall area, perhaps in a van that makes multiple trips on weekends.
"We're trying to find a community partner that has some ties to Fairview, so they already have a sense of what the needs are there," he said.
'A very long mile'
Maria and Chris Crawford, who operate a small food pantry in Fairview, said they're hearing "a lot of uncertainty and a lot of stress" from residents who don't have an easy way to make it to the grocery store.
"It may be only a mile from the old Carrs location, but that's a very long mile when you are trying to bring groceries back," Maria Crawford said.
They launched the pantry last year, privately funding it themselves along with food donations. Now they're looking at creating a voluntary ridesharing network to help residents get to a store if needed, she said.
With the Carrs closure, the couple expects to see more people coming to the pantry, which currently operates two days a month out of the Fairview Recreation Center. They provide three days of meals to households, and some chocolate or candy to "lift spirits," she said.
"People are wondering how they're going to make this work," she said. "I think that the effects are going to be pretty drastic."
The closing of a grocery store in a low-income neighborhood has many negative consequences, said Tina McKim, a founder of the Birchwood Food Desert Fighters in Bellingham, Washington.
The Albertsons store in her Birchwood neighborhood in Washington closed in 2016 after 35 years, she said.
"It caused the loss of jobs, the loss of a community gathering space and the loss of access to fresh produce," she said.
The store also created "noncompete clauses" to prevent another grocery store from moving in for 20 years, she said. Albertsons removed the restrictions after the state of Washington opened an investigation into them.
Fairview resident Harrison Smith said he didn't want to see a restrictive covenant placed on the Gambell site.
His research on the topic led him to examples in the Lower 48 of grocery stores like the one that closed in Bellingham using sales or rental agreements to block new grocery stores from moving into the same spot.
"The hope was just to prevent a situation to make that impossible," Smith said. "We believe the neighborhood is worth investing in and we continue to want a grocery store."
Smith's work was instrumental in the Assembly's decision to pass the ordinance, Assembly Chair Constant said in an interview.
The measure passed on a vote of 10-2, just days before the Carrs was closed.
Assembly members Keith McCormick, representing South Anchorage and Girdwood, and Scott Myers, representing Eagle River, voted against it.
Constant said that some people are concerned that the measure is an "overreach" that limits transactions between private parties.
But the ban ensures that certain grocery stores in Anchorage cannot prevent competitors from moving into the same spot, he said.
In the case of the Carrs at Gambell, it could help mean that the property continues as a grocery store, if a future store operator wants to move in.
"That property has been a grocery asset for the neighborhood for generations, and it has value in that capacity," Constant said.
"It has endured long before and probably will long after endure in that function, because that's what the neighborhood use is there," he said.
