Closure of last grocery store in downtown St. Paul shows that city government has reneged on the ‘urban social contract’
Photo: Corey Schreppel via X
In the current edition of our magazine, Thinking Minnesota, I wrote about the sad decline of the Lowertown area of St. Paul. That decline continues with news of the closure of downtown St. Paul’s only remaining grocery store, Lunds & Byerlys at E. 10th and Robert streets.
In a statement, Lunds & Byerlys explained:
It’s a decision we didn’t want to make, but one we needed to make given the significant staffing and financial challenges we’ve experienced over the past five years. From a financial perspective, the store’s operating costs continue to far outpace sales, which has made it no longer financially sustainable to remain open. Key contributing factors have included declining store visits, spurred, in part, by a significant shift to remote work for many downtown businesses and organizations, and a significant increase in store security costs to ensure a safe experience for our team members and customers.
These factors will be familiar. The exodus of workers from downtown is behind the collapse in commercial property values and resulting decline in commercial property tax payments, which is squeezing the city budget and pushing residential property taxes up. The rise in anti-social behavior and outright crime has contributed to this. The store was set on fire in 2022, when approximately $350,000 of merchandise had to be discarded, with the total damage between $500,000 and $800,000. The store cuts its hours by 35% recently, partly in response to anti-social behavior inside. What ails Lunds & Byerlys is what ails Lowertown and St. Paul more generally.
City government reneges on the urban social contract
The “social contract” offered by the new urbanists says that if you give up things like the private outdoor space you get with your suburban yard or the private transport you get from your gas-guzzling car, you will get, in return, “public” outdoor spaces and either “public” transport or “walkable” options for places to socialize or shop.
Of this closure, Fox 9 reports:
“This was part of the reason it was on my list of things I wanted in an apartment, so I’ve moved here is to have a sustainable grocery store,” said Andrea Smith, who doesn’t have a car.
People like Smith will be forced to figure out where to shop next.
The Star Tribune reports:
“It’s really unfortunate,” [Robb] Mitchell said of the planned closing. Many of his Lowertown neighbors, he said, are disappointed to lose a walkable option.
Mitchell said he’d love to see a more affordable chain take the grocer’s place. For now, though, he said he’ll have to use public transportation more frequently to shop at stores farther from his apartment.
“Now I can’t just pick up stuff at the end of the day,” he said. “Now I have to plan much more.”
For both people, the “urban social contract” has been broken. Implicit in the trade of private for “public” space or private for “public” transport is the promise that the people responsible for these “public” services — the government — will maintain them to a decent standard. This has not happened in St. Paul, where government public spaces, like Mears Park, and transportation, like the Green Line light rail, are, to put it bluntly, grotty. There are almost no “walkable” options for socializing left in Lowertown and soon there will be no “walkable” shopping options left, either. The government didn’t keep its end of the urban social contract.
If the new urbanism is to have any hope of success, urban governments need to maintain a standard of “public” offerings comparable to what can be got privately. Among other things, that means law enforcement being allowed to enforce standards of behavior in “public” spaces as a private owner would in their spaces. The new urbanism requires a “conservative” approach to law and order. Is that a price the new urbanists are willing to pay?