I know what’s the matter with downtown Tucson — there’s no supermarket. 

I’ll often ask friends or others who’ve moved into a new home where they shop for groceries. It such a practical thing. People who live in a rural setting or on the outskirts of a metropolitan area often have to drive some distance to get to a real supermarket. You’d think the distances would get shorter the closer into the urban core one gets.

But when you get to the core of Tucson’s downtown that doesn’t seem to be the case. We’ve got some friends who live in Barrio Histórico and other who live in Armory Park. They’ve got nice houses but in both cases when they have to do any serious grocery shopping they get in their cars to drive to their nearest supermarkets which are either east to a Safeway at Broadway and Campbell Avenue near the University of Arizona or west beyond Interstate 10 where there’s Food City at St. Mary’s Road and Grande Avenue, Safeway at St. Mary’s and Silverbell roads or Albertsons at Speedway and Silverbell Road.

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The people we know in both neighborhoods shrug their shoulders and say they’re no different than most others in Tucson who have to drive somewhere to shop for groceries. But is that what people who want to live in an urban setting really want to do?

Practically every western city I can think of that has rejuvenated its downtown has included a supermarket as an integral part of successful redevelopment. (Phoenix doesn’t have a supermarket but I’ll argue that city developed a sports complex and is still in the midst of reviving a downtown residential component, which includes grocery stores.)

There are variations, but the general theme for getting a supermarket downtown involves a redevelopment agency working with a developer — often on a mixed-use project — putting out a request for proposals (RFP) to operate a general supermarket. Development of the physical structure usually comes from a combination of public and private sources.

One version that’s intriguing comes from California, where some cities have put RFPs asking a grocery operator to set prices in the downtown store at the lowest per-item amount charged at any other of its nearby locations. If necessary, the operator is subsidized; either up to the average store revenue in the market area or through reductions in lease payments. In either event, these are limited to a set period of time, such as three years.

It makes the deal mutually beneficial — the store helps spur redevelopment and, in turn, successful redevelopment makes the store profitable. A downtown San Diego Ralph’s supermarket that was built in a blighted area with the help of a subsidy in the late 1980s now ranks as one of the company’s top five performing stores in that region.

In Tucson’s case another benefit of having a downtown supermarket would be the additional revenue it would bring in to the Rio Nuevo tax increment financing district.

Of course the idea for a supermarket presupposes we want downtown Tucson to actually have people living there. Judging from the city council’s history of decisions that may not be the case. 

Contact David Hatfield at dhatfield@azbiz.com or (520) 295-4237.