Bodegas Are Vital to Urban Neighborhoods

Urbanist Jane Jacobs is credited with developing the concept, “eyes on the street," to describe how vibrant urban neighborhoods, complete with "a healthy neighborhood retail scene," make for safer places to live, writes Nikolai Fedak for New York YIMBY.

With storefronts and their occupants keeping vigilant over an area, criminal activity is deterred, while the pedestrian experience is substantially improved. The concept is not difficult to understand.

In this regard, the local bodega is perhaps one of the most valuable assets New York City real estate has to offer. Besides the aspect of convenience that the neighborhood stores provide, many are also open 24 hours a day (or close to it), providing a spot for local characters to congregate alongside store owners and shop workers. 

The sum of this activity plays an immeasurable role in ensuring that peripheral neighborhoods generally lacking in retail still have spots that light up the nighttime streets, and eyes to watch them.

With that introduction, Fedak points to the latest threat from Silicon Valley, the automated bodega. Two years ago it was expanding chain stores, and now these independent mom and pop stores are threatened by even smaller retail outlets.

A campaign against the new startup has been launched by the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, "the umbrella organization of 100 non-profit affordable housing and economic development groups, serving low- and moderate income residents in all five boroughs of New York City." The association calls the vending machine outlets "brodegas".

As New York State Coalition of Hispanic Chamber of Commerce Chairman Frank Garcia said, “Real bodegas are all about human relationships within a community.”

Considering the public safety element of bodegas and the importance to neighborhoods not served by larger retail establishments, Fedak recognizes "the unquantifiable gap in quality of living that is likely to result if bodegas do begin to close en-masse."

Though exact numbers are impossible to quantify, the social value of these specific mom & pop retail stores is vastly greater than the material goods within.

Zoning woes

However, as with so many things urban, the problem posed by the new startup can be connected to zoning, which is why brodegas may literally be replacing bodegas rather than occupying new retail space, which Fedak explains is "actually impossible" in many neighborhoods.

Instead of focusing on why “Brodega” is a terrible idea, there needs to be comprehensive reform of where retail can and cannot be built, or the likelihood that bodegas and the rest of the five boroughs’ mom & pop retail scene go the way of the dinosaurs is going to increase substantially.