East-side Save A Lot closing as Wichita’s food desert grows
Northeast Wichita’s Save A Lot grocery store is closing and with it the only full-service supermarket serving a broad swath of the historically Black community in northeast Wichita.
City Council member Brandon Johnson said he has confirmed the planned closure, which is tentatively scheduled for July 10.
The closure of the store, at 2402 E 13th St., is a major blow to a large section of the city, Johnson said.
“It’s going to make things worse,” Johnson said. “It’s already a food desert and this is the nearest store people over here have.”
Other than Save A Lot, the closest grocery stores are Dillons markets at Douglas and Hillside, or two other Dillons on Rock Road, one at Central and one at 21st Street.
Sam Cooper lives a block away from Save A Lot. He said people in the neighborhood rely on the grocery store.
“Since this store’s been here, it’s meant a lot to the community,” Cooper said. “We need a grocery store on this corner.”
He said the most vulnerable people in the community will be hurt the most by the abrupt closure.
“It’s going to impact a whole lot for the elderly people or people just right here in this area that don’t have cars or don’t have a way to get around,” Cooper said.
News of the store closure comes the day before the Wichita City Council and Sedgwick County Commission are set to meet together to discuss a joint Food System Master Plan, the main goal of which is to reduce food insecurity in the area.
The pending closure of Save a Lot “will probably emphasize the need for us to work strategically together” to improve resident access to healthy food, said council member Becky Tuttle, an advocate for the master plan.
A survey done in 2013 showed a fourth of the population of Wichita living in “food deserts,” low-income areas where it’s a mile or more to the nearest full-service grocery store, Tuttle said.
The situation is worse now with recent years of the consolidation and closures of grocery stores, especially in inner-city neighborhoods, she said.
Part of the master plan is to try to remove barriers between low-income residents and healthy eating by targeting locations, the cost of food and the transportation to get to it.
Another major component is to try to make it easier for urban residents to grow produce, for their own use and potentially for sale at farmers markets to supplement their income.
Grocery store had city, federal help
Save A Lot was developed with a combination of city and federal assistance and was hailed as a success story in urban redevelopment.
The project to bring a grocery store to the area got underway in 1997, after Dillons closed its store at 21st and Oliver.
Save a Lot opened with fanfare in 2006.
The project was mostly funded with a $750,000 federal grant through the Community Development Block Grant program, obtained by then-Congressman Todd Tiahrt.
The city also pitched in, forming a Tax Increment Finance District around the store to divert the increased property tax from the site to pay for improvements to infrastructure.
The store was originally developed through Power Community Development Corp., a non-profit entity run by James Arbertha, who has been active in developing other community projects in northeast Wichita.
The store was sold in March 2017 to Willowbend Apartments LLC, a Florida-based company that apparently has since changed its name to WB LLC, according to Sedgwick County tax records.
Proceeds from the sale were allocated to another project by Arbertha’s Power CDC, the restoration of the Dunbar Theater, a historic building near Ninth and Cleveland which was once the only theater where Black Wichitans could go see a movie without segregation restrictions.
The year before Save a Lot opened, in 2005, the property was appraised by county tax agents at $126,000. With the addition of the store, the value rose to $1.15 million. It’s currently appraised at $766,200, the records show.
How to get groceries
Linda Torkelson, who lives several blocks away from Save A Lot, said she’ll have to figure out another mode of transportation to pick up her groceries.
“All I ever do is go on bicycle,” Torkelson said.
Now she’ll have to figure out how to get to another full-service grocery store like the Dillons at Douglas and Hillside.
“That’s way too far to go,” she said.
The closure of Save a Lot is latest in a series of redevelopment failures in low-income areas of Wichita.
But for a few years, the area actually had two grocery stores: Walmart opened one of its neighborhood grocery markets in another publicly supported development at 13th and Oliver in 2011. But that store closed in 2016.
The 13th Street store is the only Save a Lot left in the city after the 2020 closing of a store serving the south Wichita area of Planeview.
The Planeview store, which also served a low-income neighborhood and received public development assistance, was opened in November of 2011 at Pawnee and Washington but shuttered in December of last year.
A third Save a Lot opened in an abandoned Dillon’s store near Harry and Broadway in 2017 but has also since been closed.
This story was originally published June 21, 2021 at 2:23 PM.
