Abstract
We explore cooperatives’ potential to play governing roles in neighborhood commercial corridors (NCCs) by examining one grocery cooperative in Philadelphia that has had stores on three NCCs in the city. We distinguish between an anchor institution role, where one organization provides collective goods for the corridor, and governance, where multiple corridor stakeholders collectively provide goods. We conclude that a cooperative will more likely play a governance role if it enters an NCC at a point when there are no other potential corridor-governing organizations, and when the NCC itself is at an early stage of development or redevelopment. What this suggests more generally about NCCs is that the organizations present at their founding or at a critical juncture have a large impact on their future developmental trajectories. We argue further that a cooperative is more likely to play a governance role when it was created by neighborhood stakeholders and it thus reflects the distinct social norms of the neighborhood.
Keywords
On Carpenter Lane in the West Mount Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia, there is a small but unusually vibrant neighborhood commercial corridor (NCC) known as Mount Airy Village. In the space of less than two blocks in what is otherwise an almost entirely residential area, there is, as of February 2016, a bookstore, art gallery, yoga studio, architectural salvage company, café, two dry cleaners, a children and infants clothing store (including a cloth diaper service), a grocery cooperative, and pet supply and wellness stores. A forthcoming development will include condominiums, coworking space, and new space for retail.
One of the main causes for the unique vibrancy of Mount Airy Village is Weavers Way Co-op (WWC), a cooperative grocery founded in 1973 that serves as the anchor institution for the corridor, facilitating the provision of collective goods such as branding efforts, retail promotions, and community festivals. The primary question that we ask in this article is whether and how WWC’s anchor institution role also facilitates shared corridor governance among other NCC stakeholders, or whether the cooperative’s role is limited to unilaterally providing public goods, either out of a sense of social responsibility or because its management and members believe that providing such goods are in the cooperative’s own interests, or both. We are, in other words, using WWC to probe the distinction between being an anchor and a governing institution. In doing so, we are relying on the established definitions of these two terms in the literature, where governance refers to collective goods provision through a coalition of multiple groups (Stone 1989, pp. 186–98), and anchor institutions, most typically universities, are those “anchored” in a specific location and community, to which they unilaterally provide collective goods, sometimes but not necessarily in consultation with the community (Dubb, McKinley, and Howard 2013, pp. 1–2)
Our distinction between anchor and governing institutions in NCCs expands upon Randy Stoecker’s (1997, 2001) distinction between community organizing, in which community members organize themselves to “create action for social change,” and community development, which refers specifically to the work of community development corporations (CDCs), which are often run by professionals who have little interaction with community members (Stoecker 2001). Unlike Stoecker’s focus on local communities in general, we focus more narrowly on NCCs and the more specific community-based organizations typically involved in NCC governance, which includes CDCs but which also includes business associations (BAs) and, most importantly, business improvement districts (BIDs).
The purpose of asking whether WWC’s role in Mount Airy Village is one of an anchor or governing institution is to explore the potential for cooperatives to serve as NCC governing institutions, similar to BAs, BIDs, and sometimes CDCs. Other kinds of organizations besides cooperatives might of course also serve as nontraditional NCC governing institutions, and to a certain extent, our analysis is potentially relevant to those other organizations. Yet cooperatives are at least somewhat unique because of their commitment to deliberative decision making and procedural democracy (International Cooperative Alliance 2016), through which they may have the potential to foster the kind of corridor governance that would encourage greater civic participation and social capital (see, for instance, Portney and Berry 1997), making them at least in some instances preferable to more traditional community-based organizations, especially in smaller corridors that might not be served by CDCs and where BIDs are not a viable option.
In the case of Mount Airy Village, the evidence suggests that WWC plays primarily an anchor institution role, yet one that reflects a consensus around the role of the cooperative on the NCC, and that consensus is itself an example of at least a weak form of governance, similar in some respects to Peterson’s (1981) notion of the apolitical, consensual nature of developmental policies. Yet unlike Peterson, whose notion of consensus in city policymaking relied on an imagined and dubious “city interest” (see esp. p. 21), the nature of the consensus in Mount Airy Village is premised on a clear and distinct set of social norms shared by corridor stakeholders.
WWC is the oldest, largest, and most stable business in Mount Airy Village, and it became the primary actor in the redevelopment of the corridor, starting especially in the first decade of the twenty-first century. As such, WWC attracted a distinct and loyal customer base, which in turn attracted a unique set of retailers, providing Mount Airy Village with a distinct and cohesive identity that built on the larger neighborhood identity as socially progressive and racially diverse. In short, there developed over time a set of shared norms between the cooperative, the corridor, and the neighborhood, based on their mutually reinforcing developmental trajectories, and those shared norms provide a sense of legitimacy by which the WWC can serve a governance role.
The importance of shared norms in facilitating WWC’s governance role in Mount Airy Village becomes more evident when we compare the cooperative’s role in two other corridors where it has had or currently has stores—Ogontz Avenue in West Oak Lane (opened in 2008 and closed in 2011) and Germantown Avenue in Chestnut Hill (opened in 2010). The same kind of shared social norms that defined the relationship between WWC and other Mount Airy Village stakeholders did not exist between WWC and Ogontz Avenue stakeholders, and it does not exist between WWC and Germantown Avenue stakeholders, in large part, we argue, because WWC came to the latter two corridors at a point in the corridors’ development when there were mature systems of local governance with which the cooperative was at best only partially compatible.
What this suggests more generally about NCC governance is that it is defined by collective action that develops as a historical process, with local institutions that gain legitimacy through the construction of shared norms over time. Thus, while WWC acts largely unilaterally in providing collective goods in Mount Airy Village, it is only able to do so because of its role in shaping the shared norms of the corridor, which is itself an example of collective governance, in the sense in which Elinor Ostrom (1990, pp. 36, 172, 183–84, 211) recognized the importance of shared norms in the collective governance of common pool resources.
Given the relatively small presence of cooperatives in most U.S. cities (with the exception of credit unions), ours is by necessity an exploratory study. Indeed, besides WWC, there is currently only one other grocery cooperative in Philadelphia proper. Rather than being representative, WWC’s role in Mount Airy Village is “special in the sense of allowing one to gain certain insights that other organizations would not be able to provide” (Siggelkow 2007, p. 20; see also Gerring 2004, pp. 349–50). Much of the material for this case study is based on local press coverage (including the WWC newsletter, The Shuttle), a retail inventory of the three NCCs conducted by the authors in February 2016, and interviews conducted between 2010 and 2013 with supplementary interviews conducted in 2016 and 2017, with Mount Airy Village retailers and WWC stakeholders, including staff, board members, cooperative members, and personnel from other local cooperatives.
The rest of this article proceeds in five steps. First, we review the literature on cooperatives and economic development, as well as that of commercial corridor governance. Second, we provide an introduction to our three NCCs by placing them in the context of Philadelphia. Third, we provide a case study of WWC and its three branch stores. Fourth, we discuss what our examination of WWC in three very different NCCs suggests about the potential for cooperatives to play corridor governance roles. We conclude that the role of a cooperative in an NCC will depend on both the developmental stage of the NCC at the point the cooperative is established and the role of NCC stakeholders in establishing the cooperative.
Finally, we suggest some policy recommendations based on our case study. We suggest that cooperatives will be most likely to play governance roles on small NCCs in which there are no other governing organizations (of which there are many, at least in Philadelphia) and that an existing cooperative seeking to play a developmental or governance role in a new corridor should either rely on a franchising rather than a chain model or cultivate extensive local support to ensure shared social norms between the cooperative and other NCC stakeholders.
Cooperatives and Collective Action in NCCs
Cooperatives are businesses owned and controlled by their members. They differ from both for-profit and nonprofit corporations in that many users are also owners, and profits are returned back to these member-owners based on their patronage, not on the size of their ownership stake. There are a variety of cooperative forms; in this article, we consider consumer-owned cooperatives (rather than those owned by workers, for example) and grocery cooperatives in particular, as besides credit unions, groceries are the most common type of retail cooperative in cities (Deller et al. 2009) and, thus, the most likely to play an NCC governance role. Although cooperative businesses have been around since the eighteenth century, there is renewed interest in advancing this business model in the United States among scholars and practitioners (Majee and Hoyt 2011; Schneiberg 2011). Cooperative business development has been seen as the antidote to food deserts in places such as Greensboro, North Carolina (Huffman 2016) and to a stagnant economy in places such as Cleveland, Ohio and Jackson, Mississippi (Flanders 2014; Howard, Kuri, and Pierce Lee 2010). Some of the interest in cooperatives today forms part of the larger discourse around the “community economy” or “solidarity economy” rubrics that include a variety of democratic development practices (Loh and Shear 2015; Roelvink, St. Martin, and Gibson-Graham 2015). There have been attempts to understand the relationship between cooperatives and community economic development, yet much of this work is either theoretical or grounded in rural practice (Fairbairn et al. 1991; Merrett and Walzer 2004). Our current study thus extends the existing research by exploring the opportunities and challenges of cooperatives on urban NCCs.
Consumer-owned cooperatives such as WWC are the product of collective action designed to provide goods and services that the market does not otherwise provide. They are often the result of long periods of intensive grassroots organizing, and it is not unheard of for cooperatives to engage in years of predevelopment before actually opening a store, as demonstrated by recent cooperative developments in Philadelphia’s Kensington and Passyunk Square neighborhoods (Travaline 2016a, 2016b).
In the absence of such extensive efforts, a cooperative and the collective goods it represents will not exist—cooperatives are, in other words, resolutions of collective action dilemmas. By contrast, traditional NCCs are not necessarily created through collective action. Indeed, historic corridors most likely thrived because the relationship between heavy street traffic and a diverse retail mix was a path-dependent one of “increasing returns,” where street traffic attracted more retailers, which attracted more street traffic, and so on. 1 The technological constraints that sustained such a system of increasing returns to a specific corridor, and which defined the “walking city,” were largely removed by innovations in transportation, most notably the automobile and the resultant shopping malls (Jackson 1985), and later, the Internet (Rigby 2011).
The traditional NCCs that are remnants of the walking city have proven remarkably resilient, and recent evidence suggests they are making a comeback. Leinberger and Rodriguez (2016, p. 4) have found, for instance, that “For perhaps the first time in 60 years, walkable urban places . . . in all 30 of the largest metros are gaining market share over their drivable sub-urban competition—and showing higher rental premiums.” Yet these same findings also underline the new competitive context in which traditional NCCs find themselves, where they need to use corridor-wide marketing and their retail mix to define themselves as lifestyle choices. Many of the “walkable urban places” gaining market share are new developments with a single owner who, thus, has ample control over the retail mix and who has an incentive to pay for collective amenities such as extra street cleaning and security. By contrast, in most historic NCCs, multiple property owners, retailers, and other stakeholders must cooperate to protect the cleanliness, safety, image, and retail mix of their common resource, the corridor.
To compete with shopping malls and other developments with single owners, traditional NCC stakeholders have created various localized governing systems, which can be conceived of as lying on a continuum in terms of the degree to which they serve a corridor governance role. At one end are BAs, which are voluntary organizations that depend on membership dues, are typically quite weak, and involve only select merchants. At the other end of the spectrum are BIDs, which are created by city ordinance and a vote of affected property owners, receive mandatory assessments from property owners within their districts, and which have the power to put liens on properties for nonpayment (for overviews, see Batchis 2010; Dilworth 2010; Hoyt 2005; Hoyt and Gopal-Agge 2007; Mitchell 2009; Morçöl et al. 2008). With a more stable and typically larger revenue source that does not depend on voluntary contributions, BIDs represent the strongest form of NCC governance; they are, in fact, NCC governments.
In between BIDs and BAs are CDCs, nonprofit corporations primarily involved in property development and management. When their territories include NCCs, CDCs often play corridor management roles, sometimes with designated corridor managers. Without the power of assessment, and often without as much of an organizational focus on NCCs, CDCs typically play a smaller corridor governance role than BIDs. And as Stoecker (1997, 2001) has pointed out, CDCs can be created without any formal process of community agreement, such as the vote required to establish a BID, and they are, thus, a weaker reflection of collective community action.
In the case of both cooperatives and NCCs, institutionalization can reduce to a greater or lesser degree the need for sustained collective action. In a cooperative where the membership delegates most of its authority to its board of directors, which in turn delegates broad authority to a general manager, the need for the kind of collective action that created the cooperative in the first place is ostensibly significantly reduced. Similarly, in an NCC where stakeholders have come together to establish a BID that collects mandatory assessments and which delegates significant authority to an executive director who takes responsibility for security, street cleaning, and marketing, merchants and property owners have also reduced the need to cooperate among themselves to maintain their shared resource.
Yet the need for collective action never entirely disappears. As a cooperative grows or market conditions change, renewed member participation may be required. The failure of cooperatives to respond to collective action dilemmas can lead to their demise, as in the case of Ecology Food Co-op in West Philadelphia, which dissolved in 1992 after failing to adapt to a newly competitive retail environment (Flaumenhaft 2016). Indeed, WWC is the sole survivor in a region of Philadelphia where there had previously been four food cooperatives (Marter 1998). Collective action is necessary for other corridor-governing agents to thrive, as well. BIDs, for one, have to be periodically reauthorized, which requires the approval of property owners. And in Philadelphia, BIDs’ power of assessment is often chimerical, as BIDs themselves collect their assessments (in contrast to most other cities, where the city government adds the assessment to the property tax bill—see Kromer 2010 for an explanation of the origins of the Philadelphia system), and a BID director must, thus, confront sometimes recalcitrant property owners for whom a small lien presents a minimal threat. Even a CDC will be ineffective if it does not have community support, especially when any significant community opposition might thwart development plans.
The case of WWC in Mount Airy Village suggests, as we explain below, that a cooperative can sometimes take on the NCC governance role typically assigned to organizations like BIDs. It is one of our goals in this article to explore the extent to which WWC’s role in Mount Airy Village might serve as a model for other NCCs. We explore in particular three possible reasons why a cooperative might in some instances be more appropriate for NCC governance than the alternatives. First, an NCC may not be large or wealthy enough to generate the assessments necessary to support a BID—which the Philadelphia Department of Commerce (2012, p. 12) has suggested requires a minimum annual budget of $100,000—in which case a cooperative might serve as an alternative to a BA or CDC. Second, in some instances, NCC stakeholders may be unable to coordinate their actions to overcome the kind of collective action dilemmas that would prevent them from establishing a BID. A cooperative represents a collective action dilemma that has been resolved, and a cooperative such as WWC located along a commercial corridor is one of the parties to the larger collective action dilemma of an ungoverned NCC. Ostensibly, the actors who overcame the collective action dilemma to establish the cooperative learned skills and techniques in doing so that might make them uniquely capable of overcoming the collective action dilemma of maintaining an NCC. In doing so, the cooperative would evolve from being a retailer to an NCC governing institution. Third, the case of WWC in Mount Airy suggests that cooperatives might in some instances be institutions uniquely capable of defining the shared norms of NCC stakeholders—an often crucial component for collective action and, thus, for governance.
Cooperatives and Commercial Corridors in Philadelphia
Among the country’s 10 most populous cities, Philadelphia is the poorest, with a median household income in 2010–2014 of $37,460 and 26.7% of its population living in poverty, nearly half of whom are in “deep poverty,” living on half or less of the federal poverty rate (Lubrano 2015). The city and its metropolitan area are also highly segregated by both race and income; of the 10 largest metropolitan areas in 2010, Philadelphia had the second highest proportion of its lower-income households living in Census tracts that were majority lower income (Fry and Taylor 2012).
The city’s economic and racial stratification and segregation is at least partially reflected in the three neighborhoods that include our NCCs, all of which are in a section of the city known generally as Northwest Philadelphia (Figures 1 and 2). As Table 1 indicates, of the three zip codes that include our NCCs, that with the lowest income (West Oak Lane, where Ogontz Avenue is located) is also that with the lowest White population, while the Chestnut Hill zip code (which includes Germantown Avenue) is both the Whitest and wealthiest. In the period 2007–2011, the Chestnut Hill, Mount Airy, and West Oak Lane zip codes ranked as the second, seventh, and 30th wealthiest in the city, respectively, out of a total of 46 zip codes (Pew Charitable Trusts 2013, p. 9). Reflecting the different economic conditions of the NCCs, the Philadelphia City Planning Commission (PCPC 1996, p. 1) found that, from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, NCCs in Chestnut Hill and Mount Airy were adding new retail spaces and experiencing declining vacancy rates, while in East and West Oak Lane, vacancy rates were increasing, although the overall vacancy rate remained below the city average of 19%.
Locations of the Chestnut Hill, Mount Airy Village, and West Oak Lane NCCs in Philadelphia.
NCC locations in Northwest Philadelphia.
Percentage White and Median Household Incomes in Chestnut Hill, Mount Airy, and West Oak Lane.
Source. 2010–2014 American Community Survey five-year estimates.
Although not one of the city’s most racially diverse neighborhoods because it lacks much of a Latino population, Mount Airy is one of only three zip codes in Philadelphia where a modest but not overwhelming majority (50%–75%) of the population is Black. By contrast, there are 10 zip codes that are more than 75% White, including Chestnut Hill, and 13 zip codes that are more than 75% Black, including West Oak Lane (Pew Charitable Trusts 2013, p. 12). Indeed, Mount Airy has been recognized as one of only a few successful experiments in racial integration; from the 1950s through the 1970s, local civic and religious institutions banded together with neighborhood activists to resist redlining, blockbusting, and White flight (Ferman, Singleton, and DeMarco 1998; Perkiss 2014; Sternberg 1996).
Yet racial diversity in the neighborhood does not necessarily translate into racial diversity at WWC. A 2013 customer survey (which included customers of both the Chestnut Hill and Mount Airy stores) found that 87% of 1,255 respondents reported being White, and 69% reported household incomes of $75,000 or more. The survey found that 44% of respondents lived in Mount Airy (defined by zip code), while the next largest proportions lived in the two neighboring zip codes of either Chestnut Hill (18%) or Germantown (13%). Of the remaining 25% of respondents, 10% lived in either Roxborough or Glenside (a nearby suburb), while 15% were scattered in other zip codes.
Ostensibly reflecting the more general views of the Mount Airy neighborhood, cooperative members view WWC’s lack of diversity as a problem. Only 38% of respondents thought “that the co-op is doing well/very well in achieving the goal of reflecting the diversity of the community in every aspect of Weavers Way operations” while 20% felt that WWC was doing “somewhat poorly, poorly or very poorly” in this respect. In what seems like a reflection of the different attitudes about race and integration in Mount Airy and Chestnut Hill, the survey found that, with respect to diversity, “Chestnut Hill members and working members are significantly more likely to give very well/well ratings than Mt. Airy members and working members” (WWC 2013, pp. 56, 67–69, 90–92, 93–95).
The three corridors are of very different sizes, with Mount Airy Village being the smallest. In a retail inventory conducted in 2002–2003, the PCPC counted 263 retail centers and 55 million square feet of “retail-oriented floor area” (PCPC 2004, p. 7). Of the three NCCs under consideration here, only those in Chestnut Hill and West Oak Lane were included in the PCPC inventory, while Mount Airy Village was excluded, either as an oversight or because it did not at the time of the original inventory in 1987–1988 meet the minimum thresholds of 10,000 square feet of “gross leasable area” (GLA) and “ten retail-type units” (PCPC 1996, p. 1). In the 2002–2003 inventory the Chestnut Hill NCC was counted as one of 48 “community centers,” the third largest out of five categories, meaning that it had a total GLA of between 100,000 and 500,000 square feet. The Ogontz Avenue NCC was counted as one of the city’s 119 “neighborhood centers,” the fourth largest category, with GLA of between 30,000 and 120,000 square feet (Econsult Corporation 2009, pp. 16–17). 2
While the Mount Airy Village NCC is miniscule compared with both Germantown and Ogontz avenues, our own count of stores and storefronts on all three NCCs in February 2016 (Table 2) also showed that it has the least amount of vacancies—the only vacancies, in fact, were some storefronts that had clearly not been used as businesses for a long time, and did not appear to be looking for new businesses. Mount Airy Village also has an impressive retail mix. Of the 73 categories into which we divided all of the businesses on all three NCCs, Chestnut Hill had businesses in 61 categories, Ogontz Avenue in 23 categories, and Mount Airy Village in 11 categories. Yet if we control for the size of each corridor by expressing the number of categories in which an NCC has a business as a fraction of its total number of businesses, Mount Airy Village has the widest retail mix. That is, with 200 businesses in 61 categories, Chestnut Hill’s retail mix is 31% (61/200), while that on Ogontz Avenue is 49% (23/47) and that on Mount Airy Village is 79% (11/14). Even more impressive is the fact that, despite its small size, Mount Airy Village had stores in categories in which neither Chestnut Hill nor Ogontz Avenue had businesses—namely an architectural salvage store, bookstore, and movement arts/community space. 3
Retail and Business Inventory of the Germantown Avenue, Ogontz Avenue, and Mount Airy Village NCCs.
Source. Author count, February 26 and 29, 2016.
Note. NCCs = neighborhood commercial corridors.
In the most extensive and detailed study of Philadelphia commercial corridors ever conducted, the Econsult Corporation (2009) found that the presence of a BID on a corridor was related to higher levels of retail sales and sales growth, and higher property values. Of the three NCCs considered here, only Chestnut Hill has a BID—established in 2004, it is currently one of 13 in the city, all of which cover approximately 40 retail centers. 4 Econsult also surveyed “various public and private sector leaders” (p. 31) regarding each of the city’s retail centers, with respect to their impressions of “leadership” or, more specifically, “how organized the corridor is, and whether it has the capability to engage on matters that affect the entire corridor” (p. 156). Despite the fact that the Chestnut Hill NCC had a BID (ostensibly an indication of organizational capacity), the surveyed leaders had no knowledge of effective leadership, either good or bad, along the corridor. By contrast, those surveyed ranked the Ogontz Avenue NCC as one of the highest in the city in terms of leadership. The difference in the impressions of leadership between Germantown and Ogontz avenues is most likely explained by the role of one prominent and powerful Pennsylvania House representative, Dwight Evans, and a CDC that he founded and largely controlled, the Ogontz Avenue Revitalization Corporation (OARC).
Besides the 13 BIDs in Philadelphia, there are approximately 50 CDCs, only some of which are involved in NCC governance, and possibly 20 neighborhood-based BAs (as opposed to citywide and regional associations such as the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce), most of which are quite small, come in and out of existence, and whose membership waxes and wanes, and serve only a minimal governance function, if any. In many instances the BAs are only sustained by the support of other institutions such as CDCs.
Weavers Way Cooperative
WWC was founded in 1973, primarily by the efforts of Jules Timmerman, a Mount Airy resident who had been active in the food club of a neighborhood church, and who joined the cooperative grocery movement of the 1970s, offering $10 memberships in his prospective collective enterprise. The primary appeal to the initial 132 members was inexpensive food (the local and organic focus of contemporary cooperatives came later) and in being part of the Mount Airy “community experiment” that consisted largely of 1960s-era progressive values and counter-culturalism (Bergman 2013).
The NCC in which WWC is located, which runs along two blocks (designated as the 500 and 600 blocks) of Carpenter Lane, was in the 1950s a small but vibrant corridor, featuring “a drug store, a dry cleaner, two grocers, a soda fountain, a deli, a bakery, a tailor and even a tiny shoe store” (Hartmann 2005). Yet with the exception of one dry cleaner, every store present in the 1950s closed at some point in the 1970s or earlier. WWC was in fact originally located in the space that had previously been a deli, and in 1974 moved into the larger neighboring space that had previously been a drug store. While new businesses cycled through the existing storefronts, and some retail spaces remained largely vacant, WWC and the dry cleaner were the only two businesses that were a consistent presence on the NCC for approximately 20 years, until 1993, when Moving Arts of Mount Airy (MAMA), a dance, movement, and music studio that offers classes, moved in across the street from WWC (Hartmann 2005).
WWC’s original organizational structure, which it maintained into the twenty-first century, was relatively insular and member focused. Although the cooperative always had general managers, starting with Timmerman, the board of directors also took an active managerial role. Shopping privileges required a membership, which required working a few hours a month in the store. The cooperative expanded dramatically, to 2,300 members by 1993, with annual revenues of approximately $2.3 million, and approximately 3,000 members by 2002 (Ditzin 2005; Hartmann 2005). 5 In 1991, WWC purchased its neighboring property to expand its store. In June 2016, the cooperative celebrated a milestone of breaking 6,000 member households (Bernal 2016).
Continued growth suggested the need for even more expansion, and in 2002, WWC purchased two properties with storefronts across the street on the 600 block of Carpenter Lane. Yet the properties remained unused when in that same year the cooperative’s very existence was threatened. Board members discovered that WWC had in fact been losing money since the mid-1990s, which for unexplained reasons had been hidden through false financial reports by the cooperative’s bookkeeper, who over the course of nearly a decade had accumulated debts with vendors, written thousands of overdraft checks, and racked up $140,000 in overdraft fees from a local bank, leading ultimately to “$600,000 in surprise debts and losses . . . No one knew of the losses because no one at Weavers Way, an organization that prides itself on the honor system, had been checking the books” (Ditzin 2005).
WWC’s fiscal crisis was a critical juncture in its history that fundamentally altered the developmental trajectory of the cooperative. The immediate response was to raise prices, ask for emergency member loans, renegotiate agreements with vendors and the bank (which forgave $75,000 of the overdraft fees), and ask the staff to accept temporary cuts to their benefits (Ditzin 2005). In the decade after 2002, WWC strengthened its financial and accountability mechanisms to create a more professional and bureaucratic organization, opened up shopping privileges to nonmembers, and made the members’ work requirement voluntary (for extra discounts). The board’s role became more advisory after hiring a general manager, Glenn Bergman, who had previously worked as a regional vice president for a large food services corporation and was thus accustomed to a traditional top-down corporate structure.
By 2004, WWC was once again in a strong financial position and, under Bergman’s leadership, embarked on a new period of expansion. The properties purchased in 2002 were renovated and turned into the Weavers Way wellness and pet supply stores. In 2005, WWC purchased the property neighboring its grocery, for offices and meeting space, and in 2008, it purchased a commercial building at 542 Carpenter Lane with some plans to convert it into a restaurant, but, as a result of neighbors’ opposition, rented it instead to the architectural salvage company (Weavers Way Co-op 2016).
Under Bergman, WWC established itself as a retailer open to the general public, a de facto community center, and the anchor institution of the Carpenter Lane NCC, in which it self-consciously took a leadership role, starting with the establishment of the ad hoc Mount Airy Village Merchants Association (MAVMA) in 2007, the primary responsibility of which was (and still is) to host an annual Mount Airy Village Fair (Adams 2007, p. 1). Besides WWC, MAVMA’s original members were the MAMA, High Point Café (located at 602 Carpenter and founded in 2005), Big Blue Marble Books (551 Carpenter Lane, also founded in 2005), and the Maternal Wellness Center (an acupuncture clinic, at 606 Carpenter Lane, founded in 2006). 6
Although there had been some discussion in the 1980s of relocating to accommodate its growing membership, the members themselves largely rejected the proposal in favor of maintaining WWC’s Carpenter Lane location (Gillin 1985). The large, loyal, and steady clientele generated ample street traffic, and to accommodate that clientele, WWC maintained longer open hours than most retailers. WWC’s public commitment to the Carpenter Lane location and the traffic it generated also provided stability that attracted other merchants (Woo 2016). Even in 1993, MAMA founder and owner Pamela Rogow noted of her decision to locate on Carpenter Lane, “I came here and thought, well, goodness, we’re across the street from a market that has $4 million worth of business and 3,000 households . . . I did this with intention. I wasn’t naive about what I was building” (quoted in Hartmann 2005).
The retailers attracted to Carpenter Lane by WWC also clearly identified themselves with the basic ethic embodied in the cooperative, of being independent, local businesses concerned with creating a strong and specific sense of community with which many surrounding neighborhood residents also identified. As the owner of Big Blue Marble Books put it, “Mount Airy is a neighborhood that supports local businesses and is really committed to homegrown institutions . . . It’s a very encouraging place to be starting an independent bookstore” (quoted in Hartmann 2005). Notably, the owners of the MAMA, the bookstore, and the café are all also members of the cooperative.
Interviews with Carpenter Lane business owners reflected that advancing the work of the corridor was led by WWC, though the work is shared, primarily with High Point Café. Business owners related that the stability and dedicated marketing staff of WWC made it possible for other retailers to scale up or down their participation in corridor activities depending on their capacity, without feeling like the effort would stall. Cooperative membership is so closely identified with Carpenter Lane that one merchant recalled having shoppers offer their co-op member number at the cash register, forgetting that his business was independent. Yet despite the co-op’s prominence, the corridor retailers related that the effort would be impossible without the space, money, staff time, and stability of WWC.
The 2013 customer survey speaks further to a sense of shared norms among WWC stakeholders, and provides a clear idea of what those norms are. Respondents reported, “the most important reasons for joining/maintaining membership in the co-op” were “Support for local growers/producers (93% consider it very important or important),” “Investing in the community (87%),” and “Supporting community programs (78%).” Furthermore, “respondents showed very high levels of support” for WWC “Ends/Goals, with highest levels of support for . . . Promoting recycling/sustainability . . . Supporting local, sustainable agriculture and the urban farm movement . . . Creating a sustainable local economy . . . Access to high quality/reasonably priced food . . . [and] Membership that is diverse, inclusive and respectful” (WWC 2013, p. 5).
WWC takes on an anchor institution role in Carpenters Lane in at least four different ways. First, it promotes its location to the benefit of all local businesses. Possibly its chief promotional tool is its extensive newsletter, The Shuttle, which since 1973 has been mailed to each of its member households and distributed at its store and in neighborhood news boxes, and which since 2006 has been available online. More than a store newsletter, The Shuttle is in fact a community newspaper, which serves to publicize not just WWC but all of Mount Airy Village and the surrounding neighborhood. Second, WWC also sponsored a Mount Airy Village loyalty card that provides discounts at the cooperative earned by patronizing other NCC businesses. Third, the cooperative is an extensive property owner on the corridor, by which it controls four storefronts and can thus exercise significant control over the retail mix, to the benefit of all retailers.
Fourth, WWC sponsors annual events—a chief function of most BIDs and many other NCC organizations in Philadelphia. The two chief events are the Mount Airy Village Fair and the summer farmer’s market, both begun under Bergman. Yet the Mount Airy Village Fair is also arguably more an example of governance than of the cooperative’s role as an anchor institution. Although WWC is the primary sponsor of the fair, it is a joint effort of several other NCC institutions, most notably the High Point Café and the parent–teacher association of the neighboring public school (Lieberman, Shargorodsky, and Taylor 2016). And the official sponsor of the fair is MAVMA, though WWC is arguably the association’s most significant member.
More generally, as the customer surveys and the history of the corridor suggest, WWC has both shaped and been shaped by the unique and distinctive social norms of the neighborhood and its commercial corridor. The role that these shared norms serve in creating a consensual space for WWC to play an anchor institution role becomes more evident by looking at WWC’s roles on Ogontz Avenue, where the cooperative arguably never attempted to play an anchor institution role, and on Germantown Avenue in Chestnut Hill, where WWC attempted to play the role of anchor institution but was thwarted by existing organizations.
Weavers Way in West Oak Lane
In the midst of WWC’s expansion, in 2007, the OARC invited the cooperative to open up a branch location in one of the CDC’s properties, a 700-square-foot storefront on 72nd Avenue, immediately next to Ogontz Avenue in the heart of the West Oak Lane NCC. WWC agreed to open the small store for several reasons. First, the Ogontz Avenue project fit into the cooperative’s social mission of providing high-quality food and community ownership. Second, WWC was offered significant subsidies, both from OARC and The Reinvestment Fund (a local community development funder), to establish and run the store, including negligible rent and a start-up subsidy. Third, WWC board members, who were actively considering a second location, saw the Ogontz Avenue store as something of a pilot project, where the cooperative could learn from operating two stores simultaneously (especially since retailers face unique challenges when expanding into a second location—see, for instance, Barringer and Greening 1998).
Finally, the partnership with OARC provided WWC a connection to an important member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, Dwight Evans, the founder of OARC and in 2007 the Democratic chair of the House appropriations committee (a position he had held since 1990). Similar to the Carpenter Lane NCC, Ogontz Avenue had experienced significant disinvestment, especially in the 1970s. Both Evans and OARC are generally credited with spearheading a notable revitalization of the NCC, starting in the 1980s. As the House appropriations chair, Evans was able to steer a significant level of state funds to the CDC, including $23 million during the first decade of the twenty-first century (Heller 2010).
Notably, at the same time as WWC was negotiating with OARC, it was also considering another location in Chestnut Hill, for which it ultimately received nearly $1 million in state grants, with the support of Evans. Indeed, Evans first proposed a state grant to WWC for its Chestnut Hill location during the 2007–2008 legislative session, at the same time as the cooperative was arranging to open its store on Ogontz Avenue. 7
WWC was clearly not a lead actor on the Ogontz Avenue NCC and, with a relatively small location, it was certainly not an anchor institution in the same sense as it was on Carpenter Lane. The cooperative joined the local West Oak Lane Business Association (WOLBA), yet WOLBA appears to have been largely a branch of OARC, as OARC’s director of business development from 2005 to 2010 also had responsibility for the BA’s day-to-day operations. 8 Moreover, by 2010, Evans became increasingly unable to help the cooperative as he suffered setbacks, including being removed from his leadership position on the appropriations committee and having OARC’s spending come under scrutiny (Hepp 2009; Woodall 2009). By 2012, the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development had halted grant payments to OARC, pending an investigation into the CDC’s alleged mismanagement of state funds (J. P. Martin and Couloumbis 2012).
Throughout the WWC West Oak Lane experience, some cooperative members expressed support for the small branch store, hoping the cooperative could support the Ogontz Avenue NCC. Other members expressed disdain for the notion of subsidizing a store outside of where the existing membership lived, describing it as a “detour” from the cooperative’s expansion plans (Winston 2008). Under Bergman, all WWC enterprises were expected to be profitable, and, after several experiments with different merchandise and staff, the losses at the 72nd Avenue store were deemed unsustainable. In August 2011, WWC left 72nd Avenue, turning control of the storefront back to OARC.
Weavers Way in Chestnut Hill
After a market study in 2008–2009, WWC decided that, given the current residence and future potential growth of its membership, the best site for what was at that point a third location for the cooperative would be Chestnut Hill. In May 2010, Weavers Way Chestnut Hill opened in what had formerly been a family-owned grocery store, Caruso’s Market. Sales almost immediately exceeded all projections (Bergman 2014).
Germantown Avenue in Chestnut Hill is a much larger corridor than either Ogontz Avenue or Mount Airy Village, and it has a more elaborate structure of governing institutions. The Chestnut Hill corridor covers more than 11 blocks with 200 retailers, including several chains such as Children of America daycare, Starbucks, Jos. A Bank menswear, Sherwin Williams paints, McDonald’s, Staples, CVS, and several bank branches (Table 2), suggesting a very different set of social norms than Mount Airy Village. In contrast to both Mount Airy Village and Ogontz Avenue, there are in Chestnut Hill several interconnected local NCC governing institutions, including a BID, a foundation that owns and operates six parking lots near the corridor, a BA, community association, and historical society. In 2012, the BID, parking foundation, and BA were partially merged and now operate under a single executive director. The civic association board includes a category of “interlocking” members who are also board members of the historical society, parking foundation, and BA (Chestnut Hill Community Association 2017). And just as WWC owns and operates a newsletter that functions as a Mount Airy community newspaper, so does the Chestnut Hill civic association own and operate the weekly Chestnut Hill Local.
Conflicting interests and social norms between WWC and other Chestnut Hill NCC shareholders were evident even before Weavers Way Chestnut Hill opened, starting with a competition between WWC and a local real estate company, Bowman Properties, for a property on Germantown Avenue where WWC had originally wanted to locate its store. WWC lost to Bowman (and thus went to its second choice of the Caruso’s Market location), and Bowman proposed for its location a residential development anchored with a grocery store on the ground floor, which WWC perceived as a competitor to its new grocery.
Bowman Properties is deeply integrated with Chestnut Hill NCC governing institutions: The principal managing partner is the largest single owner of properties along the Chestnut Hill NCC and a long-term member of the boards of the BA, civic association, and parking foundation. Moreover, the project manager hired by Bowman for its residential and grocery project was also the president of the board of directors of the BID who was primarily responsible for merging the operations of the BID, parking foundation, and BA (Melamed 2011; Moselle 2011).
WWC, primarily through Bergman, made a public appeal against Bowman’s plans for a grocery store and formally opposed it at several community meetings. Bergman’s most detailed statement against the grocery appeared in the pages of The Shuttle, where he made three main points (Bergman 2011). First, Bergman argued that having two groceries so close together on Germantown Avenue might make both groceries unsustainable and was thus an unproductive redundancy. Second, if there had to be a choice between the two groceries, WWC was the better choice because it was a local business that returned as much of its revenues as possible back to the community, while the grocery planned for the Bowman property was part of a national chain. Finally, as a corridor stakeholder, WWC would have liked to have worked with Bowman and the Chestnut Hill BID to find a better retail match other than a second grocery store.
Bergman’s argument reflected both the values of WWC, and of most other businesses in Mount Airy Village, but not necessarily those of NCC stakeholders on Germantown Avenue in Chestnut Hill, where there were already numerous chain stores and where one of the lead actors was a property owner and developer, not a cooperative. And Bergman’s claim that he and WWC should have had a role in choosing a ground floor retailer for the Bowman site reflected the presumptions of an organization that was used to playing an anchor institution role. Yet there was a preexisting governance network in Chestnut Hill of which WWC was not a part, leaving it only to play the role of just one more retailer on the corridor. In December 2011, the civic association approved Bowman’s plans for its property, including the new grocery store.
Discussion
We have argued that, while WWC serves an anchor institution role in Mount Airy Village, it also serves as the primary institution in a larger NCC governing coalition that is held together through a set of shared social norms that evolved over several decades. More broadly, our examination of WWC’s role on three separate Philadelphia NCCs offers some initial insights regarding our three suggestions, that (1) a cooperative might serve an NCC governing role when an NCC is too small to sustain a BID and stakeholders want an alternative to a BA or CDC; (2) a cooperative, since it represents the resolution of a collective action dilemma, might be uniquely capable of overcoming collective action dilemmas among NCC stakeholders that have hindered the establishment of other governing organizations; and (3) a cooperative might in some instances be more culturally germane (in the sense of having more shared social norms) to an NCC than a BA, BID, or CDC. Overall, the case of WWC suggests that cooperatives are more likely to serve successfully as NCC governing organizations if they are located on small corridors in which there are no existing organizations already playing that role, if they were formed by existing stakeholders in the NCC or the wider neighborhood, and if the NCC and broader neighborhood are defined by social norms that would support a cooperative.
Of the three NCCs we examined, Germantown Avenue in Chestnut Hill is the largest and certainly the most capable of sustaining a BID, which it does. Whether Ogontz Avenue could sustain a BID would depend on its specific jurisdiction and assessment rates, but no such plan has ever been proposed. Mount Airy Village is certainly too small to sustain a BID, the assessments of which would in any case be largely paid by WWC, which already serves a governing role, albeit a unique one. Among all of Philadelphia’s many NCCs, only in Mount Airy Village is the primary governance organization a cooperative business.
As the only stable business on its NCC for many years, WWC evolved into rather than purposefully took on a governance role, especially after its near bankruptcy in 2002. In doing so, it seems likely that some degree of path-dependent “increasing returns” was involved: The cooperative attracted new merchants who saw that WWC attracted people of a specific type with specific social norms who might also be their customers, these new businesses attracted more people to the NCC who also became WWC customers, and so on. The NCC took on a specific shape as WWC grew in members and revenues, which allowed the cooperative to buy more property, which it filled with additional businesses that complemented those that were already on the corridor. Collective action, reflected especially in an annual fair and merchants’ association, was facilitated by the fact that nearly all of the NCC merchants were also active members of the cooperative, which reflected a high degree of shared norms. With so few merchants, nearly all of whom were operating complementary and not competing businesses, creating and sustaining a BA was accomplished with relative ease.
When WWC expanded its business to West Oak Lane, it did not correspondingly expand its governance role to its new NCC, for several reasons. First, WWC operated a small store on the NCC which was not ideal to serving as an anchor institution. Second, the Ogontz Avenue NCC already had OARC, which has certainly played the role of NCC anchor if not a governing institution. Third, given that the Ogontz Avenue NCC store was not profitable, WWC did not maintain a presence on the corridor long enough to establish itself as a governing organization. Fourth, there is little evidence that WWC committed much time or other resources to member recruitment and neighborhood engagement in West Oak Lane, as suggested by the paucity of cooperative customers who live in the neighborhood, as reflected in the 2013 customer survey.
Whether WWC could have established a significant membership base, or whether it could have become a significant NCC stakeholder, is unclear, in part because the extent of collective action and, thus, organizational capacity among merchants and property owners along Ogontz Avenue—which WWC could have ostensibly used to become an active NCC participant and build a local membership base—itself is unclear. The fact that the BA is essentially an arm of the CDC that is the anchor institution of the corridor, which is closely affiliated with a prominent and powerful politician, and through which many NCC functions and events have received nearly all of their funding, suggests that there was little need for collective action among other NCC stakeholders.
Ironically, then, the Econsult Corporation (2009) survey that found strong leadership on Ogontz Avenue but little knowledge among respondents of any leadership in the Chestnut Hill NCC, to the extent that it was simply a reflection of Evans’s reputation and power, was possibly and inadvertently also a reflection of the lack of cooperation among other NCC stakeholders who largely depended, in a top-down fashion, on OARC. By contrast, though NCC stakeholders in Chestnut Hill may have had little in the way of citywide profiles, they were actively working together through several separate NCC organizations, and had, thus, developed greater though less visible governance capacity than that which existed on Ogontz Avenue.
To the minimal extent that the Ogontz Avenue NCC provides any evidence regarding our hypothesis that a cooperative might play a corridor governance role in an instance when stakeholders are incapable of overcoming collective action dilemmas to establish any other type of corridor-governing institution, that evidence speaks against the hypothesis. The existence of OARC may have limited the extent of collective action among other NCC stakeholders, but OARC was an existing corridor anchor institution, and one to which WWC was very much beholden. At the same time, when Evans lost much of his power and OARC much of its funding, there was ostensibly an opening for a new anchor institution. Yet this was precisely the moment when WWC decided to leave the corridor. The cooperative’s investment in, and presence on, the corridor was minimal in any case, and there is little evidence that it could have played a governance role had it wanted to.
The collective action dilemma resolved by retail cooperatives, such as WWC, is one by which they establish a base of membership. In the case of Mount Airy Village, there is substantial overlap between NCC stakeholders and WWC membership, and in the case of Germantown Avenue, WWC moved into an NCC where it had a substantial membership in the surrounding neighborhood, if not necessarily among the NCC stakeholders. Thus, on Germantown Avenue, WWC can operate as a successful retailer, but it plays no governance role. By contrast, WWC did not have a substantial membership base either among West Oak Lane residents or among Ogontz Avenue NCC stakeholders. This suggests that, if a cooperative is going to be capable of overcoming the collective action dilemma of an otherwise unorganized NCC on the basis of its having overcome a collective action dilemma to establish a membership base, this will be facilitated if NCC stakeholders are also cooperative members.
Part of the explanation for WWC’s limited engagement with, and ultimate exit from, the Ogontz Avenue NCC might be explained by our third suggestion, that there were limited shared social norms between the cooperative and the corridor. Of the three neighborhoods in which WWC has or has had stores, West Oak Lane is distinct for being the poorest and Blackest. And while Mount Airy Village is distinct for being in a relatively racially balanced neighborhood with a history of civil rights activism, WWC customers and members are, as previously noted, overwhelmingly White and higher-income.
Racial inclusion is a challenge that plagues many consumer food cooperatives and should be cause for some sectorwide reflection, especially when cooperatives are located in diverse neighborhoods. There is no reason to assume on the basis of WWC that cooperatives are only compatible with predominantly White and/or upper-income NCCs (Carr and Servon 2009). There is a long tradition of African-American cooperative businesses, from housecleaning to child care to grocery cooperatives, especially in the South (Nembhard 2014). Sutton (2010) has provided one example of an African-American BA in Brooklyn that at least considered using cooperatives as a form of corridor management and governance (see esp. p. 367). Yet the fact that cooperatives often come together around racially homogeneous populations, whether White or Black, suggests that, if cooperatives are best able to play a governance role in NCCs as a result of a high degree of shared social norms, and if shared social norms often correspond with racial homogeneity, it will often be a challenge for cooperatives to serve as the governing organizations of racially and economically diverse corridors. These issues are particularly visible in food cooperatives, where food ways are often cultural or racially determined; nevertheless, all cooperative businesses need to reckon with the possibility that they are exclusive (Zitcer 2015). Evidence from the membership surveys (and from firsthand observation), for instance, suggests that WWC and the larger Mount Airy Village corridor serve a predominantly White customer base, even in the midst of a racially diverse neighborhood. Racial inclusiveness is an area being explored in other start-up cooperative efforts in Philadelphia, from Kensington in the North to Passyunk Square in the South; these cooperatives are working with the regional cooperative organizing effort Philadelphia Area Cooperative Association to explore issues of equity and access.
Racial and economic similitude between a cooperative and an NCC does not automatically translate into either shared norms or a governance role for the cooperative. WWC has done financially much better on Germantown Avenue than it did on the Ogontz Avenue NCC, which is undoubtedly in large part due to the greater amount of wealth in Chestnut Hill and the larger size of its NCC. Yet WWC has been effectively blocked from playing any significant governance role on Germantown Avenue. Given the well-developed system of NCC governance, there seems to be little space for WWC to play any other role than simply being another business on the corridor. And the conflict between WWC and Bowman Properties suggests that the cooperative’s guiding principles are out of step with NCC stakeholders who largely welcome chain stores, in a neighborhood that, as the 2013 customer survey suggests, is far less concerned with diversity than shoppers in Mount Airy. Thus, despite the racial and economic similarities between Chestnut Hill and WWC, any sense of shared norms between the cooperative and other corridor stakeholders appears minimal.
Policy Recommendations
The case of WWC suggests that retail cooperatives, consumer and worker-owned alike, might have the potential to play NCC governance roles on relatively small corridors where there are no existing governing organizations and where the cooperative and the corridor might, thus, develop together, on the basis of shared norms (around the importance of local businesses, healthy food, and community empowerment) that would serve to establish the legitimacy of the cooperative as a governing institution. In Philadelphia at least, there are numerous small NCCs with weak or no governing organizations, and thus, ostensibly substantial potential for new cooperatives to play corridor governance roles, with the most likely hurdle being the ability of the surrounding neighborhood to support a cooperative financially. In addition, prospective cooperatives could look in areas of Philadelphia and other cities where the existing building stock and zoning might allow for the development of new small NCCs, including underperforming small strip malls, which have the extra advantage of typically having multiple storefronts in a singly owned parcel. As for shared norms that might serve as the basis for building membership, prospective cooperative organizers might look to enlist the support of civic associations that do not serve an NCC governance role such as churches (such as that where WWC got its start), residents’ associations, or, in Philadelphia at least, Democratic ward organizations.
The need for a local membership that shares the same norms as the cooperative also suggests a franchising model, where an existing cooperative could effectively license its brand to local organizers, rather than the branch model used by WWC in Chestnut Hill and West Oak Lane. This is in fact a similar recommendation to that made by Stoecker (1997), who proposed that locally based community organizing groups partner with CDCs that worked in multiple locations, in effect combining the capacity of the CDCs with the local knowledge and connections of the organizing groups. Similarly, high-capacity cooperatives, such as WWC, might serve a limited neighborhood governance function in multiple NCCs by building local capacity among existing neighborhood stakeholders so that they can build their own cooperatives. This is in fact a function WWC has played in several places such as its partnership with the Creekside Co-op in suburban Philadelphia. Recently, WWC announced a partnership with nearby Ambler Food Co-op to open a 10,000-square-foot store in summer 2017. WWC’s expertise and credit history allowed the partnership to purchase a shuttered Bottom Dollar grocery store, and WWC members raised $1.5 million in low-interest loans to help with the cost of establishing the new co-op. The Ambler effort will be branded as a branch of Weavers Way, but capitalizes on a coordinated five-year local organizing effort, unlike WWC’s early effort to expand on Ogontz Avenue in Philadelphia (Hong 2017).
There is also important organizing work being done by a cross-sector cooperative organizing effort (consumer, worker, housing) called the Philadelphia Area Cooperative Alliance (PACA). In 2016, PACA oversaw a group of 20 intensive cooperative study circles, populated by participants from Mexican immigrant construction workers in South Philadelphia to sex workers in North Philadelphia. These groups studied the cooperative business model for six months under PACA’s supervision, and many of the groups are going on to start cooperative businesses. It would be sensible for local economic development efforts to link up to the most successful of the start-up businesses arising from these study circles, to help them transition from idea to actuality.
Our recommendations for how cooperatives might serve corridor governance roles and, thus, play a larger role in urban economic development might hopefully inform existing programs, such as U.S. Department of Agriculture programs, that, though they are largely focused on rural cooperative development, could be expanded to urban cooperatives. An expansion of their work to cover urban economic development would also aid rural agricultural interests that create products sold in cooperative groceries. At a more local level, the Philadelphia City Council held hearings in October 2016 to determine how to advance cooperative business development through loans, grants, and technical assistance. Our work here might hopefully suggest how any such city-level policies for cooperative development might also simultaneously serve as larger commercial development strategies.
Conclusion
Although we have examined the case of a single cooperative, WWC has operated stores on three very different NCCs in Philadelphia, which provides us some comparative leverage. In one of these corridors, WWC is able to serve as both an anchor and governing institution because it developed in conjunction with the corridor. By contrast, on Ogontz Avenue, WWC operated a small store for a brief period and largely at the behest of a CDC. In all likelihood the cooperative would not have wanted to play a governance role on Ogontz Avenue, as its store there was seen in part as a pilot project for which there was limited community investment. In Chestnut Hill, WWC operates its largest store on a corridor that serves a population that is at least demographically and economically similar to its clientele in Mount Airy Village. Yet in the absence of additional shared social norms between the cooperative and existing corridor stakeholders, WWC has been excluded from a governance role.
We have concluded that grocery cooperatives might play a governance role in small NCCs when the cooperative enters the corridor at a formative stage of development, providing an opportunity for the cooperative and the NCC to develop in conjunction with one another, developing a set of shared norms among all stakeholders in the process. Our analysis leaves it as an open question whether cooperatives can serve a corridor governance role on racially or economically diverse NCCs, for which further case studies might provide an answer. In particular, Philadelphia’s other grocery cooperative, Mariposa, is located on a relatively diverse corridor (Baltimore Avenue in West Philadelphia) though the extent to which it plays a governance role is currently unclear. Further afield, case studies of grocery cooperatives on NCCs in other cities would of course provide greater clarity to some of the tentative conclusions we have drawn here.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.