By Neil Johnson njohnson@gazettextra.com February 9, 2022
JANESVILLE
The city of Janesville is seeking federal funding that might help bring a supermarket to a south side area considered a food desert for several years.
City of Janesville Economic Development coordinator Nancy McDonald confirmed the city late last year applied for Wisconsin Department of Administration Neighborhood Investment Fund grant that might make possible a public-private effort to develop a full-size supermarket on Janesville’s south side.
A possible location is the 60,000-square-foot former Rock County Job Center at 1717 Center Ave., which the owner, Rock County has put on the market.
The city likely won’t learn whether it has secured funding through the program—a $250-million pool the state set up last summer—and McDonald declined to disclose how much the city requested.
But she indicated that grant funding would likely be one part of an overall development package the city and a grocery store developer would put together to make a grocery store work on the south side.
The city’s south side has handful of gas station convenience stores, a chain pharmacy and a small fresh-food market that opened last year in a former gas station. But the nearly 10,000 people who live on the south side haven’t had a full-service supermarket since Pick ‘n Save closed in 2016.
Rock County renovated the 120,000-square-foot building that now houses most of its social services offices and programs. But that left the former Job Center Building largely vacant.
City officials have said that larger grocery stores like the former Pick ‘n Save are less likely to be redeveloped into supermarkets.
But the former Job Center, at 60,000 square feet, would fit a sweet spot economic development officials say exists in the market. Such properties could draw grocery chains who specialize in smaller-format store plans or small, independent grocers.
In fact, an official with Maurer’s Market—a small, family-owned regional chain of supermarkets—said it was considering rebooting the former Job Center as a second location in Janesville. The chain’s interest in the Job Center dried up when the Maurer’s shut down its other location, a full-sized grocery in a former Sentry on East Milwaukee Street.
New grocery developments over the past decade, including Festival Foods and Aldi, have gravitated to the main retail corridor along Humes Road and Milton Avenue on the city’s northeast end.
“South-side residents have asked for this for a long time. And certainly, we’ve wanted to bring it to fruition. Hopefully this will be something we can we can do,” McDonald said.
Late last year, when chain grocery Hy-Vee expressed interest in renovating the former Shopko on Humes Road on Janesville’s northeast side, city economic development officials said the chain was exploring the concept of locating an additional, secondary store somewhere on the south side.
Gov. Tony Evers’s office said the state grant program Janesville hopes to tap is intended to fuel “transformational capital projects that will help neighborhoods recover from the (COVID-19) pandemic, and that address the equity gap in our state—like housing projects, transit and childcare solutions, and increasing access to healthcare in underserved communities.”
In Janesville, McDonald said, a south-side resident is one who has difficulty obtaining fresh food, in large part because of the lack of a nearby supermarket.
McDonald said federal U.S. Department of Agriculture data shows that throughout large swaths of Janesville, including the south side, about 5% of residents who either don’t drive or don’t have access to a vehicle live farther than walking distance from a supermarket.
“It means the south side, with no supermarket, qualifies as a food desert,” McDonald said. “I’m hoping that type of data and some other things that we’ve included in our grant application, will maybe strike a nerve with whomever is reviewing these proposals, and they’ll say, gosh, you know, Janesville is really in need of this.”
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