Who Killed the Neighborhood Grocery Store?

The Triangle lost more than just food access when we stripped small shops out of residential neighborhoods.

Planners and urbanists love to come up with technical terms. For example, growing up in Hawaii, I lived in a house with a small cottage on the property. We called it our “ohana” unit.

Many years and one planning degree later, I now recognize that as an accessory dwelling unit (ADU). I can’t imagine a more technocratic shift, from ohana, meaning family in the Hawaiian language, to the robotic and jargony idea of a “dwelling unit.”

Likewise, there has been renewed discussion of accessory commercial units (ACUs) recently. A hundred years ago, these were simply referred to as “neighborhood groceries.”