A new grocery store planned for the Central neighborhood is the latest in a string of efforts to improve food access there – and leaders say they believe this one will stick. 

Goodwill Industries’ regional branch is planning to build a $35 million Opportunity Center on the former site of St. Vincent Charity Hospital at East 22nd Street and Central Avenue. The 60,000- to 80,000-square-foot complex will have a community grocery store inside, along with Goodwill’s employment programs and space where other nonprofits can locate.   

The fight for more fresh, affordable food options in the Central neighborhood is decades long. At least one grocery store opened then closed, while another was proposed and hasn’t materialized. But City Council Member Richard Starr, who represents the neighborhood, said he believes Goodwill’s proposal is different. 

“Over time you hear about projects and initiatives, but people never put a dollar amount on it,” Starr said. “Goodwill wants to be here.”

Goodwill is investing $10 million of its own money into the building, which it is able to do partly due to a gift from billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, said Diane Pilati, the vice president of marketing for Goodwill Industries of Greater Cleveland & East Central Ohio. It also hopes to receive tax credits and raise $17 million through a capital campaign. The nonprofit is looking for donations from community and corporate foundations, Pilati said. 

Starr said the city is planning to invest in the project and is working to bring on other partners, too, such as the county government. 

“Now it’s up to us to bring those other resources,” Starr said.  

The goal is to open the facility by June of 2028, Pilati said. 

A unique grocery store proposal 

St. Vincent Charity Medical Center closed in 2022. Since then, Sisters of Charity Health System, which still owns the property and land, has been meeting with community members and leaders to decide what to do with it. 

The number one issue Michael Goar, the new president and CEO of Sisters of Charity, heard from residents after beginning the job a year and a half ago was the inability to access fresh food and vegetables within walking distance. So the agency wanted to find a partner that could tackle that issue.  

Goar said Goodwill was the right fit. The organization already operates a similar Opportunity Center in Canton, which houses 23 nonprofits such as the Alzheimer’s Association, a Red Cross chapter and an NAACP chapter. While the Canton location doesn’t include a grocery store, it does have a food pantry. Goodwill is able to offer the nonprofits located there reduced rent and other benefits – free custodial services, shared conference rooms, security – by using the revenue from the thrift stores it operates around the region.  

The goal in Cleveland is to replicate this model and add a grocery store. Instead of bringing on a local or national business to run it, Goodwill is in talks with Rid-All Green Partnership, a nonprofit urban farm in the Kinsman neighborhood. Rid-All already operates Farmer Jones Market in Maple Heights. The nonprofit is now having conversations with suppliers to ensure it can provide food cost-effectively, Pilati said. 

The Opportunity Center will also host family service and employment programming by Goodwill, such as job training. There are conversations about a Head Start program, a free pre-school, also being located in the building, Pilati said.  

Decades-long fight for food access

The Central neighborhood has one of the highest poverty rates in Cleveland, with about 70% of residents living below the poverty line. 

Having food available in the neighborhood is one of the residents’ most pressing concerns,  Starr said.

A Dave’s supermarket on East 61st Street sits just outside the neighborhood, but many residents don’t have access to a car and rely on public transit, Goar said.  

The concern Starr hears isn’t new. In 2003, the Plain Dealer reported that Frank Jackson, the council president at the time, had spent 14 years trying to lure a supermarket to Cleveland’s Central neighborhood. Many businesses told him that there were not enough homes and too many low-income residents. 

He finally convinced the owners of Dave’s to open a store at a development on East 40th Street and Community College Avenue, now known as Arbor Park Place. Millions of public dollars flowed into renovating the shopping center, including from the City of Cleveland, Cuyahoga County and the federal government. 

The supermarket opened in 2004. 

It closed in 2019, when the  East 61st Street location opened. That left residents without a close grocery store: A 2022 analysis labeled much of the Central neighborhood as having low access to grocery stores, meaning that residents live more than half a mile from a grocery store and experience higher rates of poverty.  

Since then, various efforts have sought to fill the gap. A 2022 article by the Northeast Ohio Solutions Journalism Collaborative indicated that a community development corporation in the Central neighborhood was seeking a new supermarket to replace Dave’s. That hasn’t happened yet, and Starr said there’s “no guarantee” that it will, as the organization is transitioning its leadership. The organization’s interim executive director did not respond to an email asking about the grocery store’s status. 

The Central Kinsman Wellness Collective is a community-led group that’s seeking to add more fresh food access in the neighborhood. It received funding in 2023 that helped launch a four-day farm stop – a mix between a farmers’ market and a small grocery store – at Shiloh Baptist Church last fall. Organizers said at the time that they hoped to establish a more permanent location though did not yet have details. The director of Environmental Health Watch, the nonprofit organizing the collective, said that the organization does not have a comment on Goodwill’s new grocery plans. 

Starr said that he supports all the efforts to add food access in the Central neighborhood: “The more grocery stores, the more opportunities,” he said. Pilati, with Goodwill, said that the organization is having conversations with the Central Kinsman Wellness Collective and foresees opportunities to work together.

“We don’t want to override their efforts in bringing that,” Pilati said. “And I think that they will continue to expand their model and continue to bring fresh produce, fresh meat from local farmers into the neighborhood.”