DAYTON, Ohio — One box of cereal marks its place on the shelf as workers finish laying down the prices lining the aisles. After six years, Gem City Market is starting to look like a grocery store.
By the end of April, the west Dayton co-op plans to open its doors and start feeding its neighbors. And after years of anticipation, neighbors aren’t just eager to shop, but many are finding ways to get involved.
In Phillip Raimey’s more than 20 years in West Dayton, he said he can only remember one other store he could walk to.
“In the neighborhood, I grew up in, which was Westwood, there was the old Liberal’s Market,” he said.
All of those stores closed down in the 90s, leaving several Dayton neighborhoods lacking access to fresh, healthy foods, particularly in the city’s poorest neighborhoods.
The U.S. Census estimates one in five people in Dayton don’t own cars and in low-income neighborhoods, it’s even more common to lack reliable transportation.
These conditions combined to make northwest Dayton a food desert, one of the largest in Ohio. When Gem City opens, the $7 million project hopes to be the neighborhood’s oasis.
That’s what Raimey sees when he walks through the now empty aisles, just half a mile from his home.
“It’s coming to life before your very eyes,” he said.
Leah Bahan-Harris, the store’s general manager, said there are just a few finishing touches to go, like stocking the shelves, installing the point-of-sale system and training the staff.
“When you talk about the intensity of feeling about if it’s coming soon. I have employees with me right now,” she said. “We’re actively onboarding people to talk about the culture of the store so it’s happening and it’s happening right now.”
One of those staff members is Raimey.
He started as an engagement coordinator on March 10, connecting the store’s neighbors with organizational partners, and other Dayton-area resources.
Raimey said it’s not too far off from his last job in work-force development, though this wasn’t necessarily a career change he was anticipating.
“I saw postings for it but never in a million years would I think that at that time I would actually be here,” he said.
As the store got closer to opening, though, Raimey said he started to see a mix of opportunity and familiarity.
The land where the store stands used to be a locally-owned store called McCallister's.
“I was an art major in high school and this was an area that I got a lot of my art supplies,” Raimey said.
McCallister’s also hired a lot of locals, so as Raimey flipped through old photos of the store, he found a few familiar faces.
“Yeah, that was actually the spouse of one of my former business colleagues,” he said, pointing to a woman in a photo from the early 2000s.
Raimey said Gem City Market plans to use these old pictures in some of their marketing campaigns leading up to the opening, as a reminder that though the building is gone, the co-op hopes to be a spiritual successor to McCallister’s.
Freezers fill the aisles and cereal replaces paint on the shelves but Raimey said Gem City Market is still a local store hoping to serve its community.
In addition to the fresh food the place will provide, when the market opens in April, it will offer cooking classes, a health clinic and a community room for members to rent for meetings and events.
Raimey hopes he and his neighbors can take ownership of the place.
That’s why when the official sign went up on the building at the end of March, he only had one thing to say: “It’s coming together.”
