A Fred Meyer grocery store, which sits on a busy street in Seattle’s Lake City neighborhood, serves as the area’s primary grocery store and pharmacy. Now, residents are preparing for it to close in October.
The loss of the store will reverberate across the community, forcing locals to travel more than a mile to the next-closest full-service supermarket, which has amenities like a bakery. Some community advocates are raising the alarm that shuttering the Lake City store will transform the area into a food desert.
Down the street, people lined up on a sunny morning in mid-September to collect groceries from North Helpline’s Lake City Food Bank. The nonprofit serves a diverse mix of people, including immigrant communities, the elderly and low income households. The group has seen demand for their services rise in recent months. The nonprofit’s food access director, Louren Reed, estimates between 300 and 500 new households are registering with the food bank each month…