A trip to the grocery store is usually a matter of jumping in the car and taking a quick drive. Easy, peezy, right? Not so for many of Pueblo’s eastside residents. They’ve been without an easy to get to grocery store now going on ten years! They’ve been living in a food desert. But there’s a forecast for a big rain to end the drought. A little history, first.
The Safeway store that had been an eastside fixture for decades shut down in 2016. It didn’t shutter because of a lack of customers.
It closed because of too many of the wrong kind of customers. Boosters. Shoplifters. Thieves. The store was bleeding from theft.
Since then, said Pueblo City Councilman Joe Latino, area residents, along with those living just beyond the eastside, have had to drive across the city to buy their food. Many are elderly and don’t have ready access to transportation. Bad weather also complicates the matter.
“It just breaks my heart,” said Latino, a Pueblo native who worked away from the city but several years ago found his way back home again. “I get teary-eyed just thinking about it.”
Latino, a retired teacher, coach and administrator in metro Denver and New Mexico for years before returning to Pueblo, said plans are being formulated to plant the store deep on the Eastside where what remains of Spann Elementary School now sits. The school that educated generations of Puebloans was destroyed in a 2023 fire thought started by homeless people who’d squatted in the building.
Seed money for the undertaking comes from a $150,000 grant to Rocky Mountain SER under the Healthy Food Financing Initiative from the Department of Agriculture. Efforts are also underway to identify additional grants that bring the grocery store dream closer to reality.
While Pueblo’s Eastside is not unique across Colorado as a food desert, it does underscore what is sometimes a communal indifference to a problem nearly as serious as a power outage, said RMSER consultant Monique Marez.
“When a neighborhood loses power,” Marez told The Pueblo Chieftain, “we don’t just say, ‘Okay, they just don’t have power anymore.’ We figure out how to get them back on the grid. Access to food is just as critical.”
But living without access to the kind of grocery store other communities may take for granted also presents other challenges. Food desert residents often have to grocery shop at convenience or all-purpose discount stores that often dot low income neighborhoods. They also end up paying higher prices, getting nearly expired canned goods, poorer quality cuts of meat or less than fresh produce. Not having access to a decent grocery store and quality food options also presents potential health issues, for both ends of the age spectrum.
While Eastside residents may be buoyed by the idea that they’re finally going to break out of their fresh food exile, it won’t happen overnight or even this year. Latino guesses it may not happen for as much as two years.
An early concept of what is hoped will come to fruition is a nearly 3,500-square-foot grocery store complemented by a 900-square-foot commissary kitchen abutted by a community space. A multi-purpose athletic facility is also part of the early stage blueprint.
A sharing of ideas for the proposed project will be held at Pueblo’s Rocky Mountain SER Empowerment Center, 330 Lake Avenue on April 5th. A community meeting has been scheduled for April 15th at 5:30 p.m. at El Centro del Quinto Sol at 609 E. 6th Street to share ideas with East Side residents.
Latino has expressed confidence that something good will come from this undertaking. Eastside residents, he said, “deserve the very best.” The former educator believes Puebloans will come together on the plan, as they have, he said, for all of the city’s history. “Pueblo is the home of heroes. Nothing else needs be said.”
