Radio weather

The tremendous downside of listening to Classical Minnesota Public Radio in Phoenix is that you get the Minneapolis / St Paul weather forecasts, where the high temperature tomorrow will be about 40° F cooler than here and about 100 percent more rainy.

This Week’s Reading: Bird on Fire

This week, I’m rereading Andrew Ross’s book, “Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City.”

Bird on Fire coverThis week, I’m rereading Andrew Ross’s book, Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City. I haven’t really read it since it came out in 2011, just finding snippets to share as needed. It will be interesting to see what (if anything) has changed here since his original assessment.

I’m not bringing this up simply to share what I’m reading or because I wish to agitate the Very Serious People in Phoenix thought circles. There’s something that’s been on my mind and I want to see if there’s historic backing to it or if I’m overthinking it. (More later.)

This might not also be related to my latest contribution to Instagram. (More on that later, too.)

To repair America

There is much more work to repair America than I had previously thought.

If you’ve been in a cave: George Zimmerman has been found not guilty of murdering Trayvon Martin.

There is much more work to repair America than I had previously thought.

Rainy day quick hit: Google Maps for iOS

Dear Apple (if you’re reading this post): Leave mapping to the experts; your customers have spoken.

iPhone App StoreQuick two-sentence post for a rainy evening in the desert…

You know that it says something about the quality of Apple’s native mapping application when, not quite twenty-four hours after its release, Google Maps for iOS (well, iPhone/iPod touch at the moment) is the number 1 rated free application for download.

Dear Apple (if you’re reading this post): Leave mapping to the experts; your customers have spoken.

Final thoughts on the Urban Grocery’s closing

Some final thoughts on the closing of the Urban Grocery at the Downtown Phoenix Public Market.

I’m learning more and more about the circumstances surrounding the closing of the indoor Urban Grocery at the Downtown Phoenix Public Market. While we could debate ad nauseum about the factors that led to the closing of the indoor market or point fingers at various individuals and groups, the reality is that the indoor Urban Grocery is closing at the end of business on Saturday 12 May.

In summary, passion and volunteerism alone do not make a sustainable business model; one has to pay the bills. While I’m not at liberty to say the extent of what I know and name my sources, the financial situation of the indoor Urban Grocery made it inevitable that it was going to close. Unfortunately, no amount of community donations could have possibly sustained the indoor market with how it was operated.

What we in the downtown Phoenix community need to do is work with organizations like Local First Arizona and others to find a local business partner to operate a downtown Phoenix grocery store. With the absence of the indoor Urban Grocery, downtown Phoenix has become a food desert, something that is fundamentally incompatible with an urban environment. I’m dreaming here, obviously, but this would be a tremendous opportunity for a group like Bashas’/AJ’s or La Grande Orange to step in. For either group, this would be a perfect entrée to downtown Phoenix.

We have established that the indoor Urban Grocery is a tremendous resource for the downtown Phoenix community. Although this isn’t a perfect metric, at the time of this writing, the “Save Downtown Phoenix Public Market” Facebook page has 566 likes. There have been polls and surveys done about the Urban Grocery. But again, a place needs to be operated effectively and have sound financial footing to run.

While this might sound a bit harsh, I believe that we need to move on from lamenting that the indoor Urban Grocery is closing to finding ways to write the next chapter in the life of the Downtown Phoenix Public Market. If there’s one thing that we in downtown Phoenix are good at, it’s rallying around a common cause. Let’s do that again and show our community our determination and our resolve.

I’m willing to help advance this conversation as best as I can.