Grocery store offers hope in Indy’s Riverside neighborhood (with video)

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An Indianapolis neighborhood facing substantial challenges has gotten a big boost from something that might be overlooked elsewhere - the opening of a grocery store.

Flanner House opened Cleo’s Bodega on June 20 to provide a “food access hub” in the North West Area, a part of the city described as Indianapolis’ largest food desert.

“This is one of the most historic black neighborhoods in the city,” said Torian Jones, a manager at the store. Before Interstate 65 cut through the neighborhood, “There was a whole community, a whole black infrastructure here.”

Video: A Cleo's manager talks about the pride of the neighborhood.

The city supplied $400,000 in funding to open the store, which will hire people from the neighborhood through the Flanner House Community Center for Working Families Program.

Census data shows nearly a third of residents in the area live below the poverty level, and almost half the people within a mile of Flanner House receive food stamps. Crime stats rank the 46208 ZIP code as among the city’s most violent.

But Jones said residents maintain their pride in the face of those challenges, and the store offers hope that they haven’t been forgotten, and that other business enterprises will return.

“What makes this area ‘bad,’ if anything, is a lack of enterprise. It’s a lack of understanding,” Jones said. “People are working, and those who aren’t, are trying to make their way.”

By John Strauss, jcs1122@yahoo.com

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