Reviving the General Store

I’d love to see this idea in my neighborhood in Minneapolis (“The Suburban General Store,” by Belinda Lanks, May 2009). Zoned in the 1950s, we have 1,500 residential lots and about 3,500 residents, bordered on the south by an industrial area, a suburb to both the west and north, and another residential area to the east. Near its center, the neighborhood features a large, one-story, recently abandoned elementary school on about 20 flat, level acres that already have utilities. At the neighborhood’s southwest corner there is one–one–lot that is zoned “commercial.” That lot is occupied by a print shop. Residents have no choice but to drive to get virtually everything, and the nearest stores are in the neighboring suburbs, so the city doesn’t even get the sales-tax revenue from our purchases.