Southeast Portland Neighbors Working With People’s Co-op to Develop Good Neighbor Agreement

People’s Co-op in Southeast Portland

Neighbors living near People’s Food Co-Op are working with the employee-and member-owned natural foods store to craft a good neighbor agreement (GNA).

Development manager Shawn Furst says the agreement will codify some measures People’s Co-Op already employs to ensure the grocery store does not negatively impact the surrounding neighborhood.

“We’ve always been a neighborhood store,” Furst says. “We’ve had a long history of working with our neighbors to try to make it pleasant for them to live next to a grocery store.”

Furst says the process started about six weeks ago when she was told that an individual living near People’s had begun drafting a GNA based on one that had been established with another supermarket. Furst says the co-op’s staff was taken by surprise, and Furst then emailed the Hosford-Abernethy Neighborhood Development (HAND) to get involved. “We’re very willing to talk to the neighborhood association,” Furst says. “We think it’s a great idea.”

The GNA will address a variety of potential livability and public safety concerns that are part of living near a grocery store: excessive lighting, traffic control and abatement, clean-up of graffiti, processes for noise abatement, and setting time periods for certain noisy activities, such as trash pick up.

Because the GNA is being drafted from another with a larger supermarket, “some of it doesn’t quite apply, and we’re working on tweaking to just make it more applicable and more relevant to the policies that we already hold,” Furst says.

It is not unusual for residents to want a GNA with a grocery store—HAND has GNAs with all the grocery storesin the neighborhood, including the New Seasons located at SE Division Street and SE 19th Avenue.

Furst says she hopes the GNA will be complete within a few months. So far, HAND has gotten involved only as a convening body, but it may become more involved if discussions between People’s and nearby residents come to an impasse.