Raleigh Woman Battles City Hall to Reopen Her Great-Grandparents' Neighborhood Store
Jessica Peacock standing in front of Peacox Market, her grandparents' neighborhood store in Raleigh, NC. (Source: Jessica Peacock.)
In 1964, southeast Raleigh welcomed Peacox Community Market, a neighborhood store where “folks could pick up a drink, a snack, and catch up on community news.” Fast-forward to 2020: as Jessica Peacock endeavored to renovate and reopen her great grandparents’ shop, the revamped zoning code in Raleigh, North Carolina, had different plans for the one-story building. What ensued was a nearly three-year battle—all at Peacock’s expense—to revive a staple of the neighborhood and her great-grandparents’ legacy.
The market was a fixture in Walnut Terrace until a transformative redevelopment project forced many of its patrons out, leaving the business struggling to make ends meet in 2009. It’s been closed ever since, but with some extra time on her hands and a creative kick, Peacock set her sights on reopening the shop—something she’d dreamed of for years—in 2020.
Photos of the Peacock family running the store before its shutdown in 2009. (Source: Jessica Peacock.)
She hoped reviving it would be a matter of getting permission granted. Instead, what she endured was an expensive bureaucratic process that seemed designed to discredit her ambitions. Even after filling out all the necessary paperwork, navigating dense city documents, arranging legal counsel, and engaging with her community, she ended 2020 discouraged and ultimately backed down from pursuing rezoning.
A year later, with newfound courage, she restarted the process, incurring many of the same costs but also gaining much more sympathy and solidarity from her immediate community, as well as city staff. This time, Peacock represented herself, formed a partnership with the local elementary school and the church next door, and worked twice as hard to get the neighborhood’s backing, all while juggling a job and life outside of this undertaking. Even with a stronger foundation, she entered every meeting feeling her efforts would be upended by a single dissenting opinion or an inscrutable technical question. Luckily, that wasn’t the case, and after two years, Peacox was able to get its rezoning approved. The neighborhood market is expecting to open its doors later this year.
Finally, Peacock is able to direct her attention toward the pressing infrastructural needs of the space and prepare for opening. However, with so much money, time, and energy spent before she got to this point, one question remains: Why did reviving a former family-owned store involve so much red tape?
Peacock shares updates on the store’s opening in this LinkedIn post.
Peacox Market hasn’t moved since its inception in the 1960s, but the street where it stands changed its land use. The building is currently zoned RX-3, which limits retail—like a small grocery store—to the ground floor of an apartment building located on the corner of two intersecting streets. For nearly Peacock’s entire lifetime, everyone assumed her family’s former store was located on the corner, as it’s the final structure approaching an intersection. Nevertheless, she learned there’s a “small sliver of land” that qualifies as the corner and Peacox Market isn’t standing on it.
When looking at the facts of this story, the irony for Strong Towns Director of Community Action Edward Erfurt is that “between when it first opened and now, the building hasn’t changed. Its footprint didn’t expand and it didn’t move. Instead, somewhere along the line, somebody changed the colors on the map.”
Raleigh city council member Jonathan Melton essentially campaigned on the promise to tackle those colors and how they inhibit Raleigh from serving the needs of its residents. Across Raleigh, he’s observed that zoning has isolated where people live from where they work, eat, and shop. Historic districts are often an exception, but even in those areas, Melton points out that “you certainly wouldn’t be able to reopen or build a new [corner store] and I think that’s a problem.”
Melton connected with Peacock when he learned of the struggle to reopen her family’s legacy neighborhood market. “She had to go through a really extensive rezoning process just to provide easy access to food for her neighbors,” he shared. “It shouldn’t take all those steps and all those years to make something like that happen.”
Advocates and electeds like Melton have been trying to induce a more permanent change, but he noted one of the major obstacles to loosening city-wide restrictions is anxiety over what retail would appear. “With the state prohibiting the city from controlling what type of business operates next door, we can’t promise it will be a small grocery store rather than a vape shop,” Melton explained. “But the goal is to make something like Peacox Market happen in more neighborhoods, as wanted and needed.”
Rather than anticipate and consequently regulate for the “worst-case scenario,” cities and neighborhoods should look to existing examples of what they don’t like—if it exists—and negotiate small changes. Otherwise, precautionary rules intended to block the feared vape shop will also eliminate the beloved community market. Whole neighborhoods can lose access to valued goods and services.
Zoning dictates and often limits whether and how a neighborhood can evolve and respond to growing needs. Some of those needs in Walnut Terrace, which Peacock and Melton have referred to as a “food desert,” involve easy access to food. “Everybody deserves convenient access to goods and services in their neighborhoods, as well as people who care about them in their neighborhoods,” Jessica shared. “Additionally, all neighborhoods deserve retail that’s invested in them beyond being patrons. Small businesses are uniquely positioned to take care of communities in that way.”
It's difficult to find an accurate political label for Strong Towns. That’s because the way that we as a society talk about politics is structurally dysfunctional. A new, more nuanced way of talking about politics can help us better understand the movement — and how it unites people from all walks of life.