Nicole Daniels lives in the Saratoga Heights housing complex in Binghamton's Southside neighborhood. She loves the peace and quiet of her neighborhood.
“They have the most beautiful birds up here,” Daniels said. “I like to look at the birds, I like to look at the moon. And it seems so much closer when you're in Binghamton, New York for some reason.”
Daniels moved up here 17 years ago from New York City. In all those years, she has never owned a car.
That never caused her too much trouble. To get groceries in the winter, she used to take a six-minute bus ride to the Weis grocery store on Conklin Avenue. On warmer days, she would walk the 20 minutes to get there.
“It was really everything you needed, from soup to nuts,” Daniels said. “If you want to throw a barbecue, you can do that. If it was too cold and snow was on the ground, you can go there and get salt.”
In February, Daniels heard that the Weis would close permanently. Now, she’s one of many residents in the area living without access to a neighborhood grocery store.
‘A tremendous blow’
Daniels could go to a Weis on Robinson Street, just across the Susquehanna River. But that takes almost 40 minutes each way and usually involves two bus trips. She could go to another Weis on Pennsylvania Avenue. That trip takes almost an hour, and also requires two buses.
“Sometimes you're waiting 40, 45 minutes for a bus,” Daniels said. “And if you don't come at a certain time, you've already missed it.”
There is also a limit to how many grocery bags residents can take onto the bus. Broome County Transit has said the agency will try to accommodate extra bags since the Weis on Conklin Avenue closed.
Depending on what she needs, Daniels has started taking the bus one way and splurging on a cab ride home. But she said that’s money she could be spending on food for herself and her son.
“It's been a tremendous blow. It's been like somebody punched us in the gut,” Daniels said.
‘It's going to be very difficult to attract a similar type of grocery store’
When a neighborhood’s only grocery store leaves, the vacuum it creates is called a “food desert”. That’s when a large percentage of residents, usually low-income, no longer have access to fresh, healthy food.
A report from the New York comptroller’s office last year found roughly one in 10 households in the state struggled with food insecurity. Studies have found that access to nearby grocery stores, or the transportation to reach those stores, can worsen household food insecurity.
For 60 years, residents of Southside East used the grocery store on Conklin Avenue. It was first owned by Binghamton-based Giant Markets. In 2009, Weis Markets purchased the location.
Then in February 2024, Weis suddenly announced it was closing the store. In a statement to WSKG, Weis declined to specify the reason for the closure, but said the decision was made “after careful consideration and review.”
Weis Director of Public Relations Dennis Curtin said the grocery chain offered all employees at the location positions at nearby stores, including three other stores in Binghamton.
“We remain committed to our other Southern Tier stores,” Curtin wrote. “We recently started the remodel of our Robinson Street store and plan some upgrade work at Pennsylvania Avenue store, which we will complete later this spring.”
Binghamton Mayor Jared Kraham said the city was surprised by Weis’ choice to close the store. He said the grocery chain gave no indication ahead of time that it was considering closing.
“I was incredibly frustrated and caught off guard because they had previously told me that there was nothing to worry about,” Kraham said. “And they really couldn't explain why. I was told that there was really no good explanation. So if I had been told in advance or the community was kind of told in advance, I think we could have developed some contingencies.”
Kraham said it’s clear it will be challenging to replace the Weis.
“Do I believe that in the short term, there's going to be a full-service grocery store with the same level of items or services as Weis? I do not think that,” Kraham said. “It's going to be very difficult to attract a similar type of grocery store to that location.”
But he said the city is working to determine if the Southside East neighborhood qualifies as a federally-designated food desert. That qualification could help bring in grant money or funding to fill the gap.
Multiple factors, like transportation, walkability and whether a neighborhood is in an urban or rural area, factor into a food desert designation. But for the most part, the U.S. Department of Agriculture defines an urban food desert as a neighborhood with a poverty rate of 20 percent or higher, where at least 33 percent of the population lives more than a mile from a supermarket.
According to census data, some parts of the Southside East neighborhood have a poverty rate over 20 percent. The Saratoga Heights housing complex, where Nicole Daniels lives, is at least two miles from a large supermarket.
‘You don't take something if you're not going to replace it’
A similar thing happened on the city’s Northside in 1996, when the neighborhood’s only full-service grocery store closed. For 25 years, residents went without a grocery store. In 2021, Greater Good Grocery, a nonprofit run through the Broome County Council of Churches, opened.
Since January, Greater Good has also operated the “Mobile Market”, an old school bus painted with cartoon veggie characters and fitted with refrigerators. It makes stops across the city each week.
Residents can visit the bus to purchase fresh produce and pantry staples. The Mobile Market now accepts payment with Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) food benefits.
Kinya Middleton is the general manager of Greater Good and a first-term city council member. She said the Mobile Market can’t have every product, but it does fill the gap, especially for people who don’t have consistent transportation.
“The interaction on the grocery store bus might be all they'll get for the day, until they can get someone to take them to a store,” Middleton said. “So I think one of the challenges we have, we don't have every single thing that someone might be looking for. But we have enough.”
Middleton said she hopes she can bring her experience dealing with food insecurity on the Northside to help the city address the Southside East Weis closure.
After the Weis closed in March, the Mobile Market added the neighborhood to its bus route.
Nicole Daniels in Saratoga Heights was thrilled when the bus started pulling up to the parking lot of her housing complex each week. On a recent sunny, spring day, she hauled three full bags of groceries to her front door.
“I got all kinds of things: produce, I got onions, peppers, I got a couple of eggplants,” Daniels said.
But the bus can’t be there every day, and it doesn’t have every product she’s looking for. Daniels said it’s far better than nothing. Her hope is the city will come up with a long-term solution. A lot of her neighbors are stuck buying their food from the nearby gas station.
“You would have thought that they would have put something directly in place [of the grocery store] but they didn’t,” Daniels said. “You don't take something if you're not going to replace it with something positive. So what are we to do now?”
Produced with assistance from the Public Media Journalists Association Editor Corps funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people.