Photos of Wichita Planeview grocery stores

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Carneceria Mexican Food Market in Wichita Planeview neighborhoodCarneceria Mexican Food Market in Wichita Planeview neighborhood

Supporters of a proposed Save-A-Lot grocery store in Wichita’s Planeview neighborhood claim that there are no grocery stores nearby. Therefore, the city is willing to grant over $800,000 in special tax treatment to this store. This special tax treatment — let’s call it what it is: corporate welfare — is not available to the store’s competitors that already exist in the neighborhood or nearby.

But Wendy Aylworth’s research and John Todd’s photography show that the claims of the store’s supporters are not true: There are grocery stores — nice ones, too — in Planeview. The Wichita City Council is granting special tax-advantaged status to a competitor to these largely mom-and-pop stores in the form of tax increment financing (TIF) and Community Improvement District additional sales tax.

Click here to view a set of photographs of Planeview grocery stores taken by Todd.

Comments

9 responses to “Photos of Wichita Planeview grocery stores”

  1. Nice Mike Howerter

    I know that dog gone John Todd and he is one of them thar right wing loonies. I think he must of just made those photos up.
    John Todd should quit confusing us with facts. (I wonder if there is an appliance store in Planview. Four $800,000.00 maybe I could put an appliance store in Planview.)

    Nice Mike in Parsons

    PS Don’t you be taking no pictures John Todd.

  2. FollowThe$

    In 2002, Mayor Bob Knight sold some Plainview city park land at a bargained price to his campaign manager. In 2005, many in the City Council were trying to take the books out of the Plainview library, and in 2010, the City Council wants to tax the poor and benefit the wealthy. Two things that you must never do are: 1) the wrong thing, and 2) nothing. Vote and make a difference.

  3. ictobserver

    The best entrepreneurs must be at city hall. All business in Wichita seems to need a city subsidy. I wonder how any business ever got done before the city provided TIF’s, CID sales taxes, and other breaks so someone, anyone would do something in some part of Wichita.

    I wonder how the various shopping centers and grocery stores ever got built without special subsidies.

  4. Anonymous

    I only need 10,000 to start my own business. I bet I would not get a dime if I asked.

  5. Anonymous Mike

    Hi, Unfortunately I can’t think of anyone that works for the city, is an elected official of the city that I would vote to leave in their current position. }Thankfully for those of you who aren’t city councilmen OR planners I don’t know any of you.} I’m not usually in the throw them all out crowd, but save me a seat.

    later
    Mike
    Wichita KS

  6. Anonymous

    You gotta be friggin’ kidding. This is perhaps the worst blog E V E R! How many of you shop would at Lao’s market? Or Thai – whatever? I bet there ain’t no pizza there.

  7. Wendy

    You’re right there’s no pizza there, but Lao Market sure has the best Spring Rolls in town. A former chef & his wife own & run the store. They make the Spring Rolls and package them for sale (check the upright freezer case). They also make crab rangoon with real meat in it.

  8. Anonymous Mike

    Hi, I haven’t shopped at the Lao Market yet, but I do eat lunch occasionally at the Taco Factory just across from Bomber Burger, their Carne Asada is great. I can’t eat at Bomber Burger much, my arteries won’t take it. Isn’t it interesting that the spell checker doesn’t do important Spanish words like “Carne Asada”?

    Mike
    Wichita KS

  9. RH

    It seems ironic that this Libertarian blog would pick anything in Planeview as validation of a free-market / anti-government ideology

    fact, Planeview was originally a bustling, thriving diverse community that was arguably the first relatively racially integrated section of Wichita, where thousands lived in relative harmony in amazingly close quarters — and it was all a government project. Planeview was a city unto itself, with its own schools, stores (including grocery), laundry, theater, eateries and so on — many of them operating around-the-clock. The community was home to some of the war’s most productive workers and its children went on to become some of Wichita’s most successful citizens.

    And it was all a giant exercise in socialism. And it worked.

    Ditto for the smaller built-for-war neighborhoods of Hilltop and Beechwood.

    After the war, the free-enterprise business “leaders” demanded that the war housing projects be destroyed. They got their way with Beechwood, but not Hilltop nor Planeview. But they got the “next best thing”: privatization — turning over the properties to the free market, whereupon predatory free-marketers descended upon the land like vultures, and turned the tidy, civil communities into the city’s largest and most wretched slums — along the way, divesting th em of their schools, community centers and every other civil amenity, including their stores.

    The sole exception was the eastern half of Hilltop — which banded together to form the Hilltop Housing Corp., turning the old apartments into condos within a socialistic communal housing compact. Today, that extremely extdensely populated area retains its war-years civility, cleanliness and sense of community. It remains a quiet, comfortable, civil place to live.

    On the other side of the fence, though, lies West Hilltop, Wichita’s poorest, seediest, saddest neighborhood — made up of tiny houses dumped onto the “free market,” where individual “entrepreneurs” (absentee slum-lords) turned a tidy neighborhood into a rotting corpse of its former self — filthy, crumbling, chaotic and violent.

    Planeview, today, having suffered the same “free market” makeover, is little better.

    For Planeview, and its suffering citizens, a touch of socialism might be the best thing possible to overcome decades of free market abuse.

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