Will United Market KC be the grocery store KC East Siders have needed? | Opinion
There is a new grocery store coming to the corner of 31st and Prospect. United Market KC, LLC will operate the store at 3110 Prospect Ave. in the Linwood Shopping Center as soon as April, the city announced recently.
On Friday, more details emerged in a video call meeting of the Urban Summit.
This is a big deal, and I was glad to hear it. The East Side Kansas City neighborhoods had been without a grocer since August 2025 after the community rose up — erupted is the better term — when crime in and around the former Sun Fresh Market store became uncontained. Reports of fights, drug use, public sex and even nudity inside the store kept customers away, according to store employees.
The new store operator is Anthony Estrada, who told members of the Urban Summit Friday morning that he is “thinking outside the box” to ensure its success. “Our top priority is going to be safety. We are exploring some avenues … on how to keep the community safe. So, one of those avenues is making it a member’s only stores like a Costco or a Sam’s Club. I’m going to pretty much let the community decide if that’s the direction we want to go.”
Estrada said the membership method would keep customer’s name, address and other vital information on file. “If people’s information is on file, they’re less likely to do something negative inside the store, because they know we can identify them.” He added that once the membership is up and running, he would connect it to a loyalty rewards program.
Neighborhood residents as ambassadors
City Manager Mario Vasquez also spoke to the Urban Summit on the public safety part of the Prospect Corridor equation. “We’re very aware of what things occur on Prospect, with respect to perception of safety and the people hanging out there,” he said. Vasquez said he wants to see security in the shopping center, and a “presence along the corridor, north and south, so we can go into the streets, so we can take care of the bus stops where we have a lot of loitering going on, and perhaps to bring on people from the neighborhood to work as ambassadors, and help us do the cleanups and help us keep things organized.”
According to a news release, the ordinance authorizing the lease agreement was sponsored by Mayor Quinton Lucas and Third District Councilwomen Melissa Robinson and Melissa Patterson Hazley. Estrada said the story would open “two to three months after the agreement is signed” next week.
Lucas praised United Market in the release and said, “We’ve been deliberate throughout this process to help ensure the success of this privately-operated grocery store and the entire Prospect corridor.”
Ensure the success of the entire Prospect corridor? This brings the question: What has changed since those town hall meetings in late 2024 where neighborhood members and civic leaders asked — no, implored — the city to do something?
Back then, Urban League CEO Gwen Grant challenged both the community and the police to come back with solutions. “Do you have the collective will?” she asked, and said police needed to “clean up the doggone mess.”
Kansas City Police Chief Stacey Graves promised to round up the bad actors and provide round-the-clock police patrols, and crime did go down. Another thing happened: Jackson County got a new prosecutor. Melesa Johnson was elected in November 2024, running on a law-and-order platform and promising to prosecute the lower-level crimes that previously had gone unhandled.
The success of the store and the corridor depends on a lot of things, including working to lower crime in the area and prosecuting arrests. If those things are in order, we could see a good outcome both for the store and the customers.
After all, no one wants to shop for groceries having to cross active drug areas or passing by public sex in the parking lot. And before, these things led to other problems: Customers stopped coming and budget issues kept the previous tenant, Sun Fresh, from restocking the stores. By the end, there didn’t seem to be a strong reason to keep it open.
There are good things going for United Market KC: It’s on a public bus line, and it’s in a community that wants to see its success. Let’s hope that’s enough to keep this area from again becoming a food desert.
