Own the block
A grocery store downtown, owned by the people who shop in it.
Downtown needs this for three reasons, and they weigh the same. Two thousand residents, every cruise passenger and crew member, and the students and staff of Texas A&M Galveston and UTMB have nowhere to buy fresh produce without a drive. A grocery brings people downtown Sunday through Thursday, the days every shop around it is empty. And with the colleges at the table and a hundred dollar share for students, it is the first thing the young islanders we keep losing could ever own.
The buildings that could hold a store sit empty because fixing one costs millions before the first dollar of rent. The way around that is a community investment fund: neighbors buy small shares, investors and foundations buy larger ones, and the fund owns the building. There is not one in Texas yet.
It starts with a head count. This page has one job: find out how many of us there are.
© 2026 Raymond Arce · Concept first published September 25, 2026
Why a grocery store, and not something else
Three reasons, and they weigh the same.
Access to food
Fresh produce and daily essentials within walking distance for the two thousand people who live downtown, the crews coming off the ships, and the 1.8 million cruise passengers a year who board here, one in five of all visitors in 2025 per Visit Galveston's economic impact report. Today the closest store is a small market more than a mile east. The supermarkets are three miles and more west.
Downtown also sits between two campuses. Across the channel on Pelican Island, Texas A&M Galveston has nearly 2,300 students. On the east end, UTMB employs about 16,500 people and enrolls about 3,600 students. From either campus, the nearest supermarket is more than three miles away. Near UTMB there is only the small market. A store downtown sits in the middle of all of them.
An anchor for the block
Ask a shop owner downtown what Tuesday looks like. A grocery is the one business people walk into several times a week, and it brings them downtown Sunday through Thursday, when the shops and restaurants around it are waiting on foot traffic that does not come. No other single tenant does that seven days a week. The GEDP's Joshua Owens told The Daily News in August that residents and year round activity are what downtown needs most.
The next generation
Between 2010 and 2019 Galveston lost an estimated 775 families, and by 2019 nearly 900 fewer children attended its public schools than in 2012, per Vision Galveston. A hundred dollar share built with Galveston College, UTMB and Texas A&M Galveston, with financial literacy and investment training taught alongside it, puts the young people we keep losing on the ownership side of the block. Rhode Island already prices its shares by class, so a student tier is a design choice, not an invention. That is a third reason to build a grocery store, not a bonus on top of one.
Be clear on what this is
A show of hands. Not an offer, and not a pledge.
Nobody is taking money and nothing here binds you. No city money, no new tax, no new district. And it is an investment, not a savings account: money people put in is at risk.
Not a scientific poll. A head count and a comment card, and I read every one. Nothing on this page is an offer to sell or a solicitation to buy anything.
In their words
What neighbors are saying.
From the comment cards on this page. A comment goes up here only when the person who wrote it says it can.
The next one could be yours.
Leave a comment in the card above and check the box that says I can share it.
What would make it real
An idea is like a table.
Every table needs at least three legs to stand on. This one has four, and the head count above is what makes the first one possible.
The money
Neighbors buying small shares, a hundred dollars for students and a few hundred and up for everyone else. Accredited investors in the same fund on the same terms. A foundation matching the first dollars. And a loan on top. Federal crowdfunding rules cap what a fund can raise that way at five million dollars a year and limit what each non-accredited person can put in, under 17 C.F.R. 227.100. For a first building that is a ceiling, not a problem.
The tax breaks
Four, and none is automatic. Texas nominated downtown and the East End for the new federal opportunity zones on September 4; certification is expected by November 28 and the zone would start January 1, 2027. A federal credit worth twenty percent of the rehabilitation cost for a certified historic building, under 26 U.S.C. 47. A Texas credit worth another twenty five percent that can be sold for cash, under Tax Code Chapter 172. And the City's own ten year freeze on City taxes for a substantial historic rehabilitation, through its Financial Incentive Program. People say Galveston does not do tax incentives. On historic rehabilitation that is wrong.
The project
A fund with no building is a bank account. One building named early, a builder who has rehabilitated a hundred year old structure, a grocer who wants the space, and a local nonprofit holding the fund with the investors at the table. Not the City, and not a candidate. The tenant comes first: without a grocer, this is a real estate deal looking for a purpose.
The next generation
Galveston College, UTMB and Texas A&M Galveston at the table from the start. A hundred dollar share for students and young islanders, with financial literacy and investment training taught through the college, the Economic Development Partnership, or a local advisor who takes it on. Anyone under eighteen would hold theirs through a custodial account under the Texas Uniform Transfers to Minors Act, a question for the fund's lawyers. I put this to the panel at the Neighborhood Economics conference on September 16 and the answer was that it is legal and being done.
The part I will not soften
Six ways this fails.
Not enough of us
If the count stays small there is no leverage, no match, and no reason for an owner or a grocer to take the meeting. That is the one you decide.
The walls
Texas requires an asbestos survey before any renovation of a commercial building, under 25 Tex. Admin. Code 296.191(d)(1). Add lead paint from before 1978, water from Ike, which put downtown under water from Harborside to Market and damaged an estimated 75 percent of the city's buildings per The Daily News, and a century of settling. Nobody knows the bill until somebody opens the walls, and it comes before the first dollar of rent. That is why a bank alone will not do these buildings.
It raises slowly
Rhode Island's fund, the first of its kind, opened in September 2024, is raising three and a half million dollars, and had about two hundred ninety thousand ten months in, per the Providence Preservation Society. Anybody promising a store by next summer is selling something.
People can lose money
This is an investment. A neighbor's five hundred dollars is at risk, and every conversation about this starts there.
The zone is not certified
Downtown is nominated, not designated. If Treasury says no in November, a leg comes off the table and the plan gets rebuilt without it.
No grocer
Without an operator who wants to run a store downtown there is no project. That is the conversation I am having first.
Others have made this work. Kachuwa in Boulder, Colorado has raised money since 2017; its 310 members have invested more than twenty six million dollars, per the Brookings Institution. Nova Scotia has run funds like this since 1999; a 2021 study counted forty two funds that raised over a hundred million dollars. None of these is Galveston, and none of their numbers is a promise about ours.
The ask
First from you. Then from Council.
From you: say whether you would put money in, bring five neighbors or five classmates to this page, and tell me if you know a grocer or a building owner. Then I take the count to the island's foundations and ask for a match. From the colleges: a seat at the table for a student share and the training that goes with it. From Council, three things and none of them a purchase: confirm downtown's opportunity zone the day Treasury certifies it, put the City's historic tax freeze in writing for a downtown grocery project, and convene Vision Galveston, Build Galveston, the GEDP and Galveston College about who would hold a fund and who would teach the class.