Shoppes at Wissinoming

Reinvestment Fund financed the construction of the Shoppes at Wissinoming, an 110,000 square foot new grocery store-anchored shopping center in northeast Philadelphia.

The $29 million development brought a new 66,000-square-foot ShopRite supermarket to a location that is both a Reinvestment Fund-designated Limited Supermarket Access (LSA) area and a USDA Low Income Low Access area, improving access to affordable fresh food to the surrounding low-income community. The development is within Philadelphia’s largest remaining LSA area with 17,902 residents.

The shopping center will also include a Wawa, 17,450 square feet of community-serving retail and two additional retail spaces, transforming a former warehouse into a community asset. The project is expected to create 250 construction jobs and 300 full-time jobs at the tenant businesses.

The ShopRite supermarket at the shopping center is owned and operated by the Ammons family, which owns two other stores in the region. The Ammons family ShopRite is part of Wakefern, one of the leading grocery co-ops in the country and in the Philadelphia market. ShopRite has significant market share in the region and this store is anticipated to do over $43 million in sales in its first year of operations. The store’s primary trade area has a total population of 70,489, with a 23% poverty rate.

Reinvestment Fund financing is part of a leverage loan for a $14.5 million New Markets Tax Credit transaction. Reinvestment Fund is providing a loan with participations from Philadelphia Industrial Development Corp (PIDC) and LISC. Reinvestment Fund’s portion of the loan includes funds from its federal Healthy Food Financing Initiative award. PIDC, Commonwealth Cornerstone Group and Chase are providing the NMTC allocations. The entire NMTC transaction is subordinate to a loan from Firstrust, a long-standing regional bank.