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On June 27, 2026,  the lights went dark at 10721 NE Sandy Blvd. The Grocery Outlet that had anchored the Parkrose neighborhood for close to 15 years rang up its last liquidation sale and closed for good, following months of stalled lease talks between the franchise and its property owner.

For a lot of Portland shoppers, a single grocery store closing is an inconvenience. In Parkrose, it landed closer to a gut punch. This is District 1, where a handful of conventional grocery stores serve a swath of outer East Portland that, by comparison, has roughly 18 in District 3, according to McKeever. The Gateway Fred Meyer, a few miles away, closed in July 2025 as part of a wider wave of Kroger shutdowns nationwide, costing the region nearly 250 jobs. What's left within easy reach now is two WinCo Foods locations — genuinely the cheapest stores in town, by my own monthly price tracking, but not exactly built for someone without a car — plus a Costco and a handful of smaller specialty and international grocers. East Portland is functionally a food desert at this point, and the Parkrose closure didn't help.

Cranston, a longtime Gateway resident who doesn't drive, relied on both stores. Before the closures, he'd swing by Fred Meyer for something quick after a night shift, or use his EBT card at the prepared hot deli — WinCo doesn't allow that. Grocery Outlet was where he stocked up on butter, cheese, and small "luxury" items, like a $2 jar of fancy mustard, that made a tight budget feel a little less tight. Now it's WinCo or a long transit ride, and his meal planning has shifted toward beans, stews, and big batch cooking he can freeze. 

"It's almost a poor tax to not have those options available," he said — buying in bulk to save money assumes you have a freezer and the space to put one, which not everyone does.

Parkrose resident Michael Woods put it more bluntly to KOIN: "It's pretty sad that it's closing," he said, citing both the theft that partially drove the decision and the longer trip to WinCo now ahead of him.

The narrative that's dogged this story is "crime made them leave." That's part of it, but it's not the whole picture, and Don McKeever — the Grocery Outlet's independent owner-operator for the past four years — wants that corrected. 

He says negotiations broke down over lease terms: Grocery Outlet wanted a six-year commitment, the property owner wanted 10, layered on top of real safety incidents and the kind of organized retail theft that erodes already-thin grocery margins. Portland City Council President Jamie Dunphy, a Parkrose resident himself, told KOIN that police response times have genuinely improved under the city's new form of government. 

"We've had much better response times from Portland police," Dunphy said, adding that Grocery Outlet's corporate office weighed the closure against a rough five-year stretch citywide and wasn't willing to bend on the lease as a result. Grocery Outlet, for its part, thanked the Parkrose community for its loyalty in a statement and pointed shoppers toward its other Portland-area locations, including another location in East Portland, further south.

What almost got lost in the coverage is that McKeever had other options. Grocery Outlet offered him bigger stores in easier locations more than once. He turned them down every time, because he'd built something in Parkrose that went well beyond selling groceries: a food pantry at Parkrose High School that grew from a request list into a spot kids weren't embarrassed to visit anymore — "We'll just meet down in the pantry," he recalled them yelling to each other in the hallway — plus free meals during spring break for low-income families, fundraisers that got a cash-strapped youth football team its uniforms back mid-season, and health benefits for his staff, a rarity anywhere in the Grocery Outlet system. 

Asked what all of it added up to, McKeever didn't hesitate: "We took care of our people."

McKeever isn't leaving. He's rebuilding, independently, in the same building, under a new name: Parkrose Grocery. No franchise agreement, no corporate restrictions on what he can stock or who he can buy from — which matters, because some of the loudest requests from customers were things Grocery Outlet's rules simply didn't allow. A hot deli. A real baby and diaper section. Local produce sourced from nearby farms like Rossi Farms instead of whatever the distributor happened to allocate that week.

The timeline is brutal by industry standards regardless of which specific fall date ends up sticking. A project like this typically takes eight or nine months to pull off in ideal conditions; McKeever is trying to do it in a fraction of that, after Grocery Outlet moved its closure date up from August to June and ate into the runway he'd planned around — and as of this week, he's doing it without a signed lease. He's aiming to bring staffing back up to 19 to 21 people, roughly where it stood before he had to trim down to 11 during the wind-down, with the same wage structure and health benefits intact.

None of this is happening in a vacuum. Historic Parkrose, the neighborhood's business association, has backed the businesses along that stretch of Sandy Boulevard for more than a decade — funding bulletproof glass and a mural at the store years ago — and Executive Director Héctor Márquez has worked directly alongside McKeever throughout his four years running it, including a recent push to coordinate litter cleanup crews that visibly improved the block. Márquez connected McKeever to Prosper Portland's healthy-communities initiative, aimed squarely at food access in underserved neighborhoods; the agency has floated up to $500,000 for capital improvements, part of a roughly $2 million total project cost.

McKeever is also leaning on his neighbors directly. Rather than hire out all of the deep cleaning and painting, he's coordinating volunteers who want to scrub floors, paint walls, and restock shelves themselves. "I want this to be a real uplifting community event," he said — the idea being that people who help build the store will feel like it's actually theirs when it opens.

McKeever and his backers held a news conference on Monday, July 27, to put real numbers behind the reopening plan. Stumptown Savings wasn't invited, so what follows is drawn from the outlets that were.

The headline number is $30,000: that's the fundraising goal McKeever and Historic Parkrose set, with a deadline of the end of September. Historic Parkrose has already committed an $8,000 no-interest loan on top of that, and Portland City Council President Jamie Dunphy pledged $6,000 from his own office budget on the spot. According to McKeever, most of the "hard costs" — renovation, equipment — are already covered separately; this fundraiser is specifically for wages and training before the doors open, plus early expenses like a new point-of-sale system, per KOIN. Prosper Portland's contribution — building improvements — sits outside the fundraiser entirely, consistent with the healthy-communities capital commitment Márquez had already described to me.

The timeline has moved. McKeever had originally told me he was hoping for a late-September or early-October opening, though he was upfront that it was an aggressive target given how compressed his runway already was. At last Monday's presser, the public number softened to this fall, with November now the date organizers are using. One detail didn't make it into most of the coverage: the lease on the building isn't signed yet. McKeever told the Stumptown Savings he's still negotiating and hopes to have an agreement in the coming weeks — meaning the November target, and the fundraiser deadline built around it, is still resting on a piece of paper that doesn't exist yet.

Some of what McKeever described at the presser goes beyond just reopening the same store under a new name. He's talked about a deli counter, coffee, a community gathering space where people can sit and have a conversation, and an expanded selection for families with infants and toddlers — additions he said came straight from what customers told him they wished the old store had, according to KGW.

He's also planning a stronger security setup than the old location had, which Dunphy tied directly to why City Council got involved in the first place: city leaders said they stepped in partly after hearing about the crime and lack of city support McKeever dealt with while running the Grocery Outlet, and pointed to programs like Ceasefire and Portland Street Response as pieces of the broader fix the neighborhood needs. Dunphy has framed the closure itself in blunt terms, telling OregonLive it did "psychological damage" to the neighborhood — and said the first thing he'll personally buy once the doors reopen is milk, eggs, or bread. "The basics."

McKeever isn't the first person on this stretch of Sandy Boulevard to ask the neighborhood to fund a business into existence. Lily Burnett opened Parkrose Coffee a few years ago on the strength of a $10,000 GoFundMe from community members who wanted, in her words, something positive built in Parkrose. She's now one of the loudest voices backing McKeever's effort, and she's also the one who put the stakes in the plainest terms: without a full-service grocery store in the neighborhood, homebound seniors and anyone without reliable transportation are stuck making a car or bus trip just to buy groceries — for a lot of people, she told KGW, that's simply too big of a lift. It's a useful gut check on how far $30,000 in community goodwill can actually stretch, since her store is smaller and cost roughly a third of what McKeever's asking for.

That community goodwill isn't unconditional, though, and it's worth understanding why. Historic Parkrose, the same business association backing McKeever's fundraiser, spent much of the spring pushing a separate and far more contested proposal: a new enhanced service district that would have taxed Parkrose business owners roughly $644,000 a year (cumulative) for a decade to pay for extra litter cleanup and security. A group calling itself Protect Parkrose, representing 77 property owners who together account for more than half the district's proposed assessment base, organized hard against it, arguing it was effectively a tax business owners had no vote on. The Portland City Council's City Life Committee didn't kill the proposal outright, but it also didn't vote to advance it after packed testimony against it on July 14 — Historic Parkrose paused it the following week, Willamette Week reported. Protect Parkrose spokeswoman Lindsay Berschauer told Willamette Week she believes Historic Parkrose lost credibility with some business owners over how the process was handled, and that she doesn't see much room for compromise going forward.

None of that means the grocery fundraiser is in trouble. But it landed in the same news cycle as a presser asking the same neighborhood, through the same nonprofit, to open its wallet again — for a cause with far broader support than the service district ever had, but from a backer whose standing with some local business owners is genuinely shakier than it was a month ago.

Parkrose's food gap won't close the day this store reopens. East Portland has been underserved on grocery access for years, and one independent store — however well-intentioned — can't undo that on its own. International grocery markets like Hong Phat, Lily Market, and Namaste fill real gaps in the area, but they're not a full substitute for a full-service grocery store and they shouldn't have to be treated as one.

What's happening at 10721 NE Sandy is still worth watching, though, because it's a rare case of a neighborhood refusing to just accept an empty storefront as its fate. If you want to help — financially, or with your own two hands once renovations start — keep an eye on @ParkroseLocalGrocery on Instagram, where McKeever shares updates on the project and ways people can get involved.