New Altamont liquor and convenience store draws neighborhood ire; owner touts investment as good for East Central

The once run-down corner of East Central’s Altamont Street and Fifth Avenue has been transformed.

A building with shabby walls and shingles is now painted crisp red and black. New concrete steps lead inside the brightly lit store. And neon signs and feather flags advertise what’s inside: liquor, beer and vapes.

Diana Akinyi, 42, lives across the street from the new Altamont Liquor and Grocery. She was excited to see that the new owners of the property were remodeling the old building but soured on the building once ads went up. She has two children – one preteen and one teenager – and worries that the easy availability of booze and vapes will attract bad influences that could spell trouble.

“I don’t understand why they’d sell alcohol and vape in an area with just families,” she said. “I hate it. It’s an unnecessary evil.”

The owner of Altamont Liquor and Grocery, Joey Bains, bought the property in 2024 for $275,000. He said he saw a need for a community store in the area.

“There used to be a gas station on the corner as soon as you got off the freeway, but there was nothing there right now for the Fifth Avenue and Altamont Street and the whole neighborhood back there, East Central,” Bains said, adding that the nearest grocery store is the Fred Meyer on Thor Street.

The Bains family owns a number of gas stations, convenience stores and other businesses across Spokane and Spokane Valley, including the 7-Eleven on Second Avenue and Division Street, the Dutch Bros Coffee on Boone Avenue and Barker Road, and the Northtown Market kitty-corner to the NorthTown Mall.

The Bains’ project has overcome neighborhood opposition and an effort earlier this year by the city to stop it from obtaining a liquor license.

Altamont neighbor Tyson West, 49, remembers the gas station that used to sit on the corner of Altamont and Third. It was a “rough spot,” he said, with drug deals on the premises not an uncommon scene to those who live in the area. He and his wife knew that the abandoned building next to their home was zoned for retail, but they did not think anyone would actually set up shop.

While stressing that East Central is a “wonderful neighborhood,” Gavin Cooley, former chief financial officer for the city, said it is also “one of Spokane’s more economically stressed and crime-stressed areas.”

Cooley serves as the Spokane Business Association’s director of strategic initiatives. Instability, alcohol and fentanyl all “multiply” the impacts of one another, he said, and opening a liquor store “in a neighborhood that is already struggling is the last thing you want to do.”

“In the age of fentanyl, no neighborhood should be dealing with this kind of distribution of alcohol,” Cooley said.

Especially Fifth Avenue, Charity Resian said.

Resian works for the Carl Maxey Center, a few blocks east from the convenience shop. She manages an initiative to improve safety, walkability, economic development and the aesthetics of Fifth Avenue. Liquor sales will increase alcohol abuse and violence in the neighborhood, she said, “declining the stability of our community.”

“We truly believe that it will impact the public health, safety and just the general well-being of our neighborhood,” she said. “And that is not part of our mission. We are opposed to that.”

The city of Spokane requested in April that the state liquor and cannabis board deny the Altamont Liquor and Grocery store a liquor license due to its close proximity to the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center. An ordinance passed in April prohibits new businesses from selling liquor for off-site consumption within 500 feet of community centers, schools, parks, libraries and transit centers.

The city’s letter to the liquor board said the store is the only parcel zoned for retail along the Fifth Avenue corridor, which is a historically Black neighborhood impacted disproportionately by state highway projects.

“An email from (liquor board) staff indicated that the applicant’s proposed location is more than 500 feet from the entrance of the community center, yet the activities of the Martin Luther King Jr Community Center take place throughout the entire property, including the parking lot and grass areas where children may play outside,” the letter said.

The board responded to the city, saying that it is not the fault of the business that crime rates are increasing in the area and upheld that the distance between the entrances of the shop and the community center is 713 feet and therefore in line with the law.

“We take concerns of communities seriously and have met with various representatives about this issue,” liquor control board spokeswoman Julie Graham wrote in an email to The Spokesman-Review. “However, if a business meets the criteria, and has not had a problematic history, we issue licensees to applicants who qualify.”

The liquor license holder’s other businesses, Graham said, have been operating for 30 years and haven’t received any Liquor and Cannabis Board violations in the past two years.

City Councilman Paul Dillon said he “cannot emphasize enough how disappointing this is.”

“This flies in the face of our ordinance and is really dismissive of that stakeholder feedback,” Dillon said. “We have to really look at the public health and consequences of these decisions, and I don’t believe that the Washington state Liquor Control Board is living up to their goals.”

Resian also wrote a letter to the board on behalf of her initiative for the Carl Maxey Center, but said she never received a response.

“Nobody communicated to us in any form, just to give us updates on even what decision the board made,” she said. “They didn’t consider the safety of the community, the safety of the kids. None of that.”

Safety for employees is “top priority” for Bains, “and that goes for our neighbors, too. I mean, they’re going to be like our family for our business.” There are typically two workers in the store at all times and surveillance cameras inside and outside, he said.

“The building was just vacant for a while. It was condemned. Basically, there was weeds growing outside, that building was boarded up, people drawing graffiti on the sides of it, right?” he said. “If you drive by now – we put quite a bit of money into it and new sidewalks for pedestrian walking … The building is really well lit up now and it makes that corner pop. I kind of look at it as it adds value to the neighborhood.”

Built in 1909, the building was originally the JH Mumm grocery store, according to Megan Duvall with the Spokane Historic Preservation Office. It passed hands multiple times as a grocery store and became a beauty and barber shop in the early 1950s. The record gets muddy, with ads in the Spokane Daily Chronicle for partly furnished rooms, but later mentions of another grocery store in the same location. One of the last records of activity on the lot was a Daily Chronicle ad for a “commercial building” for rent from 1974.

Bains estimated his company poured more than $500,000 into revamping the property and surrounding area.

West, a neighbor, said he talked with Bains about safety concerns for his family and was somewhat reassured that he and the store could “watch each other’s back,” though he will still be investing in a sturdier fence for his front yard.

“I like Joey and I wish him the best,” West said, but he wishes that Bains was not selling alcohol.

Bains said he is now working on purchasing the house next door to Altamont Liquor and Grocery to turn into a parking lot.

Mayor Lisa Brown said in an email statement that the city “plans to again challenge the liquor license at its annual renewal.” Re-establishing the neighborhood as an Alcohol Impact Area – a label which was inadvertently removed in 2022 – could be another avenue for challenging the market if needed, councilman Dillon said. Businesses in impact areas are subject to restrictions on amounts and types of alcohol sold and the hours they can sell it.

After downtown Spokane lost its impact area designation, crime rates rose by 60%, according to Brown. The City Council voted to reinstate downtown’s voluntary Alcohol Impact Area in February, but not in East Central as city officials said at the time that the neighborhood had not reported increased crime since the lapse.

“Fifth Avenue is a beautiful, vibrant neighborhood,” Dillon said. “And I hope that we can resolve this for the good of the community.”