Meet ‘Aunt Rhonda,’ whose years of persistence will bring a store to a Syracuse food desert

Syracuse, N.Y. — Government help and cheap rent were not enough to convince A.K. Kaid to open a grocery store in Syracuse’s Valley neighborhood. Instead, the Buffalo entrepreneur’s decision to invest in an impoverished area shunned by corporate supermarket chains came down to one person: Rhonda Vesey. For more than five years, Vesey — a soft-spoken daughter of a 1950s Civil Rights pioneer — ...