The great clash is coming, Urban: Hippies against Yuppies, skateboards against minivans, homeless against homemakers. Four blocks west from Urban, at Haight and Stanyan, a Whole Foods supermarket is preparing to invade.

But according to Ken Hines, Whole Foods Vice President of Development for Northern California, the Haight-Ashbury Whole Foods isn’t trying to invade, or even attract customers from outside the Haight. At an open meeting in the basement of the Park Branch Library on Page Street on Jan. 14, Hines explained that the new Whole Foods will be “a community store.” Hines assured the Haight-Ashbury Community Council that Whole Foods is “not looking to draw people from all over the city into the market.”

Medina Clermont (’10) agrees that this could be a good thing for the neighborhood. “My family shops at Whole Foods all the time,” she said. Furthermore, she noted that the new market will take the place of the Cala Foods market, which “has been empty for years. Now that whole end of Haight is just disgusting.”

Clermont realizes that though the Whole Foods “might change the culture of Haight, (making it) like hippie-dippie or hipster … it’s important not to have empty spaces like that.”

Dawn, (who declined to give her last name), a Haight street resident who lives right next door to the soon-to-be-construction site, isn’t sure that the Whole Foods is a good idea. She explained her reservations while shopping at the Haight Street Market, a grocery store on Haight between Ashbury and Clayton, which opened in 1981.

“How is (the Whole Foods) gonna affect this store? It sounds like a good idea, but you gotta think about how it affects those around them, the mom and pop stores around here.”

But she admitted that she wouldn’t mind a “real grocery store” in the neighborhood, since the Haight Street Market doesn’t sell meat. “You know, not everyone’s a vegetarian in San Francisco,” she laughed.

Clarke Weatherspoon, Urban history teacher, said that the economic health of the Haight Street Market is his chief concern as well. “As a store, I like Whole Foods, I shop there often. But I’m a dedicated patron of the Haight Street Market and so because of that, I will not be shopping at the Whole Foods (in the Haight),” he said, adding, “I think they have a lot of loyal customers who won’t go to Whole Foods.”

Georgia Vardockastanis, co-owner of the Haight Street Market, isn’t worried about competing with Whole Foods, and she won’t be changing her prices. “We’ll keep doing what we’ve been doing all these years,” Vardockastanis said. “It’s been a success. That’s all we can do, right?”

In case Urban lunchers are wondering, the “Urban discount” that is offered by many local stores isn’t in the cards. According to Hines, Whole Foods policy is “no specific discounts.”

Construction on the new supermarket is projected to begin in May, with opening day projected for sometime in December, though Joey Cain, President of the Haight-Ashbury Neighborhood Council, believes that “December is wishful thinking.”