Something There Is That Doesn't Like a Wal-Mart
Nick Gillespie | May 25, 2004, 4:53am
The National Trust for Historic Preservation is at it again, declaring the entire state of Vermont "endangered" by Wal-Mart. The Green Mountain state has four of the discount superstores now, with seven (count 'em) planned for the coming year.
From a NY Times account via the Houston Chronicle:
The National Trust for Historic Preservation put Vermont on its list of endangered places back in 1993, [Trust president] Richard Moe said, even when there were no Wal-Marts there. But there were already several other so-called "big box stores" that were threatening its character.
"Back then, Vermont was the only state without a Wal-Mart," a news release for the Trust said. "Today, it has four -- and it now faces an invasion of behemoth stores that could destroy much of what makes Vermont Vermont."
Moe said that the Trust was listing Vermont and its threat from Wal-Mart "to stimulate a debate in Vermont and throughout the country."
Actually, it'd be more accurate to say the Trust is trying to keep alive a debate it lost a long time ago. Read the whole Chronicle piece and then check out this story I wrote, which quotes Moe, on the same topic in 1995. The only thing that has changed for him is the year.
joe | May 26, 2004, 1:35am | #
Russ, single use zoning not only forbids residences in commercial zones, but also stores in residential zones.
The purpose of single-use zoning, created by Hoover's Commerce Dept, was to eliminate the messy, dynamic street life that exists in traditional neighborhoods. All that mingling of commerce and home life was deemed improper by Victorian fussbudgets and Progressive Reformers alike, who thought the home (and residential neighborhood) needed to be protected from the intrusion of corrupting commerce. Once the reasonable idea of using zoning to keep homes from suffering from the air, water, and noise pollution of heavy industry was established, it was a small step to protect them from the moral pollution of commerce. Especially since commerce has the annoying habit of bringing people of different classes, races, and sexes together. FDR DID consider walkability in community design. His model communities contain useful walking paths separated from the roads. The anti-urban politics that drove 20th century development policies first expressed themselves as a preference for villages, not isolated homesteads.
But yes, the massive spending on highway projects has led to automobile oriented development around interchanges, just as spending on rail transit leads to transit/pedestrian-oriented development around train stations.
"large apartment complexes are usually right next to the commercial property, set off from the highway to reduce the noise interference." Congratulations, you've stumbled onto another one of joe's pet peeves - the residential development located 50 feet away from a shopping center, situated and laid out so that residents cannot walk down the street to the stores, but have to drive 1.5 miles around a superblock, park in the giant lot, and walk a greater distance than that between their unit and their destination anyway. In many cases, the permit required to build the residential complex does not allow any stores therein, and that required for the mall doesn't allow residential units.
And sprawl development generates greater runoff per unit, when you consider the floor area under each 100 sq feet of roof (two story house vs four story mixed use building), and the greater area of pavement - driveways, subdivision roads, arterial roads - required for each sprawly unit. When you apply this principle of "pavement efficiency" to the stores they frequent big box with huge parking lot and long frontage on a multilane arterial vs. corner stores and downtowns), the discrepency gets even worse. If you've got 10,000 people living with 40 square miles, there will be much, much less runoff if they are living in a town with traditional neighborhoods and downtown vs a sprawling suburb.
The progressive-era concerns about fire, floods, light, and air in building design were easily answered by relatively minor standards in building and neighborhood design, that still allowed urban densities. I'd estimate that 1-3% of zoning the reduction in density required by sprawl zoning is necessary to address these concerns.
FDR
joe | May 26, 2004, 10:43am | #
Predictably, Nick's piece combines interesting, thoughtful meditations on economic history with slanted, misinformed statements about regulation and communities.
The conceit that the opposition to sprawl comes from it's newness and unfamiliarity, while support for human-scale communities is conservative, is laughable. Suburban sprawl is now the default community style for most of America, and walkable, humane landscapes are unusual and innovative. People don't oppose Wal-Mart and anti-human commercial strips because they're unfamiliar with them, but because they know them so well.
The pretense that the shift to automobile-oriented commerce was entirely or mostly a market-driven phenomenon demonstrates either an ignorance of history, a willingness to deceive, or both. Note that Nick never mentions, in his denunciation of zoning, that the primary purpose and impact of zoning over the last three generations has been to forbid the construction of stores withing residential neighborhoods, and require such giant parking lots that big box is the only way to make the numbers work. The selectiveness of his denunciations should raise a flag for anyone who is vaguely familiar with the issues involved.
And while shopping centers and automobile ownership did indeed become common as far back as the 20s, it's important to not that it was not until 30-40 years later that neighborhood- and city commercial centers began their decline. The two were able to coexist for a generation and a half, until the government adopted regulations and financing schemes that banned of severly disincented urban areas and town/neighborhood centers. Go back to FDR and his model planned communities, or Robert Moses and his city destroying (in so many ways) highway projects, and the government's purposeful elimination of cities and promotion of auto-oriented, single-use suburbia is obvious.
Yet the lesson Nick takes away from the massive, disruptive pro-car planning schemes of mid-centruy is...the shift to auto-oriented development was a natural result of the market! Can there be any better definition of "conservative" than "one who accepts the agendas of dead men as natural?"
joe | May 27, 2004, 10:12am | #
Pleae note, Mark, that I never actually argued in favor of using zoning or ballot initiatives to obstruct big boxes. I just poked holes in the arguments of their supporters, mainly because I find ignorant, misleading blather about matters I know a lot about to be annoying. But yes, I suppose my history of seeing my informed, nuanced points distorted into convenient bogey men may well give me sympathy for Sen. Kerry.
fy, "Why not establish the principle that you can build whatever you want wherever you want, BUT if you tangibly harm your neighbors who were there before you, you are responsible for damages?" Because by the time the factory is built, begins operating, pollutes the neighborhood, and the case gets through court, the neighborhood is already irrevocably damaged, and the chance of the factory being dismantled and the land restored approaches zero.
Russ D, you're just flat our wrong. Tamping down on wicked, commerce-tainted street life (and segregating poor, vulnerable women and children from it) was a much-lauded, openly-promoted goal of modernist (1900-1970) planning and zoning schemes - the ones that created spawl and the automobile city. I suggest you read some Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, or (for a good dissent) Jane Jacobs. The zoning scheme that made sprawl the predominant style of development in this country is based not on 1910-era light/air/sanitation concerns, but 1930s-1950s era "turn your back on the street" theories. This concept informed both the urban renewal plans that created places like Cabrini Green, and auto-oriented suburban zoning.
Gil, "People weren't "engineered" into the car culture, they willingly embraced it." Now you're confusing car ownership with car culture. Mass ownership of cars preceeded sprawl by 1-2 generations. Development still proceeded along traditional lines during this period. It was not until the government began encouraging suburbanizaiton and openly working to reorder traditional cities and neighborhoods that sprawl began. Your narrative must sound nice to someone with your ideology, but the facts are on my side. Read more. Though, to be fair, many smart growth environmentalists make this same mistake.
"Cars meant freedom to travel great distances and many places on one's own schedule and made it possible to live further away from crowded and noisy cities." Well, you also need huge investments in a highways system to make that work, and plenty of eminent domain takings to build it.
"The government, just like Ford and General Motors was respinding to the demand for cars and the freedom of mobility they provided - it wasn't engineering that demand." When General Motors founded the American Streetcar Company to purchase and put out of business trolley systems, those systems were still quite profitable. Again, you need to read more, and assume less, so you won't make as many embarrassing, demonstrable errors. "Geography of Nowhere" has a good libertarian take on these issues.
"At the beginning of the 20th century, if a store was halfway across town, how were you going to get there?" That's just the point, John. At the beginning of the 20th century, stores were located where people could get to them without cars. Cars (and the regulations developed to encourage their use) didn't just allow people to be more mobile within the existing residential and retail geography; they changed that geography, to such an extent that those who cannot or do not drive now have much less access to retail than people in the early 20th century. Those that do end up burning a gallon of gas to buy a gallon of milk. Though to answer your question, you took the trolley, which was probably privately owned and profitable.
Alexandria Sage | May 27, 2004, 10:45am | #
May 23, 2004
Towns: Crime follows Wal-Mart
By Alexandria Sage
The Associated Press
HARRISVILLE, Utah - Officer Nate Thompson remembers when green fields and an egg farm stood here on the site of the 212,000-square-foot Wal-Mart.
Before the 24-hour Supercenter opened, the town's approximately 4,000 residents retired to their homes after dark, with two solitary bars providing the only late-night distractions.
"We're just kind of a boring little city, you know," said Thompson, 31.
But boring is a thing of the past in Harrisville - at least for the Harrisville Police Department. Since Wal-Mart opened in early 2001, calls to the department have jumped by a third. The number of officers has increased from four to six. The store's parking lot, where more than half the city's DUIs originate, is now patrolled overnight.
"Our DUIs skyrocketed," said Thompson, cruising the parking lot one recent Friday night. "It just went through the roof."
As the world's largest retailer puts its stamp on rural communities, some towns are discovering that while the 24-hour big-box store may bring financial benefits, they go hand-in-hand with an unintended downside: increased burdens on law enforcement.
"You just about name it," said Clinton Police Chief Bill Chilson. "Domestic violence, shoplifting, fraud scams, we've had DUI, traffic accidents, medical situations - we haven't had any shootings yet."
Chilson estimated that the population of his city of 18,000 nearly doubles in size each day because of his city's Supercenter, one of 19 Wal-Mart discount store-supermarket hybrids in Utah and nearly 1,400 around the country. Warned of what to expect by similar towns with 24-hour Wal-Marts, he recalled one court judge asking him, "Have you been Wal-Mart-ized yet?"
In some towns across the country, law-enforcement agencies have even opened substations in their local Wal-Marts to better respond to the increased activity. The Durango Police Department opened a substation in the Durango Wal-Mart shortly after it opened because the store provided a space. An officer has never been stationed there full time. The substation is now closed.
Durango police Capt. Dale Smith said Durango's Wal-Mart has not been a hotspot for crime. Theft is almost a daily occurrence, however. On Thursday there was a report of a woman shoplifter who was being combative and biting store employees.
"Wal-Mart is pretty aggressive about watching for and capturing shoplifters," Smith said, so police do respond to a lot of shoplifting calls.
The parking lot at Durango's Wal-Mart is monitored by cameras, Smith said, and police patrol the area frequently. Those are two deterrents that may be working to limit major crime, he said.
Wal-Mart says it works closely with law enforcement on crime-prevention measures, including staff training and community outreach. Each store has cameras and undercover security guards, many of them former law enforcement officers.
"Before we build a store, we begin a conversation with local law enforcement and we begin building a relationship with them," said Sharon Weber, a spokeswoman for the Bentonville, Ark.-based retailer.
Overwhelmingly, police chiefs defended Wal-Mart as an asset to the community and helpful to law enforcement, providing full access and information for investigations and grants to fund police projects, to say nothing of the tax benefits the store brings the community.
"Thank goodness for Wal-Mart, that's all I can say," said Harrisville Mayor Fred Oates. "Any mayor in the United States who had the opportunity would be glad to have a Wal-Mart."
Harrisville earns about $60,000 monthly in sales taxes from Wal-Mart, Oates estimated, and that figure will jump 40 percent after an access road to the store is paid for out of sales tax revenue this year.
Still, when the retail powerhouse is built in a small rural community, the effect on the local police department can be devastating.
"It is at times overwhelming," said Chief John Slauch, of the West Sadsbury Township Police Department in rural Pennsylvania.
And municipal taxes don't cover the extra costs incurred by the eight-officer police force, he said.
"I really don't think Wal-Mart is concerned with what happens on the local level; they're concerned with how much money they're making," he said, adding, "They're not looking at the burden they're creating."
A criminal magnet
Back in Harrisville, more than 100 cars are still parked in the vast Wal-Mart parking lot well past midnight. Drug users on methamphetamine tend to gravitate to this store in the wee hours of the night.
"We look at Wal-Mart as the first line of defense in terms of crime coming into the city," said Officer Thompson, sitting in his black Camaro patrol car.
Thompson looks for the paranoia and uncontrolled body movements that betrays "tweakers," addicts high on meth. Drug DUIs outnumber those involving alcohol three to one in Harrisville, and most originate in the Wal-Mart parking lot.
"No one wants to pay more money - including tweakers," he said, laughing.
In all its stores, Wal-Mart has limited the amount of cold medicine any one person can buy, since over-the-counter medications containing ephedrine or pseudoephedrine can be used to produce methamphetamine.
Besides the 150 DUIs last year, most of the crime is directed at Wal-Mart, including shoplifting, check fraud and petty scams. The store's most serious incident was an officer-involved shooting in January, when a 25-year-old man pointed a fake gun at an officer who returned fire, wounding the suspect.
The vast majority of those arrested in Harrisville are from neighboring Ogden, population 77,000, said Harrisville Police Chief Max Jackson. Because of the increased volume of cases, court times have been extended to allow the city prosecutor time to negotiate pleas.
Despite the additional burdens, both Thompson and Jackson defend Wal-Mart as "good partners." Since the store opened, Wal-Mart has donated funds for a bike patrol program, firearms, computers in patrol cars and training materials and equipment.
Still, Jackson, who sits on the board of The National Center for Rural Law Enforcement, said he plans to raise Wal-Mart's impact on small police agencies as a nationally growing issue when the board next meets.
As for Thompson, Wal-Mart may have handed him an unintended prize. He was named the Utah Peace Officers Association Officer of the Year for 2002.
"It was based on the amount of arrests I made - basically because of Wal-Mart."
Herald Staff Writer Shane Benjamin contributed to this report.
