Most people are familiar with the damage Wal-Mart, Target and
other "big box" retailers have done to local
economies. Across the country, these giant stores have gutted
downtowns and decimated locally owned businesses.
Now the national chains are dealing communities a second
blow. They are vacating their existing stores, sometimes to
build bigger outlets, sometimes just closing up shop, in both
cases leaving huge empty shells and acres of asphalt behind.
Southern states, where big box retailers expanded early and
multiplied rapidly, have been hardest hit. But the problem is
beginning to surface in Minnesota. Wal-Mart intends to close
stores in Owatonna and Albert Lea later this year and open
larger outlets nearby. The 80,000-square-foot Albert Lea store
is just 11 years old.
What can a city do with the shell of an old Wal-Mart store?
Not much. It's a problem plaguing planners and local officials,
who are struggling to contain the spread of this new retail
blight. It's also a warning to communities considering new big
box developments.
The roots of the retail vacancy problem are twofold. Chain
stores are multiplying at a staggering pace. They've created a
glut of retail space. In the last 12 years, per capita retail
space has increased 34 percent, from 15 to 20 square feet. Many
towns now have more retail space than residents can support.
The second part of the problem is that corporate chains
reinvent themselves every 10 years or so, abandoning existing
outlets in favor of new formats. First there were the strip
malls, which gave way to the enclosed malls. These in turn
failed as developers built ever-larger regional malls. Hundreds
of malls weakened and died following the arrival of the first
big box stores in the 1980s.
Then in the 1990s the big boxes themselves began to shed
their skins, vacating existing stores only to build larger
outlets across the street or across town.
Wal-Mart is one of the worst offenders. According to
Sprawl-Busters, an organization that helps communities fight
superstore sprawl, the United States is home to 380 empty
Wal-Mart stores. Wal-Mart plans to "relocate" up to
110 more stores in the next year.
Most abandoned stores remain vacant for many years. An
abandoned Wal-Mart in Bards town, Ky., sat empty for nearly a
decade. Some cities are burdened with more than one empty box.
West Columbia, S.C., is home to almost a dozen empty or soon to
be vacated big box stores, including Wal-Mart, Target and
Circuit City.
Leapfrogging across the landscape costs these companies less
than recycling existing properties. But it's cheap only because
the rest of us are paying the price. The new stores are chewing
up valuable farmland and open space, exacerbating traffic and
air pollution, burdening public services and morphing our
communities into placeless blobs of sprawl.
A growing number of cities and towns are taking a different
approach. Many have barred the construction of new big box
stores and prohibited retail expansion into undeveloped areas.
Tax dollars are no longer spent on building roads and sewers to
service sprawling developments, but instead on strengthening
Main Street.
It's a strategy that pays off. Main Streets have been around
for hundreds of years. Individual businesses may come and go --
yesterday's dry goods store becomes today's Internet cafe -- but
the district itself retains its utility, serving as the center
of both economic and social life.
Most important, Main Street businesses, unlike global
companies, are owned by people who live in the community and are
committed to its well-being.
-- Stacy Mitchell is a researcher with the New Rules Project (http://www.newrules.org
) of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. She is the
author of The Home Town Advantage: How to Defend Your Main
Street Against Chain Stores and Why It Matters (ILSR, 2000)
and edits a bimonthly email newsletter (http://www.newrules.org/hta/index.htm
) on efforts nationwide to keep chain stores out and protect
locally owned businesses.
