I agree with this. Generally, people buy in a particular neighborhood because they can afford to live there and they either like the way it is currently or they envision it as improved and restored to past glory. If somebody is going to build something new in the neighborhood, the neighbors generally want it to "fit" in with the look of the existing neighborhood.Originally posted by Cismontane
..and at no additional density....
This is the most profitable Target in the entire system. Placed atop a Best Buy and a BevMo!, this discount store is part of West Hollywood Gateway, an Jon Jerde-designed urban power strip with a great relationship to the street, as well as two levels of underground parking featuring express elevators. The population density in the area is very high, but virtually none of these residents are living in highrises or even in midrises.
This is a Bullseye Bodega from Target in New York.
Big-box retailers can do urban if properly motivated.
They will if the conditions are exactly right. The problem is that there aren't a lot of cities where the conditions are "exactly right".
Example: After years of trying to resurrect downtown retail, Buffalo finally figured out the city can make some serious tax monies, even with tax incentives, by redeveloping its old industrial sites in the northern part of the city into a shopping/dining/entertainment area. Why should Target build a multistory store over a parking garage in downtown Buffalo when they can build a typical Target complete with parking in North Buffalo at a fraction of the cost, especially when there are many thousands more people living in and around NB than around downtown Buffalo?
There's a reason why the most successful experimental big box stores are in high rent locations in NYC and West LA, at the respective cities' $64,000 corners (highest traffic, highest visability location), to cite your examples. High rent locations at the heart of 20 million person cities are much better at hatching alternatives like these. These two facilities may be among a small handful of potential sites in all of North America.
The typical big box site economics require tilt up construction and a huge surface parking lot, about 30% parcel coverage, and FAR 0.3. I'm sure you can vary this in many locations, but only within certain parameters. In most cities, for example, the location has to be within eye shot of a highway interchange, since only that will give the store sufficient visibility given the inevitably lower level of activity by local cars and pedestrians.
Naturally, the paradigm changes with the population density, the walkability, and the access to transit. The parking lot and the highway interchange are required when those elements are not in place.
The only reason I cited these examples is to provide evidence as to the profitability that big-box retailers can find in a less auto-oriented built environment. Obviously, the big-box retail model is borne from auto-dependent suburban sprawl, but this model can be successfully modified to fit walkable urban locations.
And here's a Home Depot in the dense urban Chicago Lincoln Park Neighborhood:
This is on a large parcel on Halsted St. 2-story with parking on the roof with a cart escalator inside to get to the 2nd floor.
I'm sorry. Is my bias showing?
Home depot and Target are become major urban players. But they were willing to modify their acres of parking requirements. Walmart says they are developing a city version. Ikea only seems to like the boondocks (my apologies to their neighbors).
Ironically, as much as Walmart and many of its customers want to locate in urban communities, there is an element that works very hard to keep them out.
Anyone want to adopt a dog?
Washington, D.C. is getting four WalMart stores. I don't know how much opposition there was, but the two major drivers for getting them were the needs of the low-income population in the District and the lost tax revenue from residents going over the border to do their shopping:
http://www.walmartwashingtondc.com/
The problem is simple: Developers (including big box retailers) are usually only concerned with their own bottom line (and as good capitalists, rightly so), however there are a lot of social and environmental costs that they don’t currently factor into their equation. These would include things like increased air pollution from more people having to drive to their store; the future cost of fuel people will need to spend to get to the store; loss of farm land; increased municipal infrastructure costs, and so on. Under most current standards those costs will be born by the residents of the community in the future and they are very, very hard to quantify. The costs could be pennies a day, but over the years they’ll add up to thousands and thousands of dollars. The job of planners is to have some understanding of the social and environmental costs to the future residents and fighting to make sure the developer bears some of these costs.
I don’t know what the best solution is, but it has to be something that has a financial impact on the developer’s bottom line. There could be some way to manipulate property taxes so that it becomes more expensive to develop in a low density format and less expensive to develop in a high density format. I’ve heard one proposal were someone was suggesting property taxes should be based on land area rather than land value. In other words one acre of commercial land would pay the same rate no matter where it was located in the municipality.
Wal-Mart will locate anywhere on the planet, where they think they will make money. Yes, there are many in suburbia. But, they know where the money's at. They'll locate in very urban settings, if they can get past the logistics. They'll locate in remote places with less than 10,000 people, like Winnemucca, Nevada, where people only pass through the town to shop. With that said, I don't think Wal-Mart would go in as a two-story structure in a generic suburban community--they will build using the path of least resistance, fitting in with the existing settings. Kudos to the dense urban communities that have accommodated big boxes within their urban fabric, but they also ought to realize that it's mostly a market decision.
I think communities (or, rather, their stakehlders) have the right to decide what type of place they want to live in. Our job as planners is to facilitate (and guide the devleopment of) their vision using our technical skills and process management skills. We help them develop and test alternatives and then codify/approve/entitle their informed preferences among those alternatives. Sure, we help shape their agenda, but we don't dictate it.
Main street/traditional retail preservation will be a priority for some areas. There may be perfectly good reasons for such policies: preservation of attractiveness for tourism, historic preservation, creating/activity street fronts (the topic of this post), proximity/TOD-promotion, tax base protection, supporting or protecting existing industry clusters, etc, These areas may very well want to develop policies that limit big boxes, while promoting small business retailing opportunities. Our job there is to evaluate and identify the pro's and con's of such policies and then develop their form - overlays, base zoning changes, subsidy schemes, etc.
Other areas will wish to attract big boxes, thereby enhancing consumer product affordability, accessibility (bringing groceries and other essentials into neighborhoods where small business cost structures won't work), tax base expansion, promoting/maximizing retail job growth, etc. These areas may want us to help them develop policies and plans that will attract a Wal Mart or even a Power Center to anchor a community center of somet type. Our job there is to help develop these plans and strategies, making changes to zoning and/or devising subsidy schemes as needed to attract the desired anchors. We could also help to mitigate effects on street frontage activity, etc., through planning and design alternatives which we could work with the prospective big box deveopers on.
I don't think there's a right answer here.
You just provided it.
I share your sentiment--and I certainly wouldn't want to make comments that gives developers all the credit, while reducing the role of the planner to that of a technician or worse, paper pusher. As I've mentioned before elsewhere in the forums, I often find myself (as a municipal planner) balancing priorities and objectives, listening to stakeholders, maneuvering political pressures, etc... There isn't a right answer, and that's what makes the job interesting.
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