[pf] Abandoned Malls, Suburban Blight

by Tom Wheeler

20 December 2000 21:57 UTC

Published on Wednesday, December 20, 2000 in the Miami Herald

Abandoned Malls, Suburban Blight
by Stacy Mitchell

Most people are familiar with the kinds of damage that ``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 to build bigger outlets, leaving the
landscape littered with dead malls, abandoned strip developments and empty
big-box superstores.

According to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, of the five
billion square feet of retail space in the country, fully half a billion
sits empty. That's 11,000 football fields worth of dead real estate,
surrounded by thousands of acres of asphalt.

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.
These absentee-owned companies have demonstrated little concern for the
economic stability and well-being of the places where they do business.
Towns that once welcomed these giant stores, sacrificing locally owned
businesses, now regret it.

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 waves of ever-larger regional
malls. Hundreds of malls weakened and died following the arrival of the
first wave of big-box stores in the 1980s. Then in the 1990s, the big boxes
themselves began to shed their skins to build larger outlets elsewhere.

Wal-Mart is one of the worst offenders. According to the latest tally from
Sprawl-Busters, an organization that helps communities fight superstore
sprawl, the United States is home to 380 empty Wal-Mart stores. Sometimes
Wal-Mart abandons a town altogether. More often, the company closes a store
and opens a larger store nearby. Wal-Mart plans to ``relocate'' as many as
110 stores next year.

Most abandoned stores remain vacant for many years. The buildings are
unsuitable for much besides big-box retailing. National retailers generally
prefer to maintain the lease rather than let the property fall into the
hands of a competitor.

West Columbia, S. C., is home to almost a dozen empty or soon-to-be-vacated
big-box stores, including Wal-Mart, Lowe's, Target and Circuit City. All are
building larger outlets nearby. Leapfrogging across the landscape costs
these companies less than recycling existing properties. But the only reason
it's so cheap is 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. The empty stores create blight and erode local
property values.

Main Street businesses are owned by local people.

Not content to become victims of the corporate cannibalization game, a
growing number of cites and towns are rejecting national chains. Many have
barred the construction of large-scale superstores and prohibited commercial
development in outlying areas. They no longer spend tax dollars on building
roads and sewers to service new big boxes but instead on Main Street
improvements. Their economic development efforts focus not on attracting
outside corporations but on strengthening locally owned businesses and
nurturing new ones.

It's a strategy that pays off in the long-run. Unlike the disposable big
box, Main Streets have been around for hundreds of years and have the
potential to endure for hundreds more. 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 distant
global companies, are owned by people who live in the community and have a
far deeper interest in its well-being.

Stacy Mitchell, a researcher with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance
(www.newrules.org), is the author of The Home Town Advantage: How to Defend
Your Main Street Against Chain Stores and Why It Matters.


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