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11. Sprawl Bustershrtp:iiw­wryv. sprawl -busters. com/search.sb?readstory=875 recent neNys List articles Search database by text: by the month: ................................... .......................................... -......................................................... ....... GO 2002 JAN 2002-01-26 . Hood River, OR. County Adopts Cap on Building Size 2001 JAN FEB 1\4AR Citizens in Hood River County, Oregon are celebrating this Zn APR MAY JUN week a zoning victory. Here is a report from the Citizens for JUL AUG SEP Responsible Growth on the new 'footprint ordinance': "The OCT NOV DEC Hood River County Board of Commissioners Tuesday voted to adopt size limits on commercial buildings in the area 2000 immediately surrounding the city of Hood River as JAN FEB MAR "responsible" and "visionary. "The city has clearly defined the APR MAY JUN values it holds dear and defined limits to help it guide future JUL AUG SEP growth," said.local realtor and co-chair of the CRG. In a 5-0 OCT NOV DEC vote, the board supported county adoption of zoning language for the C-2 commercial zone lying just outside the Hood River city limits but inside the urban growth boundary. That JAANN FEB MAR language limits building footprint size to 50,000 square feet ` PR MAY and requires review of designs for buildings between 25,000 JUL AUG SEEPP and 50,000 square feet.The city of Hood River had adopted OCT NOV DEC the limits in the fall of 2001. Under an intergovernmental agreement, the county was then obligated to consider 1998 adopting the rules for land inside the urban growth area, JAN FEB MAR which it administers until the land is annexed by the city. APR MAY JUN Under Oregon's statewide land use planning system, cities JUL AUG SEP must establish boundaries inside which necessary and OCT NOV DEC projected urban -density growth can occur. Boundaries are adjusted in response to need and in consideration of other land use values. Citizens for Responsible Growth formed in the fall of 2001, to support the "footprint ordinance," to oppose development of a Wal-Mart Supercenter on C-2 land west of Hood River, and to foster family -wage job growth compatible with the features that Hood River County residents say makes for its attractive quality of life. What you can do: For information about Citizens for Responsible Growth, go to www.hoodriversfuture.org/ on the Internet, or call 541-386-6221 or 541-490-3051. For a copy of the Hood River ordinance, contact info@sprawl-busters.com 1 nf'7 1 tnY/ A' . — I http://,�vnvw.sprawl-busters.com/searcli.sb?readstory 875 "Norman has become the guru of the anti -Wal-Mart movement" — 60 Minutes Strategic Planning N Field Operations Voter Campaigns info sprawl-busters.com 21 Grinnell St, Greenfield N MA 01301 (413) 772-6289 2 of 2 1 /27/02 2 31 PM thank -you for your update http://ww,o,,.sprawl-busters.com/contact.htm For more information, call Al Norman at (413) 772-6289 (evenings, EST) or send email to infoCcbsprawl-busters.com "Norman has become the guru of the anti -Wal-Mart movement" — 60 Minutes Strategic Planning N Field Operations Voter Campaigns info@sprawl-busters.com 21 Grinnell St, Greenfield N MA 01301 (413)772-6289 1 of 1 1/77/n,) 7.,id Pk The Case Against Sprawl http://www.sprawl-busters.con-L/caseagauistsprawl.litml The Case Against Sprawl (from the book "Slam -Dunkin, Wal-Mart") by Al Norman (0 1999; Sprawl -Busters. "Becoming the world's largest retailer was never considered. And being big has never been the goal." --Wal-Mart, 1996 Annual Report America is drowning in retail glut --and we wouldn't have it any other way. As the Discount Store News proclaimed in 1994: "Welcome to the United States of Wal-Mart." Despite what they say, being big has always been the goal at Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart claims that more than 93 million Americans shop at Wal-Mart every week. Sales at Wal-Mart for the year ending February, 1999 totalled $137 billion. According to economist Tom Muller, the average American household spends around $1,100 a year at a Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart says in 1996 that the average American spent $360 at their stores. Wal-Mart is the largest seller of cheap underwear in the world. The company boasts that in 1996, it sold 1.13 pairs of underwear for every man, woman and child in America. My family of five did not shop at Wal-Mart in 1996, so I figure that some family out there bought an extra 5.65 pairs of underwear, and my guess is that those underwear are sitting unwrapped in someone's drawer --because they are too embarrassed to admit that they purchased more than their fair share. As of February, 1999 Wal-Mart operated more than 3,562 "units" in seven countries. Wal-Mart is the largest private employer in America, having surpassed General Motors. The company had 910,000 employees as of the start of 1999. Last year, a new Wal-Mart discount store opened every three days, and another 200 stores are planned for this year. It took Home Depot 20 years to open 500 stores, but they plan to open another 500 stores over the next 3 years. All across America, consumers are making decisions every day that impact the environment they care the most about: that 10 or 15 mile radius that circumscribes most of our daily living. This is our "personal environment". It has more immediacy and relevance to most of us than any other enviromnental movement today. The personal environment is, after all, where we spend 90% or more of our time. It is the well-worn path to and from work, back and forth from the grocery store, or the shops downtown. Home to mall --and back again. We are acutely sensitive to changes in this environment, and to its degradation. It has more meaning for us than any "checkbook" environmental 1 of fi 1 /17/m')•dF PTA Tie Case Against Sprawl littp://wwA,.sprawl-busters.com/easeagainstsprawl.litml cause. we can "think globally" about ozone depletion, but there are few causes in our own hometown that allow us to "act locally". Yes, we want to save the whales. Yes, we want to save old growth forests. But attack our "personal environment" --and watch out! We are the most defensive when it comes to defending our home territory. The construction of land -devouring, windowless hulks of dead architecture in our hometown is like insulting our Mother! How else can you explain hundreds of citizens showing up to testify at a Zoning Board hearing? From Kanawha City, WV to Tij eras, NM, we sit through hour after hour of dry testimony from traffic enginners and hydrologists --all because our home is being attacked, our personal environment is on the line. In many cases, citizen activists have derailed big corporations, or held them at bay for years. The key factor in these confrontations is that we sense that the future of our personal environment, and that of our children, depends on us. It's a matter of home rule. This is one battle where we make a difference. The massive invasion of overstuffed retail stores is a hands-on environmental, economic and social issue, which has provoked a widespread citizen response. Retail redundancy, which accelerated in the 1980s, but became grotesque in the 1990s, has created thousands of accidental activists --people who never planned on fighting off a multinational corporation --determined to stop a problem too swollen to hide anymore. We can hear the sound of land being chewed up by the yellow corporate caterpillars. There, squatting on the edge of our community, we can see the problem. We pass it on our way to and from work. This is not the distantly understood destruction of a remote rainforest --this hits where we live. As one woman from Ohio told me: "The first thing we smelled was the burning of trees." Environmental and land use issues have moved to the forefront of this -debate, as citizens pour through zoning by-laws and wetland commission regulations looking for obscure tripwires that could bring down a project. In 1998, Home Depot and Wal-Mart alone built more than 250 stores, or more than 33 million new square feet of retail space in a nation that is already saturated to the bone with plazas and malls. Assuming that each store represents a trade area of at least 40,000 people, more than 10 million Americans will find themselves reading headlines about Home Depot or Wal-Mart in their local newspaper. The massive glut of capricious construction raises serious environmental and economic issues such as: ® the impact of traffic on air quality standards ® the threat to water quality and acquifers ® the mismanagement of stormwater and sewage ® the reduction of wildlife habitat ® the loss of open space and unique natural areas ® the homogenization of rural landscapes ® the expense of costly new infrastructure ® the deterioration of historic commerical centers ® the overdependence on the automobile and superhighways The Case Against Sprawl http://www.sprawl-busters.coin/.caseagainstsprawl.litml "Sprawl" is defined by the National Trust for Historic Preservation as "poorly planned, low -density, auto -oriented development that spreads out from the center of communities." It creates that doughnut effect in some cities where acrylic and asphalt suburban shopping malls form a ring around the dead center, where the old downtown sits decaying. Between 1960 and 1975, the state of Pennsylvania lost a total of 3,600,000 acres of farmland. That's like losing a geographic area the size of Pittsburg every six months. At the opening of the Wal-Mart store in Rutland, VT, a man dressed in a neat suit carried a doomsday sign that simply read: THIS IS STUPID! Here is how the Bank of America, California's largest financial institution, described the impact of sprawl in that state: Urban job centers have decentralized to the suburbs. New housing tracts have moved even deeper into agricultural and environmentally sensitive areas. Private auto use continues to rise. This acceleration of sprawl has surfaced enormous social, environmental and economic costs, which until now have been hidden, ignored, or quietly borne by society. The burden of these costs is becoming very clear. Businesses suffer from higher costs, a loss in worker productivity, and underutilized investments in older communities. California's business climate becomes less attractive than surrounding states. Suburban residents pay a heavy price in taxation and automobile expenses, while residents of older cities and suburbs lose access to jobs, social stability, and political power. Agriculture and ecosystems also suffer .... We can no longer afford the luxury of sprawl. Part of the mythology about Sam Walton is that he located stores in smaller towns because his wife Helen did not like the big cities. But I believe that Walton did not want to wrestle with big city developers and saturated - markets. Besides, land was cheap in rural America. There were less zoning restrictions --sometimes no zoning at all. Walton sensed that Americans were moving out of the urban core and heading to suburbia. "Our key strategy," Walton wrote, "was simply to put good-sized discount stores into little one-horse towns which everybody else was ignoring ... It turned out that the first big lesson we learned was that there was much, much more business out there in small town America than anybody, including me, had ever dreamed of. it But small town America started learning a "big lesson" also --one that took years to sink in: saturated retail markets bring deterioration and decay. With retail sprawl development comes a series of economic and social problems for host communities. Sprawl is often mistaken for economic development, and the people it affects the most are least likely to understand it. ® It destroys the economic and environmental value of land ® It encourages an inefficient land -use pattern that is very expensive to serve. The Case Agauist Sprawl http://www.sprawl-busters.com/caseapainstsprawl.htni ® It fosters redundant competition between local governments, an economic war of tax incentives. ® It forces costly infrastructure development at the edge of towns. ® It causes disinvestment from established core commercial areas. W It requires the use of public tax support for revitalizing rundown core areas. ® It degrades the visual, aesthetic character of local communities. ® It lowers the value of other commercial and residential property, reducing public revenues. ® It weakens the sense of place and community cohesiveness. ® It masquerades as a form of economic development. The violation of our personal environment by sprawling retail development leads to an alienation from community, a sense of isolation and disconnectedness. When mall developers created interior spaces to shop, they gave them names like "Village Square", or "The Main Street Shops", hoping to console us for the loss of the real commercial centers they were destroying. In Disneyworid artisans have created an acrylic Main Street facade, where they hand out pins that celebrate "Main Street, USA". These pins have a picture of Mickey Mouse on the front, riding an old-fashioned big -wheel bicycle, tipping his straw boater hat. But stamped on the back of the pin it says: "©Disney Taiwan". The sprawl corporations are waging a war of indoctrination. They need us as accomplices in the destruction of our own hometowns. In 1997 Home Depot was able to spend $178 million on self-congratulatory advertising. What we ultimately have to do is convince our friends and neighbors that there is a politics of shopping. That is does matter to your hometown where you shop. The big box corporations lay the blame at our feet. First, Wal-Mart says it needs bigger stores because its customers demand wider aisles. Then it says it needs smaller stores because its supercenters are "too busy and not convenient". Most of what we buy at Wal-Mart are unplanned purchases, and most of these items end up in the landfill anyway. A psychologist might argue that as our lives become emptier, our shelves become fuller. This 'shop till your community drops' mentality is imploding our own hometowns. We see the results, but apparently are not moved by them --even when the evidence is all around us, as 60 Minutes noted: In Iowa, ten years after Wal-Mart came to the state, nearly half of the men's' and boy's clothing stores, and grocery stores... closed. That's an enormous impact on a state in only ten years. When Iowa State University Professor Ken Stone examined the sales changes in Iowa small towns from 1983 to 1993, he discovered "a huge shift of sales to larger towns and cities, with substantial amounts captured by mass merchandise stores." Stone estimates that the total number of businesses lost in small towns and rural areas was 7,326 in the decade studied. Iowans spent $425 million more at discount stores,.but $153 million less at variety stores, $129 million less at grocery stores, $94 million less at hardware stores, $47 The Case Against Sprawl http:/hvww.sprawl-busters.com/easeagainstsprawl.htmi million less at men's and boys apparel stores, and so on. In the 11 store types studied, businesses lost more than $603 million in sales. In this ten year period, Iowa lost: 555 Grocery stores 298 Hardware stores 293 Building Supply Stores 161 Variety Stores 158 Women's Apparel stores 153 Shoe Stores 116 Drug Stores 111 Men's and Boys Apparel store People have said to me: "When Wal-Mart arrives, they hit the town with the force of 100 new businesses opening at once". The demise of smaller, independent businesses in Iowa suggests that the "retail hurricane" theory is true. Stone reaches a similar conclusion: The shopping habits of consumers fundamentally change after the introduction of discount mass merchandisers. They purchase much more of their merchandise at mass merchandisers and less at local merchants. The result is the loss of many stores across the state. According to the International Council of Shopping Centers: ® Discount department stores, conventional department stores, and toy stores are store types where three or fewer companies capture 50% or more of sales. ® The top three building materials and supply stores now control 31 % of the market ($32 billion in sales). ® The same with the top three drug stores: 33% of the market ($30 billion in sales). ® Between 1987 and 1992, the number of discount department stores increased annually by an average of +3%, while men's and women's shoes stores dropped an average of -6%, household appliance fell by -3%, and grocery stores, Radio & TV stores, drugstores, building materials stores, apparel stores --all were in the negative column. The impact of big stores has also been felt in the manufacturing sector. For example, in the apparel industry, America has literally lost its shirt. Between 1973 and 1996, America lost nearly half of its apparel manufacturing jobs. A total of 597,000 jobs were lost during the 23 year period. The same can be said for the shoe industry, or for the pharmacy industry. 90% of the shoes sold in America today are imported. During this same period, discount superstores rose dramatically. Wal-Mart likes to underplay its market share by using the nation as its trade area. Here's what David Glass, Wal-Mart's President said in the company's 1997 Annual Report: In the United States, Wal-Mart only holds 7% of a $1.4 trillion retail market. That leaves a tremendous opportunity for future growth. The supermarket 5 of fi 1/27/02 2-46 PTV The.Casi, Against Sprawl http://www.sprawl-busters.coin/caseaeainstsprawl.html industry, amounting to $425 billion a year, is a great opportunity for continued growth. It's almost three times the size of the discount store industry, where Wal-Mart is one of the three retailers that, combined, hold almost 85% of the market. Yet in the grocery segment, the top five players constitute less than 25%. When Glass says Wal-Mart has a 7% share of the retail pie in America, he's talking about ALL retail sales of any kind, from gasoline to tomatoes, from paperclips to lip -balm. But in the discount store wars, three companies own the field. At the local level, however, where a retail trade area might span only a 20 square mile radius, the impact of one or two big box stores can be devastating to the rest of the retailers. Consider the study done by the San Diego Union -Tribune of the home improvement market in San Diego County. The survey asked consumers where they made their most recent purchase of common items. The results showed Home Depot has an astonishing hold over the county marketplace: "Norman has become the guru of the anti -Wal-Mart movement" — 60 Minutes - - - Strategic Planning — Field Operations Voter Campaigns info@sprawl-busters.com 21 Grinnell St, Greenfield — MA 01301 (413)772-6289