Big Cities Big Boxes

Tax-Subsidies for Wal-Mart?

In an editorial headlined "Socking NYC Shoppers," on Sunday, August 28, the New York Post winds up arguing that New Yorkers can afford to subsidize the medical costs of Wal-Mart's workers. The Post starts out in frontal attack mode, blasting the unions for arguing that the increased taxes New Yorkers will need to pay for Wal-Mart's employees' public assistance will be greater than the amount they may save by shopping at Wal-Mart. "In truth," says the Post, "this is a fight over the price of groceries." Really? Then tell us whether the cost of a health-care subsidy for Wal-Mart is or is not greater than the savings on groceries.

MCG Letter to The New York Times re "Foiled Once in New York," re Wal-Mart's Claim That Small Businesses Thrive Near Wal-Mart, Plans for Staten Island Store

To the Editor:

Your report on Wal-Mart's desire to build a suburban-style, automobile-dependent store in New York City, on Staten Island, quotes Wal-Mart representative Mia Masten as saying that "small businesses often continue to thrive even after a Wal-Mart opens nearby."  (Steven Greenhouse, "Foiled Once in New York, Wal-Mart Turns on Charm," Monday, August 22, 2005, at A 13.)  I have spent ten years studying the effects of the big box stores, and my blog BigCitiesBigBoxes.com focuses on the effects of big boxes on New York City's high streets. Wal-Mart's claim that "small businesses often continue to thrive" near a Wal-Mart store is false.

MCG Letter to the New York Post Saying Low Prices are Not the Most Important Way to Judge Retailers

Here is the letter I sent to the Editor of the New York Post about Ryan Sager's column that violently attacked the unions and lauded Wal-Mart exclusively on the grounds that Wal-Mart offers low prices. [The Post published an excerpt from my letter on Monday, August 22.] The "low prices" argument is simplistic and wrongly-focused, as I argue here. Low prices are not enough. The Triangle Shirtwaist Company probably offered low prices, but not by means any of us would support.

Red Hook Residents Demand Department of Environmental Conservation Hearing on Ikea-Red Hook Permit Application: How Big Box Stores Like Wal-Mart and Ikea May Damage the Environment Everywhere

Environmentalists argue that the big box stores like Wal-Mart and Ikea do environmental damage wherever they go. With thanks to ProfessorBainbridge.com, here is a link to an excellent short piece on environmental damage, "The CEO of Wal-Mart Drives a?" on Autospies.com. Sprawl, pollution, damage to ecosystems, culture of disposability, it hits them all.

Meanwhile, back in Red Hook, Ikea has yet to clear a number of legal and regulatory hurdles to building its store, including not only the on-going litigation in the New York State Supreme Court but environmental challenges in the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. Opponents of the project are writing to the state DEC demanding that the DEC hold a hearing on Ikea's permit applications. Ikea has applied to the DEC for a tidal wetlands permit and a clean water act water quality certification for the proposed Ikea-Red Hook store, but it has not included its proposed ferry dock in its applications. Letters are going to Katherine McGucken, the Project Manager and Environmental Analyst for the Ikea site at NYS Dept of Environmental Conservation.

Book What's the Matter with Kansas? Describes Wal-Mart's Devastating Effects

I am surprised at how little we all talk about America's abandoned small town Main Streets, although everyone who travels around the country sees them. When Wal-Mart planted itself out by the highway, it devastated all those bustling downtowns. If we New Yorkers, too, let Wal-Mart and the the other big boxes expand without constraints, that same devastation may come to the shopping streets near us. Thomas Frank's political best-seller What's the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, recalls Kansas in the early nineteen-eighties, with its "friendly folks ambling slowly down the old brick sidewalks, little kids singing in the school, average people in rambling Victorian houses listening attentively to the radio broadcast of the high school football game." Nowadays, he says, "Main Streets here are vacant, almost as a rule; their grandiose stone facades are crumbling and covered up with plywood--rotting plywood, usually, itself simply hung and abandoned fifteen years ago or whenever it was that Wal-Mart came to town."

Neighborhood Retail Alliance: Why Conservatives Oppose Big Box Stores

We at Big Cities Big Boxes are focused on the news that big box Ikea has just closed on the Erie Basin property in Red Hook, perhaps moving it closer to building its tax-subsidized store. See the posts immediately below about the news from Red Hook. While we wait for events in Red Hook to unfold, let's briefly review how some conservative proponents of Wal-Mart and Ikea, champions of the free market, try to make favoring big box stores look like a conservative position, while they accuse opponents of being dominated by unions.

To its great credit, the blog for the Neighborhood Retail Alliance has just posted a survey of the conservative arguments for opposing Wal-Mart. Read it here. It covers a wide range of economic studies and arguments, and it surveys a large part of the best literature and advocacy on the big box phenomenon. The owner of Big Cities Big Boxes is a onetime member of the National Writers Union--so much for union affiliations--but declares herself opposed to uncontrolled growth of big box stores on conservative grounds, civic, aesthetic, social and economic.

####

Times Reports New Film to Assess True Costs of Wal-Mart

The New York Times reported yesterday that Robert Greenwald, producer and director of "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism," is now taking on Wal-Mart. His film will be called "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price." Read about it here. We know nothing more about Mr. Greenwald's project. However, BigCitiesBigBoxes.com is entirely open to the possibility that the big box stores cost us much more than they save us. We look forward to viewing the film.

How the Ikea-Red Hook Hearing Relates to Big Box Questions

The proposed tax-subsidized Ikea-Red Hook project is so inappropriate for the Red Hook waterfront that the Village Voice called Red Hook the "best place in New York City not to put an Ikea." Red Hook has no subway. The proposed Ikea-Red Hook site is more than a mile from the overburdened Gowanus Expressway. It is at the foot of Red Hook's narrow cobblestone streets. Brooklyn residents and businesses have brought a lawsuit to challenge the city's approval of Ikea-Red Hook. The full transcript of Thursday's hearing, at which attorney Antonia Bryson of the Urban Environmental Law Center argued Brooklyn plaintiffs' case in New York State Supreme Court, now appears on this blog.

It may surprise non-lawyers to learn that the lawsuit is not directly about whether Ikea should build a big box project on the Brooklyn waterfront. Nor is it directly about the urgent issue of whether New York City should build big box stores if that means putting our neighborhood shopkeepers out of business. Under the New York City Charter, citizens did not have a direct say on those questions. Rather, the lawsuit asserts legal grounds to challenge the City Council's and the City Planning Commission's approval of the project. Plaintiffs have a heavy legal burden.

Big Box Bully Wal-Mart Will Fight Efforts to Limit Size of Stores

In a warning of what is to come if we permit Wal-Mart to enter New York City without any limits, or even if we threaten to impose any limits, today's New York Times reports that Wal-Mart has just outspent the opposition by 10-to-1, and used inflammatory rhetoric, to defeat an ordinance in Flagstaff, Arizona, that would limit the size of new stores. Let's heed this warning. New Yorkers need to talk about the size of any future big box stores, and to talk right away. Until now, the big box battle in New York City has focused on the inappropriate location for the proposed Ikea-Red Hook store, now in litigation in the New York State Supreme Court and ridiculed in the Village Voice, and on the battle over Wal-Mart's low wages. If New York

MCG: A Call for a Moratorium and a Study of Big Box Stores

The New York City Council should debate whether we want more big box stores in New York City and, if so, with what constraints. New York City needs to study the effects of big box stores and let the people decide. Do New Yorkers want the big boxes? If so, how many? Do we want them even if they drive our local shopkeepers out of business? If we do want some of them, where do we want them and in what form? Do we want automobile-dependent suburban-style big box stores in big parking lots? Or do we want big boxes to behave like other New York City stores, situate themselves near public transit and preserve our lively shopping streets? Perhaps by doing as Home Depot has done on West 23rd Street, using a New York City format, not a suburban format? What about labor practices? Do we want to insist that the big boxes have to act like other New York City employers? Should they have to pay the same wages as other New York City employers?

One of the main reasons the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations have given for supporting big box stores is that if New York City does not allow them, New Yorkers will shop at big box stores in the suburbs, taking their sales tax dollars with them. This is an old tactic of big boxes, extorting concessions from local governments by threatening to take their stores elsewhere. Developers, of course, like this tactic, too. Wal-Mart has used this tactic all over the United States, with resulting devastation of local Main Street shopping districts. Ikea has even used this tactic successfully in Ireland, threatening to build in Belfast, in Northern Ireland, if not permitted to build in Dublin. First, however, the claim may or may not in fact be true, and it may not apply at all to the people who are most likely to want to shop in big boxes. We don't know.

Capitulation to the big boxes is not the only option. Look at the big picture. The big boxes have used their threat-to-go-elsewhere so much, so widely, that self-preservation suggests New York City's banding together with other municipal governments to find a better way to deal with the big boxes' threats. Can't the municipalities propose state-wide or national legislation to counter the big boxes' strategy of pitting local governments against one another? As one approach, is there a way for all localities to benefit proportionally from sales taxes in big boxes in one locality?

Finally, what does it say that the great New York City economy is so humbled by one industry? Why is the New York City economy so weak that it must rely so heavily on sales taxes from retail sales?

####