One-Shop Stopping

Do Wal-Mart and Home Deport spell the end of "community"? A report on the superstore wars.

Nick Gillespie from the May 1995 issue

(Page 2 of 6)

Such attributes fail to blunt criticism, however. Syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman has turned the anti-superstore movement into a science fiction morality play. The activists, she has written, "are really fighting 'sprawl-marts,' huge traffic magnets at the intersection of highways, black holes that can suck businesses and everyday social life out of small communities....[T]he resistance...is sustained by people who do not want to become part of the drive-by culture, who do not want to pave paradise and put up a parking lot for a Wal-Mart." "Sprawl-marts," then, aren't merely different ways of doing business. They are instead part outer-space invader, part elemental force, countered only by what Goodman calls a "small and ardent resistance movement." It's Star Wars, with Sam Walton as Darth Vader.

The underlying logic of the anti-superstore movement is aptly summarized by the Boston conference's title: Superstore Sprawl or Vital Communities. You can have one or the other, the "sprawlbusters" maintain, but never the twain shall meet. "Sprawl" is inherently bad, the activists say, because it is out of control and wasteful of "social resources"; it escapes containment and direction by definition. Superstores, and the sprawl that comes with them, are simply too big to digest--they overwhelm the competition and the landscape alike. They replace personal interactions among townspeople with cutthroat corporate economics.

"What we are really fighting," Elizabeth Michaud, the founder of the Westford Stop Wal-Mart Committee, announces to the conference, "is the apathy and isolation in America." Apathy and isolation, say the activists, are the terminus of auto-dependent superstore sprawl.

A "vital community," in contrast, is planned and zoned, small and beautiful, personal and enduring. Freelance writer and superstore opponent Milly McLean, in describing Wickford, Rhode Island, fills in the details: "A family can live in a Victorian house...just off the main street. Their 8-year-old daughter can walk two blocks along a sidewalk to a decent public school....[T]he family can walk to a grocery store, a drugstore, a bookstore, several banks, a marina, restaurants, and a variety of specialty stores."

Sometimes, the vision of a vital community takes the form of unabashed nostalgia: "I think we have to go back to the way towns were developed in the 17- and 1800s" one Wal-Mart protester told The Washington Post. More commonly, there is a sense of freezing the world in its tracks. "It's not that I don't want any development or growth," one conference-goer told me. "It's just that things are fine the way they are now."

Given such sentiments, it isn't surprising that the activists take a dim view of the competition, change, flux, and novelty inherent in free-market enterprises. "How do you get under the boiler plate of 'free enterprise'?" asks Ron Powers, the moderator of the Boston conference. Powers, who teaches writing at Middlebury College in Vermont, won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1973 and an Emmy for news commentaries in 1985.

"Does free enterprise mean the right to suppress other merchants?" he asks rhetorically. "When a grocery store has to go into a Sam's Club to buy its [stock], how can we call that free enterprise?" thunders Edward B. Shils, the George W. Taylor Emeritus Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. "It may be legal, but it's morally wrong," says Shils, who describes himself as "an academician who has a love affair with small business."

"You can argue that every business has a right to do business," says economist Thomas Muller of Fairfax, Virginia's META Consulting Group, "but not to come into your town and be disruptive!" That disruption will be more than strictly economic, warns Shils: "People will move into the community to take these jobs and then you'll have costs for low-income housing. You'll import problems."

For the activists, there is no such thing as creative destruction--the never-finished process by which a market-based society renews itself. Forget about the good stuff markets deliver--lower prices, greater variety and quality, more options for worker and consumer alike. There is instead a focus only on what Powers refers to as "the darker side of efficiencies": the bankruptcies, the dislocations, the difficulties in keeping up. When things change, they inevitably change for the worst. The activists remind me of National Review's cri de guerre: "National Review stands athwart history, yelling stop." Although many of the anti-superstore crowd doubtlessly would cringe at the comparison (the political bent tends to be left-liberal), they are in fact true conservatives. They are suspicious of the new ways, fond of the old.

The question facing the superstore opponents is how best to keep things as they are--or make them they way they "should" be? There's no doubt that land-use laws provide anti-superstore activists with their strongest weapons for putting the kibosh on new and unwanted development. Consider the advice of Albert Norman. Two years ago, Norman helped organize the successful We're Against the WAL committee in Greenfield, Massachusetts, which channeled its energies into zoning challenges. Since then, he's become the Paul Revere of the anti-superstore movement, publishing a newsletter called Sprawl-Busters Alert and working as a paid consultant for groups around the country.

Writing in The Nation last year, Norman explained the power that zoning laws give to activists: "In our community, [Wal-Mart] tried to push its way onto industrially zoned land. It needed a variance not only to rezone land to commercial use but also to permit buildings larger than 40,000 square feet. This was the 'hook' we needed to trip the company up. Rezoning required a Town Council vote (which it won), but our town charter allowed voters to seek reconsideration of the vote, and ultimately, a referendum. All we needed was the opportunity to bring this to the general public--and we won."

Speaking at the Boston conference, Norman notes that, "Courts have thrown out plans for gas stations because of a surfeit of like enterprises." The same should hold true for superstores, he says. An audience member seconds the emotion: "We should be telling these superstores up front, 'You have to comply with our local, state, and federal laws and zones.'"

These are not the brightest days for central planning schemes, but the anti-superstore activists absolutely bear-hug notions of comprehensive land-use planning. You need to have "an underlying plan" for development, Carrie Johnson, a member of the Arlington County, Virginia, Planning Commission, tells the conference. "We're not just stopping the individual mislocated retailer, we're advancing a concept of planning reform," says Anthony C. Wood, director of the Ittleson Foundation. "You have to plan," concurs Dwight Merriam, a lawyer who has chaired the American Planning Association's Law Division. Merriam even jovially ends his conference presentation by showing a slide of a cartoon that invokes a faux-biblical commandment: "Thou shalt plan."

Interestingly, the embrace of zoning and comprehensive land-use planning is founded partly on a recognition of its past failings. "In the 1960s and '70s, planners copped out with large, uniform zones," says Jonathan F.P. Rose, a developer based in Katonah, New York, who works only in downtown areas. Rose's conference presentation details his firm's renovation of Denver's May Building, an aging hulk left over from the 19th century. They put a few big retailers, including clothing discounter TJ Maxx, on the first couple of floors, then threw in some office space, as well as low-income and market-level housing. Although some in the audience seem uncomfortable with the notion of providing aid and comfort to a national discount chain, Rose posits this as a win-win situation: Retailers get access to lots of foot traffic and preservationists maintain a historic building. What Rose laments is the lack of federal credit enhancement for mixed-use buildings. The answer to bad planning is more planning: This time we will finally get it right!

The faith in comprehensive planning works hand in fist with a concept of "community" (as opposed to individual) rights. There is little talk of individuals in the anti-superstore movement, except as "victims" of the out-of-town chain retailers. Instead, there is an emphasis on community-level decision making. "Communities must decide for themselves," says the National Trust's Richard Moe. "They must decide." The will of the community, however, can't be expressed through choices such as shopping at Wal-Mart or a locally owned store. It can only be gleaned through more formal methods, such as town council votes, planning and zoning board meetings, and referenda.