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 6 of 6)

A confession: I am a child of sprawl. I grew up in New Jersey, a state synonymous with sprawl. (Indeed, one wag wrote to the Burlington, Vermont's Free Press, that if Wal-Mart came in, the state's slogan might as well be "Just like New Jersey, only colder.") My hometown, Middletown, is about 50 miles south of Manhattan and a few miles inland from the ocean. Middletown--the blandness, the obviousness, the generic quality of the name evokes the image of a small, idyllic American town.

Despite the geographic suggestiveness of its name, however, the town is not in the middle of anything other than its own teeming sprawl. My town's character, you see, hasn't been harmed by sprawl--it is sprawl. Driving through it, a glib traveler might well see it as the epitome of the nameless, faceless, featureless suburbia you hear so much about in rants from city dwellers, rural folk, and, well, suburbanites.

There is a long history to Middletown--founded in 1664, the place is crisscrossed by Revolutionary War retreat routes and dotted by 19th-, 18th-, and even 17th-century buildings and graves--but you would have to know where to look to see that history's presence. In 1960, a few years before my family moved there, Middletown's population was about 40,000. Nowadays, it's almost double that. The town's two main arteries are clogged with strip malls, chain stores, and parking lots. It literally has no single center, no one "Main Street." My parents' house, bounded once by a dense, impenetrable woods, now abuts an old-folks' home and commands a view of an increasingly busy highway. Not exactly Mayberry, RFD.

But to write off such a place as dead or sterile is to validate the phony logic of Superstore Sprawl or Vital Communities. My hometown is sprawling yes, but vital, too. My parents, along with many other residents, balked some at the idea of development, but they also appreciate and benefit from it. Within a two-mile drive, my parents can choose from a cornucopia of goods and services that weren't available even 20 years ago. Within a quarter of a mile, they can walk to stores that didn't exist 10 years ago. My parents, who in old age are no longer as mobile as they once were, have neighbors, friends, and merchants (some of the chain-store variety) who help them out. And they do the same in return. Surely, that is a "vital" community.

Change, flux, and contingency may be inevitable and salutary (especially when responding to unobstructed market forces), but like most forms of growth, they are rarely painless. It is surely asking too much that creative destruction seem creative to all the people it affects. But it is even more absurd to try to maintain the status quo (or an idealized version of the past) in the face of evolving desires, products, and technologies. In seeing sprawl as the enemy of vitality, the anti-superstore activists turn a blind eye to the very ways that people keep their communities alive.