Quote:
Originally Posted by ISiddiqui
I'm totally with you on this. I hate that shit - the protesting against Walmart when it may be the only big box grocery store willing to move into an area.
We had a similar thing in my neck of the woods (the outrage, not the killing of the plan) - though it isn't a food desert where it was setting up. Just north of Decatur, which is very liberal and jokingly (and sometimes not to jokingly) referred to as the People's Republic of Decatur, there was this old strip mall that had long since fallen into disrepair. It's anchor store was a thrift store. The neighborhood around it had grown by spades and had lot of fairly affluent families.
Anyways, the strip mall was kept open for big box zoning. Why? Because the yuppies (in the literal sense of the term Young Urban Professions, not a derogatory) really wanted Trader Joe's to come into town. Trader Joe's has stores in Buckhead and Midtown and those folks figured Decatur would be perfect. Trader Joe's had no intention of moving to this area - they even said so publically. But yet it sat... zoned for big box.
You can imagine what happened next - the property owner got a bid in from Walmart. And Walmart wasn't just going to build a store, but it was going to create its more modern looking stores and THEN pay for the overhaul of the entire strip mall to make it look modern and inviting AND pay for adding some trees and green areas by the sidewalks.
Shit went down like nobody's business. Some neighborhood folks went apeshit over this - about how Walmart was going to make traffic in that intersection unbearable (and Trader Joe's was going to have teleportation?). They formed a group to block Walmart - but at every step, the courts said they had no leg to stand on.
Yes, there may be reasons to protest Walmart's treatment of workers, but folks are deceiving themselves if they think Walmart is all that different than other big box retailers AND a little bit of bad may be offset by a massive amount of good.
Sorry, I know its a tangent, but shit like this frustrates me.
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That intersection is already a clusterfuck, I used to live down there and traffic backs up all the way back to Emory on a good day without a shitty bowling alley and some crappy stores. It also would decrease property values and increase traffic in the side streets (and that part of Decatur may actually have decent property values) which are just hundreds of feet away.
I have no skin in that game, but also hear tell of special allowances made to Walmart in that area (probably bought off) and some strong arm ways to make sure no other bids were either accepted or taken seriously (like threatening places that wanted to develop there with years of expensive lawsuits). One developer (who I know) wanted to do mixed use development there similar to the new Emory Point that would both add grocery space and apartment living.