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| From | "josh chasin" <jchasin@nyc.rr.com> |
| Subject | Re: All I'm sayin' |
| Date | Wed, 3 Dec 2003 17:15:09 -0500 |
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Wal-Mart kills downtowns.
The fact that other things kill downtowns-- economic downturn, major
employer leaving the area, demographic shift-- does not negate the fact that
Wal-Mart kills downtowns. Pointing to a downtown killed but not by Wal-Mart
is a little like saying lung cancer isn't deadly because this guy I know, he
died from Diabetes.
I know that is an oversimplification, but Wal-mart does indeed kill
downtowns. The phenomenon has been documented time and time again.
Municipalities have banned Wal-Mart in the interest of maintaining the
health of their downtown.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Stewart Mason" <flamingo@theworld.com>
> Blaming Wal-Mart solely for the destruction of small-town downtowns is not
> entirely accurate, and has a strong element of mistaking cause and effect.
> When I lived in Levelland, Texas (population 24,000, roughly) in the
> mid-'80s, the downtown was dead, dead, dead, consisting of a furniture
> store, an antique auto parts store, a couple of insurance offices, a
> doughnut shop that was closed by noon and the worst movie theatre I have
> ever seen in my life. Everything else was boarded up. Levelland did not
> have a Wal-Mart. As I recall, there wasn't even a Wal-Mart in Lubbock,
the
> nearest city of any size, until sometime around 1987.
>
> Charity and I were in Levelland last April. They have a smallish Wal-Mart
> now, in the same building that used to house my father's store on the west
> side of town. Downtown's still dead as a stump, but it's not any *more*
> dead than it used to be. If anything, it was looking slightly more lively
> than it did 20 years ago. You can substitute just about any of the other
> cities I've lived in in my life, from the population-8000 west Texas oil
> town I was born in (which as of the last time I was there, in the spring
of
> 2002, still doesn't have a Wal-Mart within 40 miles) to the major
> metropolitan center I live in now (which has no Wal-Marts until you get
> well out into the burbs, and at that, I think there's probably half a
dozen
> in the entire state of Massachusetts), for Levelland and the basic premise
> is the same: downtown is frickin' dead whether there's a Wal-Mart there or
> not.
>
> All I'm sayin' is that while it's easy to say "Wal-Mart kills downtowns,"
> the entire idea of downtown being the shopping and entertainment center of
> a town started dying back in the '40s, when the rise of car culture and
the
> baby boom fueled the development of subdivisions and sprawl. Wal-Mart
went
> into towns ***where downtown was already dying, if not dead.*** Wal-Mart
> is an EFFECT of this trend more than it's a cause. Painting Wal-Mart as
> the evil empire that has caused all of this economic devastation is
> misguided and doesn't look at the deeper causes of the loss of downtowns.
>
> S
>
>
>
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