Elaborating on a comment he left here, bilious blogger M1EK writes that of all the reasons to oppose the Northcross Wal-Mart, decrying it for not being on the freeway is a non-starter. Instead, in order to honor those hallowed goals of pedestrian friendliness, incorporated into the design standards ordinance and elsewhere, it makes more sense to put it at a location like Northcross – a place with a transfer center, on a major arterial.
As someone without a car himself, it can be taxing enough to get to the H-E-B and back for weekly purchases, and that’s off of a main thoroughfare, Red River. God forbid I ever want to tote back a 64-pack of Sam’s Choice cola. Crossing the freeway, or walking along an overpass is out of the question. So setting aside the question of how much money you actually save shopping there, after all the illusory loss-leaders (see the last paragraph of the section passage here), shouldn’t such stores be accessible to those in the lower economic-strata, those that travel by bus?
That said, there’s a right place and a wrong place for this type of development. Ideally, it should split the difference between roads heavily traveled as the freeway, and those accessible as Burnet and Anderson. What that looks like, exactly, I don’t know. But then again, I’m not building a 200,000 square foot, 24-hour supercenter.
For those that might like to think it’s solely Lefty Q. Liberal’s problem, and not the company’s, think again: in San Diego, not exactly a hotbed of unhinged liberalism, the City Council recently voted to ban the megamart. Making the forthcoming big box ordinance appear pretty tame by comparison, it’s likely the pitched battles between the retailer and the communities it settles in have resulted in actions of this ilk. To keep something more extreme than the Big Box ordinance at bay locally, it’s up to Wal-Mart to look for real, good faith solutions.
This article appears in December 1 • 2006.