America is Over-Retailed - Too Many Stores

[M II A II R II K]

Too Many Stores


27 May 2010

By Bruce Fisher



Read More: http://artvoice.com/issues/v9n21/too_many_stores

American civilization has its perfect expression in Union Road, in the entirety of its run from Orchard Park to Williamsville. Union Road is a succession of strip malls that link the marquee suburbs of Western New York. It is what the anti-suburbanites call “Generica,” and it is a refutation of every fond hope for “smart growth,” “new urbanism,” “transit-oriented development,” and “green infrastructure,” because Union Road is all about automobiles. If gasoline spikes in price again as it did in 2008, whether because Goldman Sachs speculators bid oil futures up, or because the BP disaster in the Gulf gets worse, or because Sarah Palin and Ron Paul’s racist spawn win the mid-term elections, Union Road will be just one more suburban commercial thoroughfare clogged with angry consumers with not enough money to shop because their cars ate all their discretionary disposable income.

Union Road exists in the form that it does because since the mid-1950s, it has been the connector between consumers and retailing. At its north end, the traditional retail establishments in the Village of Williamsville predominate. Driving south toward Genesee Street brings one to the wide-setback strip plazas of the 1960s, where nowadays the somewhat downscale stores are. Further south, there is layering: regionally owned grocery chain stores are mixed with various national big-box stores in a plaza that was well established more than 40 years ago, while opposite, some locally owned stores and service centers predominate up until the entrance roads to the region’s largest shopping mall. Past the next big intersection at Walden, which is itself a mile of big-box stores intermixed with discount houses and a few relatively downscale stores that are not to be found in the premium-rental malls, there is a gap of only two miles before the 1960s strip mall pattern repeats.

The village centers have a vestigial existence as retailing zones; of the 16 villages in Erie County, only Kenmore, East Aurora, Hamburg, Williamsville, and Orchard Park look like villages, but even they have shopping plazas that have more retail space than each of their main streets does. Springville’s village center is obsolete as the area’s center for commerce, having long since been supplanted by the cluster of big boxes and Wal-Mart on Route 219. Angola village’s drugstore succumbed long ago to the big boxes on Route 5. Lancaster is a curious amalgam. Akron still looks like the New England Yankee place its Civil War veterans knew when they erected the tall pole to show support for Ulysses S. Grant’s campaign, because Akron still has a village commons of the type English settlers established before they came to the Niagara Frontier when it really was a frontier—but Akron shoppers shop like Angola, Lancaster, Sloan, Clarence, and also Buffalo shoppers shop: on big roads, at big-box stores, at gigantic grocery stores, and at the Galleria, Boulevard, Eastern Hills, and McKinley malls. That’s where the retail trade is. Change the names of the roads and the municipalities, and you could be anywhere in the contemporary United States.

But there’s increasing evidence that behavioral changes driven by the internet and by age-specific consumer preferences will change all this. At the Urban Land Institute and at many other institutes and think tanks, and in the real-estate industry’s own publications, there’s a growing consensus that there is way, way too much square footage devoted to retailing.