As I write this in the summer of 2004, America is under siege by an epidemic of proposed new Big Box retailers (that is, retail giants such as Wal-Mart, Target, Costco, Home Depot, etc.).

A list of a few of the many reasons why Big Box retail is deadly for communities and should be aggressively controlled:

1. Category-Killing Cannibals. Big Box retailers do not create an improved retail environment for a community or result in a net increase in jobs. Instead, they tend to cannibalize existing, in-town retail sales and in-town (often locally-owned) jobs. This is true at both the local level and the regional level. No net increase in retail sales or jobs. Just a geographic shifting from existing businesses to the Big Box (a reason why Big Box is sometimes called a "category killer," as all other retailers selling similar products are often wiped out because they are unable to compete).

2. Retail Shifts to Community Periphery. Healthy communities have traditionally had their retail activity sprinkled throughout the community. Such a pattern promotes transportation choice and builds a sense of community. Because the predatory nature of Big Box kills off most or all of the smaller retailers in a community, and because the Box needs high-capacity highway access to serve regional markets, the number of retail outlets in a Big Box community shrinks and moves to the periphery. Such a location promotes car dependence.

3. Breeds Car Dependency. Big Box retailers promote extreme levels of car dependency for those who live in the region -- which is a lethal, downwardly spiraling trend. Excessive car dependency destroys community quality of life; significantly harms community sustainability; increases our dependence on oil, outside corporations, and foreign nations, bankrupts households and local & state governments; wipes out our downtowns; transforms us into an "anywhere USA" kind of place that eliminates civic pride and a unique community character; and ruins our natural areas. Such retailers are typically placed in peripheral locations (and have site design) which makes it impossible to travel to the store without a car. As a result, an increasing proportion of residents in a community must now make an increasing number of trips by car (thereby increasing car dependency). In part, this increased car dependency is caused by the fact that the Big Box wipes out in-town businesses that were accessible by means other than the car.

4. Loss of Retailers and Choices. Big Box retailers, by extinguishing local businesses, reduces consumer choice in products, since increasingly, the only products available are those that are sold by the Big Box.

5. Dollar Drain. Big Box retailers drain dollars from a community. Instead of cycling those dollars within the community, Big Box steadily impoverishes the community by forever draining wealth from the community and pouring it into the bank accounts of out-of-town executives which have no allegiance to our community -- nor any care for our welfare (since they don't live in the community being drained).

6. Encourages Sprawl. By being so excessively car-dependent and designed to serve a regional "consumer-shed" of motorists from up to 10 (or more) miles away, Big Box retailers enable a sprawl lifestyle. That is, life becomes more feasible, and therefore breeds more sprawl households because sprawl is now more attractive.

7. Short-lived. Big Box is infamous for abandoning their boxy buildings after only a few years, typically leaving a site with a building and enormous surface parking lot that cannot be used for another purpose. Many communities have responded to such a problem by requiring the Big Box to sign an agreement that requires that, for example, the site be restored should the Big Box decide to abandon the site.

8. Large, dangerous roads, parking lots, intersections. To survive and thrive, Big Box must be designed and located to efficiently serve a regional market that extends several miles from the Big Box. This requires the construction of extremely large roads, intersections and parking lots. Communities often make the critical mistake of obligating large roads, intersections and parking lots for the prospective Big Box, naively thinking that such infrastructure will lessen the undesirable impacts of the Box. Unfortunately, large roads, intersections and parking lots are precisely what the Big Box needs to thrive, and they are more than happy to either provide these facilities themselves or, better yet, have public tax revenue subsidize the construction of such facilities. These over-sized roads, intersections and parking lots that serve the Big Box end up worsening the situation, because they end up promoting the further proliferation of Big Box retail and strip commercial development. Monster roads and parking also reduce transportation safety and transportation choice, and often end up congested despite their large size (because the roads and parking are free to use).

7. Ugly, "Anywhere USA" appearance. Big Box is notorious for building "boxy," national formula building designs that ignore local character and tend to look identical throughout the nation. Left uncontrolled, this can lead to a significant loss of a unique community character and decline in civic pride.

To stop Big Box encroachment into the community, the community must, above all else, cut off the lifeline that makes Big Box retailing possible. Effectively discouraging Big Box means not modifying nearby roads to add road capacity (for example, by adding turn lanes at intersections or adding travel lanes). If nearby intersections or roads (or interstates) are already "overweight," an effective strategy is to put them on a diet by removing turn lanes and travel lanes. Admittedly, this is a very long-term strategy. But the terrible reality is that this nation has spent several decades spending trillions of public dollars to build huge interstate highways and huge local arterial roads. The predictable result of that enormous public subsidy is that it gave birth to a nation-wide epidemic of Big Box retailers. Such retailers can only exist if they are able to gain access to an enormous, regional consumer-shed of customers (customers from multiple counties). The big roads and interstates have created that opportunity, and Big Box executives are taking advantage of this prospect by building Big Box throughout the nation. In essence, we are now paying for the sins of our forefathers and foremothers, who chose to squander ungodly sums of public dollars to widen roads, and therefore indirectly and heavily subsidizing Big Box retailing. It is naive to think we can stop Big Box until we start reversing the blunder of building these monster roads and interstates.

With modest roads, Big Box is impossible. With large roads, Big Box is inevitable.

1. Environmental regulations. They tend to be very weak; overly subjective; difficult to measure, monitor or enforce; and very easy to evade -- particularly by a well-heeled developer.

2. Generous landscaping and open space requirements. These are minor "window dressing" items that are nearly irrelevant when it comes to the problems that Big Box brings to a community. And again, the substantial financial wealth of the Big Box developer makes such expenditures painless.

 3. Restrictive building design requirements. Again, these are minor window dressing items that are inconsequential in the overall picture. The problem with Big Box is not that the Box is ugly. Granted, the Big Box building is a awful, pathetic form of architecture, but on a list of 100 evils that a Big Box delivers to a community, ugliness is near the bottom. And wealthy Big Box developers will often not even blink an eye to pay the pocket change needed to make aesthetic improvements if push comes to shove. This is not to say that a community which finds it must accept a Big Box should be silent on the question of how the Big Box building is designed. If a Big Box retailer must be allowed, it is important that the community (if it has any semblance of self-respect and civic pride) insist that the Big Box be designed to be compatible with the character of the community. See, for example, "Better Models for Superstores" (1997) by Constance Beaumont for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and "Saving Face: How Corporate Franchise Design Can Respect Community Identity" (1994) by Ronald Lee Fleming, American Planning Association Planners Advisory Service #452.

Note, however, that the elected officials need to have a great deal of political backbone (and design wisdom) for this building design strategy to work. Design regulations for Big Box require that you can trust your elected folks not to cave in to "moral high ground" arguments (such as "this Wal-Mart will provide jobs for poor people"). If you cannot trust your elected officials to stand up to such moralizing, it may be best to take the route of prohibiting Big Box from your community (by setting a maximum retail building size of, say, 75,000 square feet) instead of requiring that they abide by design requirements. A more feasible approach than community-wide prohibition is to simply prohibit them in parts of your community that are intended to remain (or become) compact, walkable and mixed use-such as your downtown. Areas where they could be allowed are those places intended to provide for the auto-oriented, suburban lifestyle. The downside to this approach, of course, is that the harmful aspects of the Big Box are far-reaching, and its tentacles can easily damage the smaller, locally-owned, more walkable portions of the community.

The real battle with Big Box must be fought with regard to their transportation and sprawl impacts (which are not in any way addressed by building design regulations). Granted, the transport and sprawl impacts are very, very difficult to address, since they require that the community resist efforts to build bigger roads and bigger intersections, and that the community starts ratcheting down the capacity of existing roads and interstate highways in the region (which is a battle that will take decades). But by comparison, building design regulations are little more than requiring fashionable clothing on Godzilla.

4. Appeal to the harm the Big Box will bring to "poor people." In public meetings, the Big Box will always have the moral high ground when it comes to "poor people." After all, don't they provide "Low, Low Prices" that "help" poor people? Arguments about how the Big Box provides "excessively low-wage jobs with no health care" or how Big Box "promote sweat shops in Mexico" are too abstract and complex for the sound-bite conditions of a public meeting.

5. Request road "improvements" to avert congestion. As noted above, requiring the Big Box to have huge, multi-turn lane intersections or huge, multi-lane roads to serve them and avoid "gridlock congestion" is a common mistake that plays into the hands of the Big Box. First, it is pocket change for Big Box to come up with the dollars to increase the size of nearby roads/intersections. Second, it is often the local or state government that ends up (further) subsidizing the Big Box by using public tax dollars to increase such road capacity. Third, such big capacity roads enable Big Box. They must have such roads to be successful. It is therefore not a "punishment" to request they provide such roads. Indeed, I suspect that the Big Box often deliberately lets the perception arise that "nearby roads need to be enlarged to avoid congestion," when all along, the Big Box was being coy and hoping that this "concession" would be "demanded" of them. The Big Box cannot exist without the Big Roads and Big Intersections. For the local government and its citizens to insist on such roads is precisely what the Big Box is hoping will be demanded. Fourth, in urban areas, traffic congestion is our friend. It promotes many things a healthy community desires: infill development, less single-occupant vehicle travel, higher residential densities, more mixed use development, lower regional air pollution and fuel consumption, taller buildings, less asphalt parking, healthier transit, healthier small (and locally-owned) business, and less suburban sprawl.

1. In almost all cases, there are polarizing, wide-ranging viewpoints on the part of elected officials and citizens of a community about what is to be done about Big Box. Some want to prohibit them, others want to go after them with aggressive design requirements. Still others don’t want to regulate them at all – fearing that to do so might chase away "desirable" retail development. Given these conditions, perhaps the most effective, politically viable strategy is to establish context (or location)-sensitive regulations. For example, the community may wish to prohibit them (with a square footage size cap) in its walkable, compact areas (such as downtown). In suburbs, the community may want to allow Big Box, but establish design requirements for them. Near large highways, the community can perhaps acknowledge that such places are so car-oriented already (and so desirable to the Big Box) that there should be either very light regulation or no regulation at all for the Big Box. Using this context-sensitive approach can satisfy all viewpoints in a community.

2. At all costs, the Big Box must not be enabled by enlarging the road capacity near it (do not add additional turn lanes at intersections near it and do not add travel lanes on roads near it). If any road modifications are made, they should be to reduce such capacity.

3. Outside of outlying suburban and highway areas, the Big Box must not be enabled by allowing it to install an enormous asphalt parking lagoon to attract tens of thousands of car-dependent shoppers. The parking must be kept modest in size (no more than 1 space per 500 feet of floor area) and must not be allowed between the store and the roads that serve it.

4. The Big Box must not be allowed to select a site that is environmentally significant.

5. It may be important to insist that the Big Box be required to be "mixed use" – particularly when it is in a core area of the community. That is, high-density residences should be incorporated on site and adjacent to the site. The site shall be developed to contain a gridded street network with narrow streets, on-street parking, multi-story buildings, street connections to adjacent properties, and compact building arrangement so that it mimics a walkable downtown (an open-air "lifestyle" center shopping mall is becoming quite popular throughout the US these days). Such design also ensures that the Big Box site can be adaptively re-used as something else (hopefully more walkable and sustainable) once the inevitable day comes when the Big Box is abandoned.

6. If #5 above is not achieved, the Big Box must be required to sign a legally-binding agreement that it will be financially responsible for demolishing the structures it builds on the site and restoring the site to its original condition after the inevitable day in the not-too-distant future when it abandons the site (usually to build something even bigger somewhere else).

In any event, the community needs to make a decision with a prospective Big Box: Will we allow the Box to treat us like a doormat and degrade what is unique, healthy and lovable about our community? Or will we insist that the Big Box only come to our community on OUR terms?

Note that there is an avalanche of web sites and reports/essays that indict Big Boxes (such as Wal-Mart) as a catastrophically bad thing for communities. Such information can be quickly and easily found by using the Google search engine on the Internet.

Sprawl Busters: http://www.sprawl-busters.com/

Congress for the New Urbanism: http://www.cnu.org/

Sprawl Factsheet: http://www.sierraclub.org/sprawl/factsheet.asp

Big Box parody: http://www.big-box.com/

Big Box Sprawl (and how to control it): http://www.nationaltrust.org/issues/smartgrowth/big_box_sprawl.pdf

Sprawl Watch: http://www.sprawlwatch.org/

National Geographic on sprawl and design: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/earthpulse/sprawl/index_flash.html

Sierra Club Sprawl Report: http://www.sierraclub.org/sprawl/report99/

NASA aerial view of sprawl: http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2002/11oct_sprawl.htm

Sprawl net: http://www.rice.edu/~lda/Sprawl_Net/About.html

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