Black Friday Parking 2022

Strip mall, Edgewood Rd SW, 9:45 a.m.

(11/25/2022) On the southwest side of Cedar Rapids, there is a triangle formed by three stroads: Edgewood Road, Wiley Boulevard, and Williams Boulevard. Average daily traffic counts are roughly 19000 for Edgewood, 9000 for Williams, and (from 2017) 14000 for Wiley. Until about ten years ago, they surrounded Westdale Mall; since that was demolished, they serve a large Wal-Mart, a large Target, and numerous shopping plazas and stand-alone stores.

The area made for an irresistible subject for my 2022 #BlackFridayParking survey, part of the annual Strong Towns event. The area is clearly meant to be driven to; it is served by three bus routes (8,10,12) but the system runs only during the day, and today was running a reduced version of that due to the holiday weekend. Walking between stores is extremely difficult, I can attest. There's a lot of traffic, moving quickly, from various directions. I relied on my remaining agility and the kindness of strangers to get places and return safely to you.

It was a lovely day, sunny and unseasonably warm. I got to Target about 10:00 a.m., too late for the doorbuster sales, but still in time to see a sizeable crowd of cars and shoppers.

Even so, much of the parking lot was unused.

Target, 3400 Edgewood Rd SW, lot 2/3 full at 9:45 a.m.

Down the street at Wal-Mart, the situation was even more pronounced: Many, many shoppers and cars...

View from the front door

...but much unused parking.

Wal-Mart Supercenter, 3601 29th Av SW, lot 1/2 full at 10:00 a.m.

Away from the two retail giants, crowds were thinner and parking lots were emptier.

Strip mall across from Wal-Mart

Kohl's had some traffic near the entrance to their lot...

...but away from the entrance ir was empty.

Kohl's, 3030 Wiley Blvd SW, lot 1/3 full at 10:00 a.m.

The parking lots on the grounds of the former Westdale Mall were glaringly empty.

On the other hand, from a distance it looked like the parking lot of Menards (home improvement store) at Wiley and Williams was very full.

As I forded these lots, I also forded a number of access roads--some, as I said, busy with fast-moving traffic, and some seeing no cars at all. This leads from the Kohl's to Wiley Boulevard, but can only be accessed by southbound traffic.

It made me think that, as much of this event is designed to complain about parking craters, big-box stores and strip malls also generate an excess of infrastructure. Maybe next year we could do Black Friday Access Roads?

Meanwhile, the Westdale area is beginning to see a little of the development promised when the city sunk a fortune into its redevelopment. There is a mixed-use development with apartments.

Parkway West, 3998 Westdale Parkway

These apartments are within walking distance of a lot of shops. I wonder if anyone ever does walk? And what might be the attraction of living here, as opposed to a more human-scaled locale? Price? Highway access? 

The apartments are flanked by a hotel (Tru, a Hilton brand) and a construction project that will become a hotel.

Will these projects generate any foot traffic at all? And given the inherent risks of crossing acres of auto infrastructure, would it be a good idea if they did?

And then there's this guy, across from the Westdale bus stop.

Car wash? Oil change? Tire store? It's auto-oriented, in any case, consistent with its surroundings.

The main purpose of Strong Towns' annual #BlackFridayParking event is to highlight to #EndParkingMinimums, provisions of zoning codes that require large stores to have even larger parking lots. Cedar Rapids' zoning code has those provisions, but the parking lots I surveyed seem to be substantially larger than required, albeit I haven't counted spaces.

Even if zoning requirements do not fully account for this appalling design, public policy has a hand in it. Property tax policy allows property owners to pay low rates on large swaths of unproductive land. City officials everywhere have a preference for big "wins," including attracting and accommodating a large franchise operation, over the economic gardening that nurtures local businesses. (See Alter 2022 on the many benefits of small locally-owned businesses over the big-box franchises.)

The result is a car-chocked landscape, full of expensive infrastructure that the widely dispersed businesses ultimately can't support, stressing drivers and practically prohibiting pedestrians. For financial, environmental, and community reasons, we need to do better. We have what we have in unholy triangles like the one I haunted today, but we need to start thinking differently and designing our cities better. As they say at Strong Towns, "Having 'enough' parking is always going to be less important than creating a place people want to be."

SEE ALSO

"Black Friday 2021," 26 November 2021 [Blairs Ferry Road NE from Fleet Farm to Wal-Mart]

"Black Friday 2016," 25 November 2016 [same area that I visited today]

Lauren Fisher, "14 Photos That Prove We Have Too Much Parking--Even on Black Friday," Strong Towns, 25 November 2022

Daniel Herriges, "The #BlackFridayParking Exception That Proves the Rule," Strong Towns, 25 November 2022

Addison del Mastro, "Unplanned Vacancies," Deleted Scenes, 12 May 2022 [paywall] [which I haven't crossed so it might not be any good] [but he's brilliant so it probably is]

Jaclyn Peiser, "Black Friday Isn't What It Used to Be. Here's Why," Washington Post, 25 November 2022 [another annual tradition is declaring Black Friday "over"] [and indeed it may have run its course, or nearly so] [in the meantime we have all this parking]

Review essay: Urbanism for all?

 

Alex Krieger, City on a Hill: Urban Idealism in America from the Puritans to the Present (Belknap/Harvard, 2019).

Stacy Mitchell, Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America's Independent Businesses (Beacon, 2006).

A few years ago, I began a talk on urbanism by reading from the excellent novel The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker (Harper, 2013). The author describes in detail the golem's first encounter of late 19th century New York City, full of energy and community and poverty and garbage. I told the group that urbanism was more or less an effort to recapture the energy and community Wecker describes without the yucky stuff.

It seems urbanism is not the first movement in American history to try to pull this off. Most of Alex Krieger's prodigious book is a chronicle of hope, as a succession of dreamers takes advantage of the vast American continent, as well as ever-improving technology, to leave whatever mess they were in to seek economic and social opportunity (chs 1, 9, 12, 16, 18), contact with nature (chs 2, 6, 7, 13), better communities (chs 4, 5, 14, 15), or just some fresh air. These (predominantly white) Americans had big ideas of how they could somewhere produce a mode of living that provided the best of both worlds--be those individualism/community, culture/nature, stimulation/security, e.g.--without the yucky parts of existing arrangements. Existing cities were typically perceived as anti-nature, rushed, stressful, crowded, dirty, noisy, corrupt, and full of disease and poverty and crime. Also difference (ch. 3). 

Las Vegas's wide streets are for people who are going places

So successive generations of dreamers struck out for a new start, either individually or in like-minded communities. Krieger covers a bunch of urban design trends over the centuries, as well as profiles of indicator cities like Washington (ch. 10), Chicago (ch. 11), and Las Vegas (ch.16). He is gentle and sympathetic in his portrayals, dismissing reflexive snobbery (of the "what they wanted was stupid" variety) and cynicism ("it was stupid to want/hope for that"). He pays some but not a whole lot of attention to the continental vastness being dependent on ignoring the presence of Native Americans, or to the nonwhite minorities and poor whites who suffered the impacts of whatever actions were taken towards the next utopia.

Eventually, Krieger's tone turns critical. Late in this exhaustive history of American approaches to place design comes this hint at the author's overall message: When Thomas More coined the term Utopia, the U came from the Greek words for "good" and "no" (p. 336). By chapter 18, on the back-to-the-city movement of "yuccies" and younger retired people in the early 21st century, he is scoring what the utopians have produced: swaths of environmental destruction, isolation or displacement of less powerful poor and nonwhite groups, and hoarding of goods and opportunities. He cities a number of critics of gentrification, including Joel Kotkin and Peter Moskowitz, contrasting their findings with a 1931 quote from James Truslow Adams, who defined the American Dream as a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position (The Epic of America, pp.214-215, quoted on p. 344). Boy, is this ever not happening. (See Piketty 2014, Reeves 2017).

Finally, in chapter 19 ("Postscript"), he turns cautiously hopeful again. We can and must do better, as we've already striven to do, though not by leaving places and people behind to build a new city on a new hill. Rather, we must our places and their people get better. Like Richard Florida in The New Urban Crisis (Basic, 2017), he has a to-do list: 

1. sharing access to the abundance of America
2. minimizing inequality, especially by careful public policy investment choices
3. stewardship of the environment, especially by curbing excessive consumption
4. responsibility to a broad idea of common purpose/good

Now, that's my kind of urban idealism! It stands in contrast to displacement-by-gentrification, or to urban renewal (ch. 14).

Stacy Mitchell's occasionally anachronistic but still powerful argument describes another American would-be utopia: the massive "big-box" stores operated across America by massive chains like Home Depot, Target, and the empire that is Wal-Mart. (Frequent mentions of Borders, Blockbuster, and K-Mart are jarring, but the arguments remain current in the age of Amazon.) The chains' promised paradise is one of large quantities of low-cost consumer goods, which would be nirvana to people who identify primarily as consumers. Local governments are attracted to the promise of single-shot job creation. In chapter 2, she tackles "the jobs mirage," including a study by Kenneth Stone of Iowa State University that found Wal-Mart's first ten years in Iowa (1983-1993, at the end of which there were 45 superstores) corresponded with statewide losses of "555 grocery stores, 591 hardware and building-supply dealers, 161 variety stores, 88 department stores, 291 apparel stores, 153 shoe stores, 116 drugstores, 111 jewelry stores, and 94 lawn and garden stores," and all their jobs with them. The low costs that attract consumers (ch. 5) are illusory, too, based on loss leaders and temporary cuts to drive out competition. These putative consumer paradises come at costs to local tax bases, domestic manufacturing, local and global wages, the landscape, the environment, and so on.

Mitchell is one of America's foremost advocates for locally-owned small businesses. Happily she concludes on hopeful notes: how communities have (sometimes) successfully fought back against chains, and how small businesses have banded together to make themselves stronger. Her evidence is thorough, yet her writing remains passionate, which is a difficult combination for any writer. Any observation of the American landscape, however, will show the lessons of all the research she details have been imperfectly learned.

 

Marion, IA, Black Friday 2019

 

Supercenters: Prize or curse?

Wal-Mart Supercenter, Cicero, Illinois,
mere blocks from the Chicago city limits

(5/8/2018) Chuck Marohn's recent Q-and-A with Joe Minicozzi on the Strong Towns Podcast reminds me of a conversation I had recently had with some old friends from Illinois. One friend noted the recent effort by Wal-Mart to build a supercenter on the south side of Chicago. Put off by Chicago's higher minimum wage for big-box stores, Wal-Mart instead built three supercenters across the city limits, in Evergreen Park (2006), Cicero (2014) and Hammond, where they now no doubt attract a lot of customers from the city. My friend considered this a blunder by the City of Chicago, because of the loss of jobs and sales taxes. So does the Chicago Tribune, which reports the city has subsequently reached accommodations with the giant retailer.

I'm agnostic about requiring certain employers to pay a super-minimum wage, but have been wondering how great were Chicago's losses, if any.

Joe Minicozzi (Source: urban-three.com)

On the podcast, Minicozzi, a planner and principal of Urban 3 LLC, explained the origins and rationale behind his formula comparing buildings according to their property tax paid per acre. Most city services are funded through property taxes on business and residences. The city's core asset, after all, is land, for which it needs to be making the most productive and efficient use. Wal-Mart is notoriously awful on this dimension, despite the volume of sales at its stores, because its footprint is so huge. In Minicozzi's example, the big-box store in his town generates $6500 in property tax per acre on a 34 acre lot, while a downtown mixed use development generates $330,000 per acre. Watch his video... it's short (3:43). See also Marohn's own 2012 analysis of two blocks in Brainerd, Minnesota.

In 2016, I participated in Strong Towns' crowd-sourced database on taxable value per acre. Here are the results from Cedar Rapids:
SW Wal-Mart $501,557
NE Wal-Mart $456,917
Great America bldg $13,999,048
Geonetric bldg $1,926,308

In a 2017 post I calculated the value of the Bever Block in downtown Cedar Rapids, soon to be demolished, to be $2,153,423 per acre. My Corridor Urbanism colleague, Ben Kaplan, reports that 1420 1st Av NE, also about to be demolished in order to make room for a development with chain restaurants, comes in at $1,740,695.

The Cook County, Illinois property search page is not currently functioning, so we can't do a similar analysis of Chicago area Wal-Mart Supercenters, but looking at results from around the country we can hardly expect they'll prove productive uses of city land, either. And that goes without taking into account subsidies provided to the retailer (Loury 2009).

But what about sales tax? Does the gain in retail sales from a big-box store counterbalance its relatively low property tax generation? No, says Minocozzi. In most states, sales tax collections don't go directly to the city treasury. They go to the state, which to the extent it redistributes the money to municipalities, does so according to a complex formula. (My state of Iowa does this. A few years ago, the nearby town of Bertram voted down a local option sales tax increase. Bertram has no businesses, so it basically was turning down its share of whatever revenues the increase generated. Needless to say, they re-voted in a hurry.)

Minicozzi challenged us to check our city's budgets, and compare the proportion of revenue produced by property and sales taxes. For Cedar Rapids's FY19 budget, 22 percent of revenues come from property taxes, 4 percent from sales and hotel/motel taxes. For Chicago's FY18 budget, 19 percent come from property taxes, 6 percent from sales taxes. Evergreen Park's FY17 financial report credits 21.5 percent of revenues to property taxes, 6.3 percent to local sales taxes. Hammond's revenue information, four years out of date, lists only "taxes" without disaggregating them into types of tax. For Cicero, your best bet is to know someone in city government; a search on their website for "budget" turns up a tribute to the 2016 Chicago Cubs, and their "contact us" function only works for Illinois residents. But you get the idea: property taxes are several times more important to these towns than sales taxes.

City of Chicago revenue sources
More property than sales tax, more grants and fees than taxes overall
(Source: City of Chicago)

So did Chicago make the right call? Or did Cicero, Evergreen Park and Hammond? As far as I can tell, Chicago wasn't foregoing a lot of revenue by losing Wal-Mart, as long as it was able to find people to make more productive use of that land. The adjacent suburbs might get a short-term bump in sales tax revenue, but they're using an inordinate amount of land area to do it. Moreover, in 15-20 years--which Minicozzi, citing Charles Terrell, director of property tax for Wal-Mart, reminds us is the anticipated useful life of a big-box store building--they'll have to deal with the clean-up.

See Also: Rachel Quednau, "6 Surprising Perspectives on Big Box Stores," Strong Towns, 8 May 2018