News
Thinking Outside the Big Box
May 5 2008
The recent uptick in big-box projects and proposals in the Crescent City, fueled by tax subsidies and other costly giveaways, has left owners of smaller home-grown businesses in related industries gritting their teeth and bracing for hard times.
They might not have a champion in City Hall, but an Emmy Award-winning journalist is working to shine a light on their situation with his documentary film-in-progress, Independent America: Rising from the Ruins The final feature-length documentary is scheduled to be ready for national broadcast by early fall.
Hanson Hosein and his assistants have been touring the city with their cameras to find out how a wide variety of mom-and-pop businesses are faring in post-Katrina New Orleans.
The clip includes comments from Edward Blakely of the city’s Office of Recovery Development and Administration as he bicycles with Hosein through a Katrina-damaged neighborhood.
Blakely tells Hosein that “the pressure from the ordinary citizens” is to bring more big-box stores. Blakely concedes that big boxes may “put these … little guys out of business,” but he insists that citizens he is hearing from say they’re focused on their own rebuilding efforts and “can’t think about that guy’s business.”
Granted, Dr. Blakely’s sound bite was extracted from a larger conversation, but it is fair to ask whether his characterization is accurate. Are New Orleanians really clamoring for chain retailers per se, or simply for a robust local economy? It is a mistake to conflate the two.
Locally owned businesses have been critical in our city’s recovery. Many reopened within days of the storm while corporate chains nervously kept their distance.
Now that federal recovery money is trickling in, big retailers are courting local politicians and scoring the sort of tax incentives our local businesses can only dream about.
Ironically, independent business owners will subsidize with their tax dollars those projects that threaten their very livelihood.
We believe that, in fact, most New Orleanians do understand the link between community well-being and their neighborhood businesses. For this very reason many residents of Orleans Parish resent the drive out to neighboring parishes to shop at the big boxes; they’d rather spend their dollars closer to home.
“If I’m going to spend my dollars at Target,” the reasoning goes, “I’d rather spend them at a Target in Orleans Parish.”
However, there are long-term costs in cozying up to corporate chains: Inevitably, profits are siphoned off from the host community and invested elsewhere.
Meanwhile, the citizen-owned businesses that have invested and re-invested in New Orleans — and that collectively contribute hundreds of millions of dollars and many thousands of jobs to the local economy — are ignored by the architects of public policy.
Not only is this unfair, but it is ultimately self-destructive, undermining local decision-making, wealth creation and retention, environmental sustainability and competition.
Hanson Hosein has documented the difficulties of independent small businesses around our country. His current film project exemplifies his belief — and ours — that New Orleans can be smarter, more diverse and more local than hundreds of less lucky American communities with derelict main streets and nowhere to go but the shiny big box on the edge of town.
… … .
This guest editorial originally appeared in the Times-Picayune on April 23, 2008.
Dana Eness of New Orleans is executive director of the Urban Conservancy. She can be reached at dana@staylocal.org.
Filed under: Editorials
Replies
Adam Watts said:
I’m not sure where Dr Blakely’s loyalties are, but the bike he rides in the video came from Wal Mart. Maybe an indication of where he does business himself.
May 8 2008
9:01 AM
David said:
New Orleans is world-renown for its restaurants. We know the names; I won’t misspell them here. What we don’t seem to note is that these famous restaurants are the culinary world’s mom-and-pop businesses.
Unfortunately, post-Katrina New Orleans has been dominated by small and lazy thinking. It used to be said in the IT world that no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft; in New Orleans that reliance on the accepted and generic response to economic woes leads us to invite Big Box stores, to tear down old houses in favor of “luxury” condos, to tear down the Port in favor of Jazz Museums and riverfront Gap stores.
It’s even less imaginative than that fabled cure for urban ills, the Monorail.
What worries me most is not that the Big Boxes will bring economic ruin. The city’s economy will rise or fall to the extent that the city invests in its historical raison d’etre: the Port.
What worries me is that easy, conventional, brainless “solutions” like the Big Box stores is that they will ruin New Orleans in a deeper, more profound way. They will ruin New Orleans at its heart. They will ruin New Orleans the way replacing Tujagues with Applebees would ruin New Orleans. You can still get a meal at Applebees, but if that’s all you’ve got, why bother eating? You can still get lumber and nails at Home Depot, but if that’s all you’ve got, why rebuild your home?
May 8 2008
9:35 AM
Wendy King said:
I agree with David on all points. People come from all over the world to visit our city, because it’s not Houston, Atlanta, or any other city. We’ve stuck to our guns, and have a strong preservationist ethic, which saved the French Quarter from the proposed Riverfront Expressway (but couldn’t save Treme from the monstrous S.Claiborne Avenue overpass which took out an avenue of old oak trees in 1965, and pretty much destroyed that part of the community.) We still have our streetcars, and brought back the Canal Streetcar line, when other cities took theirs out, and now want to put them (or a more modern version) back. We have walkable and bikeable neighborhoods, and recovering tree canopies. I’m a great believer in shopping locally. My favorite hardware stores are Harry’s Ace and Oak Street Ace, although I’ll cross the parish line, and go to Lowe’s for larger appliances.
So much of this is about educating Edward Blakely (whose quotes to the foreign press made us look like buffoons) about why New Orleans is here: it’s the port, Mr. Blakely. New Orleans wouldn’t be here, if it weren’t for its French founders’ understanding that controlling access to the Mississippi’s mouth, and to the rest of the country, was key to the city’s continued survival. We are, always have been, and always will be, a port city. Our French and Spanish founders also built the city’s buildings to a human scale. That is why the idea of a giant LSU/VA hospital obliterating most of the Tulane-Gravier neighborhood (which is recovering) is such a shock. We’ve lost so many neighborhoods, and some are starting to return, and now the LSUHSC/VA people think it’s okay to wipe out yet another neighborhood, so they can have this giant hospital complex, which could be built anywhere. Why not, for example, build it on the ruins of the former Albertson’s supermarket, near the corner of Tulane Avenue and South Jefferson Davis Parkway? There’s a good-sized commercial parking lot, lots of space, and no need to remove an entire neighborhood. Just contact Albertson’s (or whoever now owns the lot), and get title to the lot. The LSUHSC/VA gets their hospital, and the Tulane-Gravier neighborhood stays intact.
As to the Big Box stores: we have enough of them. We have the Wal-Mart on Tchoupitoulas and the Home Depot on S.Carrollton Avenue. Steer the subsidies towards the mom-and-pop stores, and let the overgrown suburbs have the large stores, which have no respect for green space or smaller footprints. A lot of Louisiana’s smaller parishes, by the way, deal with big box stores by telling them where they can build, ensuring that those parishes’ older downtowns are preserved and viable.
May 8 2008
11:35 AM
Tim said:
Big Box = Big Blunder
We need to remember what happens to the big box stores once the business cycle goes into decline. They close up, they go home, they leave a big empty box in their wake.
And what happens to the big box stores when the business cycle remains up for a few years? They close up, move to a new location, they leave a big empty box in their wake.
Peace,
Tim
May 8 2008
2:55 PM