Many conveniences—the ease of driving, food delivery, one-stop shopping—seem nice on the surface, but they often come at a high cost to our communities.
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To have enduring prosperity, a community cannot squander its land; it must develop in ways that are financially productive.
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What’s the most suburban kind of place you can think of? If you said an outlet mall, you’re probably not alone. Is there a path to incrementally retrofit these malls to a more human-scaled environment… and even if there is, is it worth the trouble?
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We, as a culture, have become so fixated on growing jobs in our communities that we can’t see anything else. It is up to us to recognize that our cities and metro areas can ask for better.
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The allure of a silver-bullet economic development project is like that boat you buy for a low, low down payment. You know, the one that ended up sitting in your driveway under a tarp for years. Just ask Memphis.
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We’re sharing the video and audio from our January 2019 live webcast Q&A with mega-retail expert Stacy Mitchell.
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The closing of the mall’s anchor store exposes how fragile the community’s business model is, providing an opening to shift approach.
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Big boxes arguably helped to kill the classic main street. Can they also bring it back?
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We are in the midst of an ongoing transformation of the traditional top-down, mass producer-to-consumer relationship into a relationship that is more harmonious and intimate between smaller-scale producers and smaller sets of consumers.
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Check out the second episode of our new podcast Upzoned! Kea Wilson and Chuck Marohn dig into an article on a troubling trend: big box retailers in Minnesota think they’re paying too much in property taxes, and they’re asking for a cut. But that’s a hard pill to swallow for small towns.
Read MoreThe closing of the mall’s anchor store exposes how fragile the community’s business model is, providing an opening to shift approach.
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Two weeks ago, we announced a crowdsourced database collecting information on the tax productivity of big box stores in comparison with other, more compact developments. We've now mapped that data for you to see.
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This week was all about the promise, the risk and the decline of big box stores in America.
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Why do we invite big box stores into our our towns, enticing them with subsidies and infrastructure, competing for their attention, all so they can offer residents low-wage part-time jobs, pay minimal property taxes, then leave 15 years later?
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In the short term, you don’t want to lose the big box war. In the long term, the only thing worse than losing the big box war is winning it.
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The future of big box stores depends crucially on decisions and facts about land-use, environmental taxes, technology, and population migration trends. Specific stores will fail or thrive depending on the health and choices of the community within which they are embedded.
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Big box stores are not the enemy; they are the natural byproduct of our suburban development pattern. It's in everyone's best interest to find economically viable ways to make that land more productive.
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How does a store with a small footprint, few choices and well-paid employees attract so many enthusiastic customers and sell twice as much per square foot as Whole Foods?
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Great design can meet multiple interests. That was the case for this urban big box store which balanced the needs of a large-scale retailer with the surrounding walkable, mixed-use neighborhood.
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Let's take a look at how big-box stores have adapted to the urban environment of New York City.
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