I found the following website by searching under Wal- Mart, Land Use, Small Town, & .edu, hoping to find an academic article. http://reclaimdemocracy.org/articles_2005/walmart_solutions_antitrust.php
Although the article was not academic, it helped lead me to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), an organization that focuses on the issues caused not just by Wal-Mart, but all big-box retailers. The article was written by Stacey Mitchell, who also wrote Big Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America’s Independent Business & The Hometown Advantage: How to Defend Your Main Street Against Chain Stores and Why it Matters. She is the senior researcher at ILSR.
The solution that Mitchell provided in this article was that a community should be proactive about expanding its control over development. The two ways she suggested was requiring an economic impact analysis and restricting the size and location for new retail projects. She did say this could be difficult since city officials often think their economy will receive a boost from the big-boxes (like we saw in the documentary) and because Wal-Mart publishes its own research that down-play the negatives (also, like we saw in the documentary).
ILSR (http://www.ilsr.org/index.html) created the Big Box Toolkit (http://www.bigboxtoolkit.com/index.php), which provides guidelines to help communities go up against big-box chains.
Mitchell lives in Maine, where the Informed Growth Act was passed in June 2007. The act requires that cities do economic impact studies when new retail stores are more than 75,000 square feet. Most Home Depots are 150,000 square feet.
I think the Big Box Toolkit could be a great resource, especially to small communities. If the citizens of Ashland had access to this toolkit, they may have felt that they were better trained to compete against Wal-Mart.
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This is very interesting. Relating this back to our externality framework, it seems that many communities are realizing the need to take into account economic externalities. I wonder if this will have a ripple effect wityh other tyoes of development that might affect local economies....(?)
I checked back at the bigboxtoolkit.com to look at some of the studies. They all have to do with economic externalities. Here are a few, along with some of the research that was found.
Retail Employment: For every new Wal-Mart job there are 1.4 jobs lost due to other businesses downsizing/closing. There is also a loss of $1.2 million in County-wide retail payroll when a Wal-Mart opens.
City Costs: In a review of 8 Ohio communities, 7 of 8 suffered a drain on the budget, losing $0.44 per square foot annually.
Subsidies: A study found 244 Wal-Mart stores and distribution centers in 35 states that were able to get state and local development subsidies of more than $1 billion. Subsidies consisted of property tax rebates, free/ reduced-priced land, funding of site preparation, on-site infrastructure & the most common, tax increment financing (TIF). If the average drain on a city budget is $.44 per SF, I wonder if the anticipated tax revenues really offset the outlays?
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