SPEAKING OUT AGAINST A WAL-MART in MIAMI, FL

Don’t box us in: A Wal-Mart in the emerging cultural center would be a giant step backward for Miami [Miami Herald]

Miami has always been a city on the verge, and it’s never quite clear whether it will embrace greatness or mediocrity. Drive up Biscayne Boulevard, a street with the potential for beauty and dignity, and you can see both possibility and stupidity—whole blocks given over to fast-food franchises, sprawling corner gas stations and more. It somehow seems like a high-stakes game of Mother-May-I, with baby steps forward and a giant step back.

But no backward step is bigger than the one the city is confronting now, a Wal-Mart next to the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, on parking lots still owned by The Miami Herald with a sale expected to be consummated next year. Of all the bad ideas ever proffered for downtown Miami, this is the worst.

And shockingly so in a time and a place where we have already invested more than $500 million (counting the Arsht Center and the preliminary work on Museum Park) in public funds to create a downtown cultural precinct.

SEEKING URBANITY

At a time and in a place where we should be seeking to create urbanity, a Wal-Mart—even the nicest superstore ever built—would mean instant squalor.

Big-box stores may be a fact of suburban and—in far too many places—small-town life; they may be a fact of economic life. But a big-box store does not belong on this prime urban site. For decades, the civic and cultural leadership of Miami has worked to create what is still an emerging downtown cultural precinct.

The public investment in the Arsht Center is nearing $500 million (and this is not small change by any way of accounting); another $200 million in public funds is aimed at new buildings for the Miami Art Museum and the Miami Science Museum with further significant investment in improving Museum Park. Four condominium towers in varying stages of completion look out over the future park, ultimately prime locations for lovers of the arts and sciences. What is missing from the equation is the urban context—the street-level amenities that would lead one to walk a few blocks to a restaurant and the theater or lunch and an exhibition—to wit, urbanism.

Achieving this is up to our planners and our politicians, for sure, but it is also up to our civic leadership—and developers are not excluded from this category—to try to plan what is best for the city, for the citizenry and for the long run. We’ve had too many giant flops already, too many white elephants already. (Think Omni, Sunset Place.)

This proposal is one where Wal-Mart would ‘’anchor’’ an Arquitectonica-designed shopping center that is described as pedestrian-oriented. The drawing released to The Miami Herald shows City Square to be colorful and appealing. And if the Arsht Center needs anything right away, it is context—shops and restaurants and places to walk before and after performances. The shops would be great. A traffic-generating big-box store in the heart of what should be the most pedestrian-oriented quarter of the city would not.

Start with land-use policy: By definition a big-box store is a greedy entity, gobbling up acre after acre; a typical Wal-Mart covers almost three acres for the store alone, another four or more acres for parking. Even modified, even glorified, even transmogrified, a Wal-Mart is, in the end, a big-box store. Would this be a smart use of prime urban land?

Go to transportation policy: In the downtown area in particular, we should be thinking of ways to reduce vehicle use and our carbon footprint—not increase it. Big-box stores are traffic generators.

Go to zoning: Many cities have passed ordinances limiting the size of stores, from tiny Greenfield, Mass. to Kaua’i, Hawaii, and from Clearwater to Chicago. The reasons are manifold: protecting ‘’main-street’’ shops, curbing traffic, saving neighborhoods, maintaining urbanism and more.

This is not a matter of what some call classicism. Big-box stores may be perceived as serving the middle and lower ends of the income spectrum, and they do—but not exclusively. And there are many reasons not to like Wal-Mart, from its confiscatory land-use practices across the country to its predatory pricing practices to its longtime and well-documented employee practices. Further, the economic-spinoff factor from a big-chain store sends the profits right out of town (and out of the country, often) while smaller, locally owned stores help regenerate the local economy. But those are not at issue here.

TOO OFTEN REACTIVE

What is at issue is that for too long, our municipal governments have been reactive rather than pro-active. They sit back and wait to see what a developer might propose rather than dream of the city as it should be and then plan and zone—and vote—accordingly. Thus we take what’s foisted on us, rather than what should be, as anyone who has crossed the Brickell Bridge or the MacArthur Causeway can attest. In the former, we’ve got a condominium complex being built just inches from the public right-of-way. In the latter (speaking of the unspeakable) is the horrific stacked big-box behemoth under construction at Fifth and Alton. What were we thinking? Or rather, what were they thinking?

Great cities spring from great ideas; it is just that simple. But it would be a mistake to think that a grand, sweeping gesture—a Central Park or a Champs Elysees—suffices. Ideas come in all sizes. Both the large scale and the fine grain count, and the latter is just as important as the former.

Posted by Joel Nezianya on Monday, August 18, 2008