Any discussion of retail in downtown Detroit seems to vacillate between a few different issues. Two of these are:
1. National retailers [[Big Box) vs. Independent boutiques
2. In the case of national retailers, Suburban-Style Big Box vs. Urban Form.
Let's put the first one aside for a moment, and focus on the second argument. Some folks argue that New York [[for some reason that's not clear) is the only city on God's Green Earth that does not need acres and acres of cheap, abundant parking. This is attributed to some inexplicable, apparently psychological phenomenon that New York is just "different" than anywhere else.
Well, I like numbers. Given that recent major retail developments in Detroit have involved suburban-style stores [[K-Mart, Home Depot, State Fairgrounds), let's see how this pans out in real life. The below comes from a recent piece on salon.com. Tell me if any of it sounds familiar.
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...a typical midsize American city, which is to say that its downtown was virtually abandoned in the second half of the twentieth century. Dozens of elegant old structures were boarded up or encased in aluminum siding as highways and liberal development policies sucked people and commercial life into dispersal.
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Some city officials saw such little value in downtown land that they planned to plunk down a prison right in the middle of a terrain that was perfect for mixed-use redevelopment.
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On the one side is a downtown building his firm rescued—a six-story steel-framed 1923 classic once owned by JCPenney and converted into shops, offices, and condos. On the other side is a Walmart on the edge of town. The old Penney’s building sits on less than a quarter of an acre, while the Walmart and its parking lots occupy thirty-four acres. Adding up the property and sales tax paid on each piece of land, Minicozzi found that the Walmart contributed only $50,800 to the city in retail and property taxes for each acre it used, but the JCPenney building contributed a whopping $330,000 per acre in property tax alone.
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When [[the developer) looked at job density, the difference was even more vivid: the small businesses that occupied the old Penney’s building employed fourteen people, which doesn’t seem like many until you realize that this is actually seventy-four jobs per acre, compared with the fewer than six jobs per acre created on a sprawling Walmart site.
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Even low-rise, mixed-use buildings of two or three stories—the kind you see on an old-style, small-town main street—bring in ten times the revenue per acre as that of an average big-box development. What’s stunning is that, thanks to the relationship between energy and distance, large-footprint sprawl development patterns can actually cost cities more to service than they give back in taxes.
http://www.salon.com/2013/11/10/walm...on_our_cities/