Bacon's Rebellion

Democracy Thrives in Sunlight

Fairfax Ties the Big Boxes in Knots

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by

James A. Bacon
in

The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors has enacted regulations that could curtail the construction of big box stores. Stand-alone stores of 80,000 square feet or larger now must obtain board approval. Mega-stores approved as part of a mall or a larger development are exempt. (Read the story in the Connection Newspapers.)

Bill Lecos, president of the Fairfax County Chamber of Commerce, opposed the new regs. The uncertainty of gaining approval could scare off potential new businesses, particularly in shopping centers that need revitalization. That’s a valid point, I think, but not a compelling one. There are countervailing considerations.

As foes of the big boxes rightly point out, Wal-Marts, Targets and other giganzo stores draw from vast market areas. People drive greater distances and place more strain on the transportation infrastructure when patronizing the big boxes than when patronizing neighborhood stores near their homes. Now, there’s nothing wrong with offering lower prices made possible by economies of scale — unless you expect someone else to pay the costs imposed by the traffic congestion caused by those economies of scale.

That’s the problem. Some of the efficiencies and “cost savings” achieved by the big boxes are illusory. Rather than creating genuine efficiencies, the big boxes are externalizing their costs to motorists at large (or to taxpayers at large, if they’re expected to upgrade the transportation infrastructure).

Every big box store should be required to submit a traffic impact analysis (maybe they are in Fairfax County, and I just don’t know about it). If the local road network is overloaded (which seems to be the case throughout most of the county), I find it entirely reasonable for Fairfax supervisors to require some kind of proffer, offset or design change as compensation for the costs imposed upon the public.

(Photo Credit of Wal-Mart in Madison Heights outside Lynchburg: Wikipedia.)

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17 responses to “Fairfax Ties the Big Boxes in Knots”

  1. Freedom Works Avatar
    Freedom Works

    Jim:

    Commuting to work and back is the primary cause of gridlock. Yesterday it took a friend of mine two hours for his morning commute. To find housing he can afford, he commutes 25 miles each way, including crossing the Potomac.

    What is the real cost to the public of building expensive bridges and long haul commuter freeways that are not paid for by tolls?

    The whole big box thing is just an election year diversion to get the anti-affordable housing growth control extremists off the Board of Supervisors case.

    Think about it. Everyone in Fairfax County already has access to every kind of big box retail. So more big box retail means fewer miles will have to be driven to get there.

    People living in Reston, for example, can drive ten miles in two different directions to get to a Wal-Mart. There are Target and Best Buy stores near both of those Wal-Marts. But you don’t have to drive 10 miles from Reston to get to a Target or a Best Buy, because they are also in Reston. Why is there no Wal-Mart in Reston, which has one of the highest populations of lower income residents?

    More big box stores infilling all over Fairfax County will reduce traffic, not increase it.

  2. E M Risse Avatar
    E M Risse

    No one should be surprised to learn we agree with Jim’s post.

    Freedom Works has a point about affordable housing.

    In our tour of three large Beta Communities in Fairfax County yesterday (Greater Merrifield, Greater Tysons Corner and Greater Fairfax Center) we saw hundreds of acres of vacant and underutilized land where housing near Jobs, Services, Recreation and, YES, Amenity could be built but for specific controls and those who miskakenly believe they benefit from these controls.

    What Freedom Works is wrong about is that he fails to understand that the owners and consultants for Big Boxes use Radial Analysis to locate their stores.

    Radial Analysis is a key tool in Regional Metrics that can be used to create Balance and well as Dysfunction.

    Fairfax County is almost 250,000 acres and when the Conty is saturated with Big Boxes they will stop building them. However, everyone of the Big Boxes is based on a distribution model that requires public subsidy for roadways and private subsidy by the consumer.

    The core problem with Big Boxes is not how they look, it is how they function and that they rely on Autonomobility to make a corporate profit and the expense of citizens individually and collectively.

    Create a level playing field and Big Boxes go away.

    EMR

  3. Larry Gross Avatar
    Larry Gross

    The radial analysis does not suprise me – but where would companies like WalMart expect to INCREASE their sales in a region rather than have New Walmarts essentially canalbalize existing WalMart sales – just by providing location that is nearer…

    UNLESS – the strategy is to put new Walmarts where they can “hurt” their competitors.. i.e. povide consumers with a Walmart that is just as close as the Target – and cheaper on some items and/or carry other items not carried by target.

    Have folks noticed that Drug Stores like CVS, Riteaid and Walgreens no longer locate in shopping centers but rather build stand-alone stores – AND that these stores carry a fairly full array of items… for folks to choose from while they are waiting for their prescriptions – and captive to the stand-alone store… no longer able to walk to other co-located stores.

    On the other side of the coin – new WalMarts and Target usually have a pharmacy… that pretty much pushed CVS/Riteaid/Walgreens out of shopping centers with WalMart/Target “anchors”.

    I understand what EMR is saying – but I’m not sure that these companies have any choice to NOT reconfigure and re-site using radial analysis, and other strategic tools.

    They can either exercise whatever options are available to them – to compete – or get outcompeted and have to close.

    I wonder if “leveling the playing field” means more land-use/development rules that benefit/promote/protect balanced communities by taking away some competitive strategies now being used?

  4. Freedom Works Avatar
    Freedom Works

    EMR:

    More big box stores are coming to Fairfax County, and they will reduce traffic. The planned Merrifield Town Center on the site of the current multiplex parking lots will have several big box stores including a Target. That will put Target many miles closer to a large segment of Fairfax County’s population. It will mean fewer cars clogging I-66 to drive west to Fair Lakes to shop at the Target or Wal-Mart in the Hazel-Peterson built mega big box center. Or it will mean fewer cars clogging Route 50 to go east to Seven Corners. Either way, central Fairfax County wins from a traffic standpoint.

    Even better, Merrifield Town Center will include thousands of apartments or condos above the retail. This new mixed use integration of big box retail with residential, office and entertainment (they are building parking garages for the multiplex) is the wave of the future in urban areas. It will substantially reduce the “autonomobility” factor you decry. Eventually with high density redevelopment between the Dunn Loring Metro and Merrifield Town Center, tens of thousands of people will be able to walk to their favorite big box retailers.

    Create a level playing field by getting rid of single use segregated zoning restrictions and big box stores will proliferate in urban areas to the benefit of consumers and commuters.

  5. Toomanytaxes Avatar
    Toomanytaxes

    If a network must be built to handle its peak capacity, then NoVA’s road system is driven by the need to commute to and from work. Under sound economic principles, we’d charge cost-based prices to commuters.

    Unless big box shoppers are also traveling during peak hours, they are not imposing additional costs on the network. So why penalize these shoppers?

    As Ray Hyde likes to say: We need more places. Let’s move some jobs to Stafford and Spotsy, and we’ll see fewer network costs for roads.

    This time the tail is wagging the dog.
    times can be virtually free.

  6. Larry Gross Avatar
    Larry Gross

    re: “If a network must be built to handle its peak capacity, then NoVA’s road system is driven by the need to commute to and from work. Under sound economic principles, we’d charge cost-based prices to commuters.”

    I could not agree more. Rush Hour congestion is primarily driven by home-work commuting – not shopping at Target or other non-commute trips.

    It’s the commute trips that drive the issue – and I further agree – that NoVa road congestion is much worse than it would normally be – because of the folks who commute to NoVa jobs from exurban locales like Stafford and Spotsy, et al.

    If the Feds did one simple thing – move most of their defense work to Quantico or HORRORs A.P.Hill in Caroline County – NoVa commute issues would change dramatically.

    We’d have both reverse commutes – from NoVA but more importantly – many of the folks in the exurban communities would no longer be commuting to NoVa.

    I’m convinced if the FEDs ever went belly-up and/or moved Defense and a few other major cabinet-level organization out of NoVa that the NoVa congestion AND the NoVa economy might be quite different.

  7. Jim Bacon Avatar
    Jim Bacon

    Larry, I can’t speak for Northern Virginia, but here in Richmond some of the worst traffic congestion occurs in and around the major retail/shopping corridors. Maybe that’s a reflection of the fact that rush hour congestion is, by NoVa standards, extremely light. But people driving greater distances to big box stores *does* put more cars on the road.

  8. Larry Gross Avatar
    Larry Gross

    re: retail shopping traffic congestion

    yes – mega-mall venues especially on non-work days – weekends, Friday nights and Holidays but I don’t think this is the same as metro regional rush our traffic – in Richmond or NoVa or most places.

    If by some miracle, rush hour home-work congestion was slayed – the regional mall type shopping congestion would be minor in comparison – AND discretionary to a certain extent.

    And if I understand – it’s stand-alone big boxes that are the target – not the regional malls.

    Do we understand the WHY behind the reasoning here?

    I’m not convinced that it is chronic rush-hour congestion that is the issue. wrong?

    We need to understand the difference in terms of impacts between regional home-work commuting rush hours – and weekend shopping congestion because the fixes may not be the same.

    The normal approach to development is to look at the traffic that it will generate – then specify the infrastructure that it will take to mitigate it properly and then let the business decide if it is economically feasible

    … as opposed to telling business where it can locate or not – on a more abitrary basis – that cannot be justified with impacts that are deemed to be not-mitigatable at the locale level.

    … this is the issue with telling any business or any employer that it cannot locate – period – because of impacts to the regional infrastructure….

    The decision – cannot be – arbitarary and capricious…. magic legal words…

  9. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    If it’s all home-to-work traffic as some posters say, then why is I95 a parking lot on the weekend?

  10. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    Because…
    I-95 is the major East Coast transportation corridor from Maine to Florida.
    Check the license plates on the cars and trucks on I-95 on a weekend.
    And don’t forget tourism in both directions: New York, Washington D.C., Kings Dominion, Williamsburg, etc.

  11. Ray Hyde Avatar
    Ray Hyde

    Better than 95% of the entire U.S. population has shopped at a Wal Mart in the last year.

    One wonders where all the opposition comes from.

  12. Larry Gross Avatar
    Larry Gross

    re: “If it’s all home-to-work traffic as some posters say, then why is I95 a parking lot on the weekend?”

    it’s different traffic – as pointed out.

    If you took an origin/destination survey of traffic of I-95 on Wednsday at 7am, you’d get a totally different result than if you took a similiar survey on Saturday at noon.

    Second – if you look at occupancy. On weekends – “carpools” if you will and or weekdays – SOVs.

    The weekend traffic is much more discretional.. when it gets really bad – people stay home or time shift – or they are 1/2 day late to the beach or grandmas…

    that’s very different than 2 hours late to work every morning…or more likely.. having to get up at 4am to get to your daily job because of gridlock-like conditions.

  13. Ray Hyde Avatar
    Ray Hyde

    “Create a level playing field and Big Boxes go away.”

    How is that a level playing field? If it were a level field there would be a place for big boxes and a place for Mom and Pop.

    You have assumed that it is desirable to make big boxes go away, in spite of considerable economic evidence to the contrary. What if it turns out that the economic benefits to consumers are such that they can afford to pay the externalities and still have more money left over? What if it turns out that the additional costs of patronizing Mom and Pop are such that there is less money available to pay for externalities, and more congestion as a result?

    What is the congestion difference betweeen trucks running around bringing supplies to a gazillion M&P’s (at lower efficiencies) and having trucks bringing supplies to fewer big boxes? In the end, each item consumed is going to be delivered to each home, one way or the other. Is it really better to prvide more of the delivery in big lumberng trucks? Or do we do better by dispersing the delivery decision to the user, so he can pick up stuff on the way home, in smaller more flexible and more efficient vehicles?

    Isn’t this exactly why dispersed computing is more useful and efficient?

    EVERY economic activity can be argued to affect someone else. If we use Pigovian analysis wrongly, we can essentially deny any and all use of private property, by unfairly pointing out “negative externalities”.

    How can you put any argument about a fair playing field in the same paragraph that uses phrases so conducive to a one sided view of the situation?

    I’m not convinced that who is harming whom is quite so obvious. I don’t agree that every economic effect on someone else is a negative externality or that externalities always justify any required state action to prevent it.

    Artificially preventing externalities is an externality itself. Neither are political checks on (or affirmation of) the decisions and/or excesses of regulators sufficient.

    If the economic basis for the arguments are wrong, then they have no moral or even normative basis either, because we all depend on good economics, measured on a level playing field.

    OK, so big box stores depend on low cost goods provided by low cost labor in far away countries. Even after you add in the enormous transportation costs, isn’t that still leveling the playing field?

    Maybe I would like to grow and sell watermelons. The fact remains that I can drive to Georgia and buy them, and bring them back, cheaper than I can grow them here. Create a level playing field, and Georgia Watermelon Growers go away.

  14. Ray Hyde Avatar
    Ray Hyde

    “If the Feds did one simple thing – move most of their defense work to Quantico or HORRORs A.P.Hill in Caroline County – NoVa commute issues would change dramatically.”

    QVD. End of story.

    It is worse than that. The Feds don’t even have to move. All they have to do is remove the common contract clause that says a contractor must be located with 25 miles of the agency.

    All they have to do is stop requiring contractors to come in and work on site – where they then spend most of the day on emails and reports: just so some GS13 can exercise “control” over something that he knows so little about that he has to hire someone else to do it.

  15. Larry Gross Avatar
    Larry Gross

    re: “All they have to do is stop …..”

    Ray.. there are more than a few things we don’t see exactly eye-to-eye on.

    This is not one of them.

    On this issue – we are in … get this… 100% agreement.

    There .. _are_ some jobs that require allday physical presence.. but for the most part – many Fed and contractor jobs are not about physically creating or maintaining something – especially in the DC area.

    Much of the “hands-on” work is done external to the DC area on military complexes… contractor facilities…

    The problem in the Wash Metro Area is pretty much as Ray describes it.

    Your basic government office is run by individuals who do not use performance metrics to judge progress but rather.. word-of-mouth and meetings… and the progress reports themselves are “after-the-fact” .. documentation.

    Much of the Fed/contractor work in the Wash Metro Area IS.. in fact.. information… that could be done at telecommute locations.

    Even some classified work could be done at secure sites distributed throughout the region.

    The truth is that there is a separate and secure military network that is used by almost all military bases AND overseas bases AND even the Navy Fleet and while you cannot have this network in people’s homes – there is such a widespread physical presence of secure sites throughout the Wash metro Region such that employees should be able to go to a nearby site and do much of their work.

    But .. the problem is.. that many Fed bosses .. don’t know how to manage people and projects that they cannot physically observe… and so they actually lobby against telecommuting… in their respective workplaces.

    The FEDS .. COULD .. make Wash Metro a MODEL tele-commuting area to demonstrate that telecommuting can have a major beneficial effect on congestion – ..

    Further.. they could PROVE that those folks that need to go out 50 miles for more “affordable housing” .. COULD…

    POGO – “we have met the enemy and he is us”.

  16. Ray Hyde Avatar
    Ray Hyde

    I agree about the classified stuff. That cannot go everywhere, but it could go to remote secure computing sites. And a lot of that classified stuff is, I hate to say it, common sense that anyone would know or understand if they thought about it for five minutes. It is classified not because it is really a secret, but because it is more valuable and more costly that way.

    “We need to understand the difference in terms of impacts between regional home-work commuting rush hours – and weekend shopping congestion because the fixes may not be the same.” I don’t think so. Whether it is jobs or shopping, cogestion is caused by too much crap in one place. I’m just not sure what the most cost effective distribution model is. Somewhere there must be a balance between Mom and Pops on every corner and super megastores a hundred miles away.

    Freedom Works says more big boxes will reduce traffic in some situations. I just don’t know.

    —————————-

    “
    … as opposed to telling business where it can locate or not – on a more abitrary basis – that cannot be justified with impacts that are deemed to be not-mitigatable at the locale level.

    … this is the issue with telling any business or any employer that it cannot locate – period – because of impacts to the regional infrastructure….

    The decision – cannot be – arbitarary and capricious…. magic legal words…”

    Yet, we do exactly that with respect to refusing to locate housing – even when the supposed impacts cannot be justified. Even when the supposed damages are all out of proportion to the allowable (agricultural) remedy.

    I’ll say it again. The stuckee, (individual or corpaoration) ought to be able to see when the rules are in his own long term interests, AND the stickor ought to be able to show when those values will become available. Otherwise, it is all smoke and mirrors, or else confiscation.

    ———————

    It is a simple, four-part argument.

    a) No one expects that the government can occupy and take possession of your property without compensation.

    b) No matter how large the benefit of taking the property is to the public, nothing would be so high as to justify violating a).

    c) the government cannot ethically set itself up as judge, jury, and adjudicator if it is actually operating in a condition of agency.

    d) Somewhere between occupying your property and leaving you entirely alone there is a balance between the amount of occupation, the degree of beneit, and the level at which government is actually acting as an agency for the majority.

    All impacts are mitigable if we simply admit that zoning is for sale: that there is a market for the benefits and the impacts.

  17. Larry Gross Avatar
    Larry Gross

    I think it is as simple as this.

    You can do whatever you wish with or on your property as long as it does not affect other property owners including those who occupy properties and pay taxes for doing so.

    What government is – in reality – is other property owners agreeing to what the rules are with regard to what things you can do with your property – if they DO affect others.

    Owning property does not give you the right to pollute others properties or to impose other impacts on other property owners.

    So .. if you want to put a big box on your property – you cannot do that without affecting others.

    So don’t blame the big bad government for “taking” your property rights.

    You’re actually talking about “rights” that you do not have to start with – and what government does – is allow your fellow property owners to nix any plans that you have that they don’t like the impacts.

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