alexander ([info]lo_spettro) wrote in [info]oberlin,
@ 2004-04-15 13:49:00
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Entry tags:oberlin in the news, town issues

Wal-mart?
Hey, this is news to me. Anyone care to give a suspended-and-on-the-other-side-of-the-world Obie opinions and whatnot?


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(Anonymous)
2004-04-15 06:32 am UTC (link)
There was an article in the review (at the top of the first page) that I didn't read.

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[info]satc_exco
2004-04-15 06:44 am UTC (link)
I dunno, call me heartless or whatever, but I don't give a rat's arse if Walmart moves in, and I don't understand why Oberlin students who are only here for 4 years max would. If it does take away business from small downtown shops, it's because those small downtown shops are ridiculously overpriced anyway. I don't care what anyone says: Gibson's sucks.

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[info]ilunas
2004-04-15 07:05 am UTC (link)
What it will also take away if those shops close is local charecter and identity. Gibsons has been in this town for over 100 years. The WalMart will not help students like you anyway. It will be two miles away, short by car, but too far to walk. In the proccess it risks closing all the local shops we depend on for daily goods, including (if it turns out to be a WalMart with a grocery section) the Misler's and IGA food stores. This isn't about convienence. This is about the charecter of the town we live in. This is already the poorest county in Ohio. The owners of many of the local stores can't afford to live in the town borders because the rents that absentee landlords charge are too high--rents tailored to the market of relatively rich college students who like to pretend they're poor and starving. WalMart won't help the town economy. Half it's employees across the nation are paid so little that they're on welfare. Culturally, with it's cencoring practices, WalMart stands against most everything that Oberlin is for.

I think thinking that issues in the town don't matter is somewhat small-minded. So you're only here for 4 years, big deal. You're also be an alumnus, and want to come back here again. If you're like many Oberlin students, those years will cause you to form a bond with this place that is lasting. (Note the number of alumni who read this lj community.) Perhaps Oberlin has changed, and if opinions like yours are now the dominent one, it's not changed for the better.

Oh, and lo_spettro,: here's the article in the review.

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[info]jude
2004-04-15 07:14 am UTC (link)
amen. i shop at the 'little stores' -- Gibson's and Kotok's (i'm sorry, it will always be Kotok's) and what have you -- because the grocery money my mother gives me is enough that i can afford to. next year i will be living off of nothing but boiled eggs and green beans -- this year i can afford to eat and live reasonably well, and i believe in supporting local business when at all possible. a few extra dollars isn't too much to pay for produce and goods that are produced in a more humane fashion and/or sold by people who actually pay their employees. big chain stores are cheap because they use cheap materials and don't pay their employees a living wage. i don't care how cheap and convenient walmart is, i will never willingly step through its doors.

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[info]satc_exco
2004-04-15 07:31 am UTC (link)
Please don't say it won't help "students like me" by assuming that I don't have a car. I do, as do a lot of students here. But you're right, Walmart won't help me because I'm leaving after this semester. However, it will help a LOT of people in this town by creating many, many more jobs than it would "destroy" by competing with local businesses.

And I do sincerely dislike Gibson's. The people there are rude and hell to work for (hence the high turnover rate of employees), their produce is often moldy, their prices are obscene compared to SuperK and even Missler's, and they don't even care because they have a monopoly on students without cars.

Here's a question: if, as you claim, students won't go to Walmart because they have no cars, then what is the problem? Local businesses then would still benefit from business from the college students, and they might be inspired to lower their prices and get their acts together to be able to salvage business from others.

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[info]satc_exco
2004-04-15 07:35 am UTC (link)
I forgot to add that you have some nerve to insinuate that my not being opposed to Walmart is some sign of the downfall of Oberlin student opinion. I can have whatever opinions I care to. Feel free to email me (ccira@oberlin.edu) if you have further problems with my personal opinions, but I find it rather cowardly to post such rudeness on a livejournal.

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[info]ilunas
2004-04-15 08:37 am UTC (link)
Okay, I wasn't trying to attack you're personal opions as not worthy of having. However much I disagree with you, you can have whatever views you want. What I was responding to is that you have a lot of support among students I've talked to about this, and I feel that that general sentiment is a sign that we're not as focused on our community as we should be.
~Marshall

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[info]ilunas
2004-04-15 08:31 am UTC (link)
Ok, I'm glad you have a car. It is true that a lot of students have cars, and once WalMart comes, even more students will feel the need to bring cars. I'm not sure that this is a good thing. WalMart will create some jobs, this is true, and I won't deny that there are many people who badly need its low prices. But: WalMart isn't any better to work for than Gibsons, indeed, I'd dare say they're worse. They have a long documented history of being an awful employer. And they won't "compete" with the local businesses. When WalMart first moves in, they artificially set their prices even lower than normal with the express purpose of driving out local competition. There is no way local stores like Ben Franklin can compete with that. Once those stores close, WalMart's prices will go back up a bit. Also, there’s the issue of cultural domination. WalMart has a very specific cultural agenda to the products it chooses to stock, one that is sanitizing towns across America so they become more and more the same. Do we really want Oberlin to be the same as anywhere else? Do we really want a historic small town district to close, and to have future generations of Oberlin students never know that there was once more to this town than just a college, some houses that are owned by absentee landlords, and a giant box of a WalMart two miles south?

In answer to your question directly, the problem is that the local stores can't survive on students alone, especially if many more students bring cars as a result of the WalMart. The stores could lower their prices, but there is no way they could lower them enough to compete with WalMart. Then once those stores close, we’re in a worse situation than the once we have right now.

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[info]infidel
2004-04-15 08:26 am UTC (link)
well said.

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what you said
[info]sunlit_shadows
2004-04-15 09:46 am UTC (link)
yes. you rock.

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walmart
[info]burdenofdreams
2004-04-15 02:36 pm UTC (link)
As for the jobs Walmart will create, I think http://na4lc.org/studies/millerwalmartreport.pdf is an interesting read.

I'll summarize some of the key findings:
Wal-Mart is able to keep prices so low due to the rock-bottom wages it pays its non-unionized workers, coupled with a lack of proper benefits. And it's the American taxpayer who is stuck picking up the slack. The average supercenter worker makes $8.23 an hour. At that low wage, according to a new report put together by Rep. George Miller (D-CA), the average Wal-Mart store would leave taxpayers in a community stuck picking up about $420,750 per year, including in part about "$36,000 a year for free and reduced lunches" for the kids of Wal-Mart families; "$108,000 a year for children's health
insurance costs; $42,000 a year for Section 8 housing assistance; and
$125,000 a year for federal tax credits and deductions for low-income
families." As an example of the size of the problem, look to Georgia, where "Wal-Mart had more employees depending on state health-insurance assistance than any other major employer in the state." In California, a study showed that in 2002, Wal-Mart workers relied on 50% more taxpayer-funded health care per employee than those at other large retail stores, with taxpayers
subsidizing more than $20 million worth of medical care.


I wrote more about this in my journal towards the end of March.

The real shitstorm for the downtown won't come from just the Walmart, but all of the stripmalls which will open up around it. Applebees, Blockbuster Video, etc is also in the works. Plus a ton of strip malls with spaces that will duplicate what the downtown offers, at a cheaper price since it surely will be vinyl shit that is built. the overall size of land that could be commercial is about half the size of the midway mall.

It just strikes me as a real race to the bottom. Whatever short term minimum wage jobs might be gained, the local economy has little chance to ever grow or expand since Walmart will swallow it whole.

And plus, I think we must connect the dots between the destruction of the local economies, Walmart, the reliance folks have on cars and cheap gas and our wars which are at least partially motivated by our addictive need for cheap oil. We pay in one or two ways - we pay more at the pump, or we pay when our family members and neighbors come home in body bags.

I know this is long so I will close with this: I graduated from Oberlin College recently. I work in town. Me and quite a number of others working for Oberlin's sustainable growth welcome more student input and energy into town governance. If progressive values are going to win out in this town, we'll need help. The group of townies who really embody the status quo in Oberlin suck and despite some really good new fresh faces on city council, the old guard still controls most of the power.



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Re: walmart
[info]ilunas
2004-04-15 02:53 pm UTC (link)
thank you, you're quite right. Now I've seen towns where WalMart has been delayed or defeated, but only when the city council and the town residents are against it. As you well sum it up, that's not the situation here. However, I and others would like to do somthing. I remember talking about all this to Liz of Ginkio Gallery back in Septemeber, and got some info, but I also got pretty discouraged about our ability to do anything more than try to organize boycotting once it arrives. You seem more involved in this, what would you say we should be doing?

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Re: walmart
[info]burdenofdreams
2004-04-15 06:27 pm UTC (link)
Some of the details are a bit tedious and I am pretty invested both literally and emotionally in the downtown - so I'll try to be as brief and informative as possible.

Oberlin is in a very difficult position as far as stopping the Walmart goes. The factors working against this are:

1) Terrible land use laws in the state of Ohio that give more weight to property rights then to the community's right to plan its land use as it desires.

2) Years ago, the old city council under some pretty poor legal advice zoned this land commercial in order to coax big box development on that site as opposed to other less desirable sites. The problem in doing this is that had the area been zoned something other then commerical and the Walmart had applied for a zoning change, the city could have been more restrictive in what type of development it allowed. Since the area is already zoned commercial, the town can't just go and all of a sudden change the zoning or permitted uses on the land back to residential or agricultual. Because of the lands commercial zoning status, Oberlin has lost much of its leverage in negotiating with Walmart since it can in no way really stop a Walmart from being built.

3) Many towns have specific design guidelines for big box development. These guidelines help make the development feel a little bit less like a clusterfuck. The guidelines range from issues of light pollution to parking to square footage maximums.
The disgagreement right now on City Council has to do with what those guidelines should be. Daniel, Charles and Eve (the group that ran as the Slate) are in favor of limiting Walmart to 100,000 sq ft and forcing it to have a 200 sp ft setback from the road. They also feel it is unnecessary for Walmart to build 786 parking spaces, which is what their plans call for. The other folks on Council, hearing Walmart complain about sqaure footage maximums and other restrictions, prefer to literally let Walmart do whatever it wants except for minor issues. They fear Walmart will leave, despite the fact that Walmart has conformed in other communities to guidelines such as the ones Oberlin is considering.
And no matter where you come down on any one design guideline or regulation, to give Walmart everything it wants is a poor negotiating tactic. I expect these differences on restrictions to be the made point of contention at Council meetings coming up.

4) Another "win" (its bleak so the victories are minor) for the town would be to try to find a way for all the property owners in this area who will be doing strip malls, applebees, lowe's, etc around the Walmart is to work together on one master plan. To have 6 planned big boxes but none in coordination with each other could turn out to be a real mess

5) Other stuff has been considered by Daniel, Eve and Charles has been stuff like a living wage ordinance. Unfortunately, again, Ohio Courts suck and have ruled municipalities like Oberlin don't have that authority.

6) I wish i could tell you that a lot could be done. At this point I think all folks can do is continue to explain that regulating Big Box Development is not being against discount retail for low income people. It's being for smart growth. We're trying to move this away from the class/race issue that it has become.

7) A lot can be done to keep or depending on your point of view, make Oberlin a vibrant main street community. Some organized movement to keep Oberlin money in Oberlin is a good place to start.
My friends on Council are working on some pretty progressive legislation which will ultimately need the support of people if it is to get passed into law. I would love to be part of some project which solicited student research, activated support around certain issues, etc.

If Oberlin is going to be a cool place to come back to for our reunions, it is going to be because people who "get it" begin to organize and get active, because old school status quoers in this town are pretty well organized.

Oh, and if you see Kirk Ormand, thank him. he's been leading the citizens movement against Walmart.

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a new article i just came across
[info]burdenofdreams
2004-04-16 06:01 am UTC (link)
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/apr2004/nf20040415_1545_db017.htm

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