Tuesday, January 20, 2004 ; Page B01
'Big-Box' Stores Leave More Than a Void
By Eric M. Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
To its neighbors as well as urban planners, a new "big-box" retail store brings choking traffic, an oceanic stretch of parking and soul-deadening architecture.
Now, it seems, there may be something even worse: An empty big-box store.
With brutal competition sending some chains to the graveyard and forcing others to move up to bigger and bigger quarters, the carcasses of empty big-box stores are increasingly littering the landscape of America 's outer suburbs and small towns.
"It's mind-boggling how often it happens," said Lisa Rother, a planner with Montgomery County .
Across the country, 245 former Wal-Marts sit empty or partially empty, including stores in Hagerstown and Fredericksburg , according to the company. In Prince William County , which has long welcomed the biggest of big boxes, sit four empty shells: a former Hechinger, a former Kmart, a former Ames and a former Lowe's.
"It's not easy trying to fill something that has little use other than [as] a wind tunnel," said Al Norman, a Massachusetts-based activist who runs a group called Sprawl-Busters. "It's enormously wasteful, environmentally destructive and downright unsightly to have our roadsides littered with these dead stores."
Local governments are increasingly fighting back -- trying to discourage, or at least rein in, the uncontrolled spread of these cinder-block giants that have become ubiquitous on the suburban landscape.
In the Washington region, Rockville prohibits stores larger than 65,000 square feet. So does Easton, MD, which also requires any store over 25,000 square feet to get special approval by the Town Council. Gaithersburg imposed design standards that required big boxes in the Washingtonian Center to front the street and lose the giant surface parking lots. The result: two-story Target and Kohl's stores with hidden parking garages.
*Prince William is considering going a step further. Officials are proposing a "poison pill" provision that would require retailers to take down a store if it is left empty for a certain length of time. If the measure were approved this year, Prince William would be among the first to adopt such a hard line.
"They are giant billboards for our communities and with enough lighting to allow an alien spaceship to land," said Ruth Griggs, a former Prince William supervisor, when she introduced the measure last year.
In Griggs's neighborhood, Lowe's recently closed its 105,092-square-foot store near Potomac Mills mall to move less than a mile away, where it built a 176,605-square-foot store.
The new Lowe's was built next door to an empty 97,547-square-foot Hechinger store, which has been vacant for the past five years.
"It's not creating any new jobs or new businesses," Griggs said recently. "It's driving values down, creating blight and taking valuable land. And you're left with a dead, empty building."
Empty stores are sometimes a magnet for graffiti, dumped furniture and unsavory activities.
Just a few feet from the bustling new Lowe's, the Hechinger parking lot is empty, the old store surrounded by garbage, dumped mattresses and a broken toilet. An old sign advertising African violets still hangs over the empty garden center. Down the street at the dark Lowe's, rusty propane containers sit in the open, next to a smashed bedroom set.
Griggs said one problem is that there obviously was no incentive for Lowe's to expand its old store or refurbish the Hechinger store.
"It's less of a hassle for them to just put the new one up than to reconfigure an empty store that they, ironically, killed," said Norman, the superstore critic.
The empty hulks present ever tougher economic development challenges to communities. It is one thing to find a new tenant for a vacant Woolworths store on a local Main Street . It is quite another to lease the 184,204-square-foot former Incredible Universe store in Woodbridge , which sat empty for four years.
Jason Todd, spokesman for the International Mass Retail Association, a trade group representing many big-box retailers, said companies want to quickly find new tenants or owners for their "dark" stores. "It just doesn't look good to have one of your stores empty."
Todd said requiring companies to take down empty buildings would add to the cost of business and wouldn't work in the case of such failed chains as Hechinger and Ames . Instead, he suggested that localities provide financial incentives for retailers who quickly find a new tenant for their vacated big-boxes.
Lowe's said the company is actively trying to sublet the old store. The company currently has 30 empty big boxes across the country.
"We have a pretty good track record, but it takes a couple of months to find someone to take that large of a space," said Chris Ahearn, a company spokeswoman.
There are some successes. The Incredible Universe building in Woodbridge was converted into office space for General Dynamics. Another nearby Hechinger store was converted into a Best Buy.
When Swedish furniture giant Ikea replaced its outlet in Potomac Mills with a much bigger one, the old Ikea was converted into a multiplex. And the Hechinger building next to the new Lowe's might find a new life as a Ford dealership.
Prince William County Executive Craig S. Gerhart said some amount of retail churn is natural, such as when CVS drugstores throughout the county vacated strip malls to build new, larger, standalone stores with drive-through windows. And some empty boxes, such as the former Ames and former Kmart stores off Route 1, actually can help improve an area by providing an impetus for redevelopment of older, failed strip malls or "power centers."
There are likely to be more empty big boxes as chains super-size their stores. Wal-Mart is focusing on replacing smaller stores with super centers that top out at more than 200,000 square feet, twice the size of many of its older stores. The giant retailer has slated an additional 87 stores for closure this year.
"The profit and volume is there," said Thomas Razukas, a retail analyst with Fitch Ratings in New York . "What is happening is that the smaller store has limits, and they have been exceeded."
He said the limit would be reached only when stores are too big for customers to navigate easily on foot.
Big-box retailers also are eyeing locations closer to affluent urban areas. Home Depot and Best Buy recently opened in the District, and Target is soon to come.
That puts greater pressure on urban planners to ensure these behemoths are woven smartly into the urban fabric.
Eileen Fogerty, Alexandria 's planner, said the city requires any store bigger than 20,000 square feet to get special permission. City leaders acted after several retailers were interested in putting a suburban-style big-box store near the Braddock Road Metro station north of Old Town . That would be the exact opposite of the transit-friendly development the city wants near Metro stops.
"And then if they leave, you've got this huge, empty 105,000-square-foot site," Fogerty said.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
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