"Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, is employing a new tactic to get around a Maryland town ordinance that limits store sizes — build two outlets right next to each other," Associated Press reports. "Wal-Mart will build adjacent stores in Dunkirk, Md. with one outlet being constructed so that it will be just under the 75,000 square-foot limit."
Well isn't that special.
In a way, it almost reminds me of developers who build one mall right next to another one, in order to skirt terms of their leases with existing anchor stores - regardless of whether this makes for an unpleasant pedestrian ambiance that makes no sense. Like in Natick.
Thanks to Timothy Lee for passing along that nugget.
The front cover of the Pioneer Press last week had a great article on a massive development project along 94 in the city of Woodbury, MN. Once again, the good intentions of the city council of Woodbury, were overtaken by the greed and corrupted mindset that a growing city has pervasively repeated. City councils are perhaps the single greatest threat to a sustainable and healthy community that was once part of the American culture. City councils nowadays looks at development in terms of what they are getting, not in what they are losing. This is corrupt. Massive big box companies like Wal-Mart, Cost-Co and Home Depot are in bed sucking the large cocks of the city councils. Perhaps the most corrupt relationship that any elected officials are apart of. It would be called a crime that if we were to have preserved the land for permanent open space than for development. But for some reason, city councils are for concrete jungles. Its called Mono-Culture; Woodbury looks like Eagan, Eagan looks like Maple Grove, Maple Grove looks like Chanhassen. The backwards philosophy that city councils have; a car-centric, shopping center driven, accessibility and convenience orientated, leads to massive obesity rates, horrendous traffic congestion, irreversible habitat destruction, and an impending community behavior that is robotic and sterile. The city councils of all growing cities need less incentive to develop, more environmentally conscious elected officials and perhaps the most important, the need for less humans, not more. Massive concrete heat pads and less green space equals a mundane and a less purposeful lifestyle. The suburbs essentially are on an irreversible and catastrophic spinning vortex of gluttonous death.
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