SAY NO TO HOME DEPOT
The Home Depot meeting is at City Hall (3500 Pan American Drive) tonight at 7 pm. Please one and all come and show your support for the Grove.
Home Depot will not take NO for an answer and they are bargaining wtih threats. They actually feel that 15 tractor trailers delivering supplies DAILY, will not be a problem. No one knows how they are going to enter the area whe they are coming from the north and on the other side of the US 1 median.
I guess they'll just plow through any open streets. 32nd Avenue will become a mess.
They also are studying traffic patterns at odd hours and on summer days when there is no school traffic and not the usual yearly traffic, since there aren't many tourists either and work patterns are slower in summer months. Home Depot is good at scamming people.
JUST SAY NO to Home
And as for the Milam's family claiming that now they will get the store they always wanted. GROW UP. There are no free lunches. With Home Depot controlling the lease, your days are numbered.
posted by Tom Falco at 8:00 PM
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4 Comments:
I think your community is awesome to come together and work so hard to prevent something that collaboratively you all do not want. Great community!
I can't be there, but I'm with you in spirit. Screw the Depot. This is a bad, bad call on their part.
Best of luck.
Let's be honest, we've all shopped at Target, the Christmas tree shop, K-mart and other retail stores. They have low prices and provide one-stop shopping; a prized asset with this areas worsening traffic. So why should we work to stop more of them from being built and consider moving our patronage to other stores further away or higher price mom and pop stores? The fact is, no matter how convenient or budget-friendly big box retailers may be to us, they have an enormous negative impact on the community. Like blisters mistaken for healthy growth, they stress nearly every aspect of our community as they gobble up land, hundreds of thousands or square feet of floor space at a time, leaving mothballed hulks in their tracks and their traffic issues that create more pollution for us.
What are we doing to increase our neighborhood protections from this? I know some of the changes are well intended, but it may take time to separate those changes from the ones designed to give developers absolute power. Developers have an opportunity to appeal any decision made by bureaucrats, boards or commissions of our city council. In fact they see law suits as just another tool in their toolbox that they use often. Neighborhoods, local stakeholders and citizens deserve the same opportunity to appeal decisions that directly affect them.
Let’s give neighborhoods a chance to win other battles, which will be fought uphill the entire way against developments going on all over Coconut Grove, in your neighborhood and in mine.
Should we champion the neighborhoods fighting the Home Depot? Should we ensure that opportunities in our neighborhoods to integrate small-scale retail are not lost? Right now the developers have chosen to create a big box home depot that will undoubtedly fail for us in the near future. Let’s see the office space and affordable housing then! Where is it? We have to see to believe it. I believe our town is being taken for ride here.
Every big box retailer adds cars to arterial streets by the tens of thousands, clogging already congested intersections and thoroughfares. If big boxes are to rein over Coconut Grove, they must be held responsible for the traffic and other issues they cause.
An issue that receives far too little attention is that the vast majority of big box retailers are non-union. Even as starving students, the money saved by shopping at Home Depot instead of a local corner store contributes to a company that sees nothing wrong with paying its employees minimum wage with no benefits while preventing them from organizing. Personally, I prefer to pay an extra 5 dollars for a Christmas tree or 25 cents for a box of Kleenex at the corner store and know that I'm not contributing to the degradation of the people checking me out.
Locally owned businesses also suffer with the presence of big boxes. Some people undoubtedly see no value in "mom and pop" businesses, but they are an important part of our community that prevents the homogenization of Coconut Grove.
We need to start thinking about Buffer zones for neighborhoods and time restrictions for truck deliveries and garbage pickup. This may seem extravagant at first glance, but picture for a second living with a family and a baby only several feet away from 24-hour parking lot lights, loitering customers, outdoor fertilizer and potting soil displays, idling trucks and a giant red sun in the shape of a "K", crowds of people leaving Bars at 3 am. Do neighborhood protections and fines for messy businesses still seem so frivolous? And not just for Home Depot but for crowded neighborhoods with new development all over Coconut Grove.
Few people consider that we heavily regulate where pornography - a perfectly legal product - can be sold simply because we "don't like" stores that sell it and "don't like" their impact on our community. I'm not advocating removing any regulations on pornography, but the analogy shows the importance and legitimacy of limiting business rights in our neighborhood. Why aren’t we fining the local bar that has thousands of cigarette buts outside and rats out back?
The big box issue will remain at the forefront of our City’s agenda. Let's hope that Coconut Grove will fall under the category of "never again." The decisions for Assembly Square are not final. Some may consider big boxes to be an issue only for elitist liberals. I prefer to believe that a larger group of people can appreciate the seriousness and complexity of these issues.
Here is what we need to do stop Home Depot, check it out: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/05/24/BAGM8J15531.DTL
also other towns pass all kinds of ordinances to make these places pay living wages, benifits, insurance in order to be a part of their community. Why can't we?
Check out what Chicago is doing:
http://www.socialpolicy.org/index.php?id=848
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