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BIG ON BIG BOXES

Many New Englanders embrace retail development, despite past battles

BY JOEL GROOVER

New Englanders have a reputation for straight talk. And on the topic of big-box stores, some do not disappoint. “We hate ’em,” said Angus Jennings, town planner for Marshfield, Mass., a 350-year-old coastal community southeast of Boston.

But the reality of big-box development in the region is considerably more nuanced. Some communities welcome the projects for their potential to create jobs, fill tax coffers and stretch dollars for the consumer. Maybe this is why a number of cases in the region — which comprises Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont — have taken some surprising turns of late.

Capping the cappers
Vermont, for example, is widely seen as the vanguard of resistance to big-box retail. And yet voters in the southwest Vermont town of Bennington, home to Bennington College, recently shot down a proposed 75,000-square-foot cap on the size of big boxes. The measure was intended to stop the local Wal-Mart from expanding, but some Bennington residents spoke out in favor of a heftier store.

Similarly, a proposed statewide cap of 50,000 square feet on big boxes died in the Vermont Senate this year when St. Johnsbury and other small towns objected that it would threaten their economic plans. (Preservationists predict that the Legislature will reconsider a statewide cap next January.)

Not that New England’s big-box opponents have lost anything in terms of passionate intensity, goodness knows. “The whole premise of Wal-Mart is to come in and put other folks out of business and dominate the market,” said Angelo Lynn, publisher of the Addison Independent, a biweekly newspaper based in the quiet village of Middlebury, Vt. “That’s great capitalism, but does it work for every town? The answer is no.”

Still, big-box chains are on the move elsewhere in the region. The scuttlebutt among brokers is that Lowe’s aims to enter New Hampshire with up to 11 new stores, and Bed Bath & Beyond plans to open as many as 24 stores across New England, says John J. McWeeney, vice president of development at Tedeschi Realty Corp., a Rockland, Mass.-based diversified real estate firm that develops and manages retail centers in southern New England.

To be sure, some communities, from small towns like Middlebury, Vt., to the old-money enclaves of Cape Cod, Mass., are loath to see suburban-style retail projects along their scenic roadways or on the outskirts of their quaint downtowns. But New England is simply too vast and diverse to be accurately portrayed as an anti-development monolith, says McWeeney.

“I don’t see a great reluctance to accept big boxes,” McWeeney said. “A lot of places have them, and we’re beginning to see the growth of lifestyle centers as well.”

In fact, the region’s toughest development constraints may have more to do with infrastructure and topography than politics or aesthetics. Overburdened, decaying roads top the list, says Rick Bryant, a transportation planner at Framingham, Mass.-based Rizzo Associates, which does traffic studies for Target, Lowe’s and other retailers.

“The biggest problem is that almost anywhere you go in New England the roadways are already operating at capacity,” Bryant said. “Because of the potential pass-by customer base that comes with volume, the retailers want to be where traffic is worst.”

We’re not in Arkansas
In a region where the manufacturing base has largely collapsed and the bill for Boston’s Big Dig highway tunnel project has reached a whopping $14.6 billion, government agencies are strapped for cash. That means developers and retailers must pay to fix any traffic problems their projects cause, Bryant says.

“When we work with a retailer from another part of the country like a Lowe’s or a Wal-Mart, we explain to them right up front that all bets are off,” Bryant said. “They might spend $200,000 to go through permitting in Arkansas, but by the time they’re done up here they could be spending $2 million to fix roadways.”

That, of course, assumes the availability of a developable site on business-zoned land — a big “if” in New England, where many retail corridors have been in use for 400 years, says Thomas J. Phillips, a partner at Boston law firm Brown Rudnick, which represents Bed Bath & Beyond, Staples, Target and other retailers, as well as developers.

Such constraints mean that big-box rollouts in New England tend to involve fewer store openings than elsewhere. The Container Store’s 2005 rollout, for example, amounts to a modest three stores in the region, with tentative plans for the opening of three Boston-area stores in the near term, according to a report by Robert Sheehan, vice president of research at Finard & Co., a full-service real estate firm in Burlington, Mass.

“There are second-generation and third-generation spaces that, when they become available, may be viable locations,” Sheehan said. “But a lot of these guys are in a kind of sit-and-wait mode.”

As a result, big-box chains pay close attention to market shifts that could lead to store vacancies. The pending May-Federated merger, for example, will cause an ownership overlap of competing Filene’s and Macy’s stores at seven Boston-area malls. Sheehan says some of those stores will be closed, creating opportunities for Best Buy, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Kohl’s and Target.

Please recycle
New England developers also keep an eye out for recyclable space. The Shoppes at Farmington Valley, in Canton, Conn., for example, opened in late May on the site of an old public golf course slated to close. The 425,000-square-foot lifestyle center contains such larger boxes as Barnes & Noble, Dick’s, Kohl’s and a Shaw’s supermarket, as well as smaller, locally owned tenants. The center was built by W/S Development Associates and leased by S.R. Weiner & Associates, Chestnut Hill, Mass.-based affiliated companies that routinely collaborate on retail projects.

“Earlier this year, we also redid a horrendous old 1960s-era shopping center, in Hingham, Massachusetts, and turned it into a similar lifestyle center,” said Richard A. Marks, a partner and senior vice president at W/S Development, referring to its Derby Street Shoppes in that town. “It’s anchored by Barnes & Noble, REI and a two-level Crate & Barrel, their first store in that market.”

An advantage to such projects is that local governments and community activists tend to view them more favorably than they would, say, a Wal-Mart Supercenter built from the ground up in a cornfield, says Mary B. Tomolonius, first selectman of Canton (story, Wal-Mart vows to keep a virtual makeover in Vermont virtual). The Shoppes at Farmington Valley, she says, is community-friendly and has wide sidewalks, Main Street-style architectural flourishes and discrete parking.

Such flexibility is the key to working with communities wary of big-box development, says Jennings, Marshfield’s fiercely anti-big-box town planner. Marshfield officials initially opposed an attempt by New England’s 13-store Roche Bros. supermarket chain to build a stand-alone store with a sea of parking out front. “We wanted something that was going to set the tone for this whole area, which is largely undeveloped,” Jennings said.

Instead, the town developed a 100-acre mixed-use district divided into 30-acre spaces, each with its own 1.5-acre park. The new Roche Bros. store, which opens this month, features an entrance facing one of the parks, and an outdoor patio, gazebo and café. “It’s the best-looking supermarket you’ve ever seen,” Jennings said.

Jennings says he hopes the district will absorb new development and help the town stave off conventional big-box projects that, in his view, threaten to cause gridlock, hurt locally owned stores and spoil Marshfield’s rural character.

His stalled plan to replace a downtown strip mall with a mixed-use project, however, shows how in some New England towns even New Urbanism-inspired designs can raise hackles. Town officials tabled the plan in March after residents, who ultimately would have voted on the plan in a public meeting, objected to its high-density housing.

“There would have been people passing out flyers saying, ‘They’re trying to bring a ghetto downtown’ and using the most egregious kind of tactics,” said Jennings.

The reality of the project may be nuanced, but when it comes to the rowdy public square that is New England politics, “straight talk” cuts both ways.