Holy Toledo, Batman!

Publisher’s Note:

Having moved to Sydney from the States in 1995, I am sensitive to generic slurs against all expat Americans. The US is a vast nation of diverse regions: California is as far away from Ohio as Sweden is from Egypt. And the regional differences are almost as vast.

Less than twelve hours after this fortnight’s edition of the City Hub hit the street, a “Septic Tank” (as we Yanks are called locally) became Premiere of NSW. When the City Hub went to print the night before, Kristina Kerscher Keneally (KKK) was the Planning Minister for the State. Who would have guessed she would be elevated to the State’s top office the next day? Unsurprisingly, the anti American rhetoric is running thick and fast.

KKK moved to Sydney in 2004 and has lived in Australia one year longer than I have. My concerns about her cultural background are now doubly troubling.

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Kristina Kerscher Keneally should know a thing or two about shopping centres. Born and bred in Toledo, Ohio, KKK’s hometown sports more mega box stores, faceless chain outlets and struggling shopping malls than any one Midwest community ever could support. Holy Toledo sits midway along the rust belt that girdles the Great Lakes: somewhere between Detroit’s decaying sprawl and Ohio’s largest city — Cleveland, which locals call “the mistake on the lake.’

Now NSW Planning Minister, KKK’s local electorate includes Green Square and Redfern-Waterloo. Combined, her South Sydney neighbourhoods comprise the inner city’s largest urban revitalisation project since Lord Mayor Frank Sartor worked hand in hand with the State Labor government to redevelop the Sydney Harbour Foreshore around Pyrmont. His reward was to be catapulted into cabinet as Planning Minister with control over the Redfern-Waterloo Authority and the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority, until KKK was anointed and Sartor was replaced.

Say what you will about her, Labor’s newly appointed real estate agent is no ordinary blonde bombshell. All year long her Department has been busy crafting a new shopping centre policy for metropolitan Sydney. Under the guise of “increasing competition” and “reducing prices for consumers” the Minister’s proposed new laws would grant developers the right to erect massive shopping centres and retail barns the size of football fields without considering their impact on Sydney’s local village precincts. They would be proud of her in Toledo.

To study how large, chain-store operations can destroy a local community at the expense of local business, KKK’s planning department should visit the Minister’s hometown, where big box stores are devouring one another and shopping malls are struggling to survive. In downtown Toledo, the former, massive nine story Macy’s Department Store (which housed a dry goods store for sixty years before Macy’s opened) sat derelict until the City government was forced to maintain the vacant site. As one urban planning expert commented, “The strip malls of Toledo have literally stripped downtown Toledo of its people, and its character–at the expense of the all-American taxpayers.”

With two mega Wal-Marts having recently expanded in Toledo, locals are fighting back, rallying and demanding comprehensive ‘Big Box’ store ordinances to help communities gain more leverage in the development process.  But here in NSW, the State’s Ohio-born Planning Minister is proposing new regulations that will make it easier for Australia’s global retail developers and mega chain store operators to put local, small shops out of business. As The Sydney Morning Herald recently reported on its front page, “[Proposed new laws will] give big developers and supermarkets free rein to open stores. Under the plan, no consideration would have to be given to the effects on small businesses or the proximity of other shops when decisions are made to approve large new stores. The term ‘neighbourhood shop’ would be deleted from local environmental plans.” Once adopted, the State’s planning guidelines will ensure that Sydney’s traditional village high streets, including Marrickville Road, Parramatta Road, the Princes and the Hume Highways all go the way of the American Midwest: malled to death.

Born in the shadow of Detroit, KKK envisions a new Motor City where consumers can drive to malls and big box stores to fill up their cars. In April the Minister told the Herald that her new centres policy would stimulate economic activity “by co-locating business, shopping services and entertainment in centres using transport and other infrastructure more efficiently”. And yet in a world planning for reduced energy consumption, studies in the US consistently find that people who live near small stores are more likely to walk to the shop. While local neighbourhood shops reduce greenhouse emissions, large shopping centres have the opposite effect. Study after study has found that people who live near local, small shops drive less, walk more and use less petrol. Big box stores, chain stores and superstores waste land resources, contributing to urban sprawl and suburban blight; to say nothing of the social cost of spending your money at a mega chain store. Dollars spent at a local shop stay in the local community.  One recent American study showed that for every $100 spent at a local-independent business, $73 stays in the community versus $43 at a non-locally owned business.

Large chain stores suck money out of the local community, while local small businesses provide colour, character and a unique cultural experience. Local small businesses generate local jobs; large retail barns create a workforce of minimum-wage slaves. Having escaped the urban blight of America’s decaying, poorly planned rust belt, the Planning Minister appears hell bent on bringing the same unsustainable, car-dependent sprawl she grew up with in Ohio here to Sydney. Having witnessed the effects of rampant, unregulated retail growth on local small businesses in her home town of Toledo, Ohio, Kristina Kerscher Kenneally plans to bring the same poor planning policies to Sydney, regardless of the social, environmental and economic costs to the Australian community.  In a world where ubiquitous chain stores are hell bent on creating a homogenous retail experience, Sydney could wind up looking a lot like Toledo.