The Associated Press reports that city officials in West Covina, California have blocked a developer from buying a San Gabriel Valley property that was slated to become home for another Wal-Mart and Home Depot. In a 3-2 vote on January 21st, the council voted not to sell 48 acres of a former landfill for $12.8 million to Eclipse Development Group. The developer was in negotiations with Wal-Mart for the property. Local residents complained that Wal-Mart would drive local retailers out of business and replace high-wage jobs with low-wage jobs. “West Covina has over 1,600 businesses, and many of the services provided by these businesses would have been duplicated by a Wal-Mart coming into town,” one city councilor said. “Moreover, we want the new jobs coming into town to be well-paying jobs that respect our middle-class working community.” The developer claimed to be surprised by the vote.
“We were instructed to bring in the best sales-tax generators we could for that site,” the developer said. “With Wal-Mart and Home Depot, we had two of the three largest sales generators within the retail industry.”
West Covina joins the growing number of communities, like Manatee County, Florida, and Hood River, Oregon that have rejected Wal-Mart in the past few weeks. Developers aren’t really surprised when communities reject these huge, over-sized stores. Or if they are surprised, they’ve been avoiding reading newspapers over the past several years. Wal-Mart has become the most unpopular form of land use in America.
