Like savengers cleaning the bones of their kill, several discount chains are lining up to take over the stores of the recently deceased Montgomery Ward department store. When Ward’s shut down a couple of months back (see newsflash below), they left in doubt the future of 250 empty buildings. The retail landscape is cluttered with dead big box stores (Wal-Mart has 400 buildings on the market right now), but the chance that 250 more hulks would sit empty was a worrisome thought to dozens of communities. But a New York based company named Kimco Realty has made a deal with Wards to buy up its stores at an auction. Kimco told the Associated Press that it has deals with companies like Home Depot, Kohl’s, Sears, Target and Wal-Mart. All the big box logos will jump at a chance to get a Ward’s site, rather than go through months of fighting with neighbors — and maybe lose, as many of these stores have. The AP described Kimco as a “leading owner of U.S. retail centers.”
Any local community that has a dead Montgomery Ward store, should be especially vigilant now to see who steps forward to inhabit the old stores. Just because someone else buys or leases the old store, does not mean that a new one automatically can go in. In some of the “takeovers”, the new tenant may want to demolish the old building and put up a new, larger structure more to their format. Residents can raise issues of scale, traffic, devaluation of property, and other site related concerns at the local level. Some of these Ward’s locations were not designed to accomodate big box layouts. The developers will try to make it seem like its just a logo change on the building, but the new tenants will generate far more traffic that a Ward’s ever did, and citizens opposed to such stores moving in should treat the buyuouts as totally new land uses at local hearings. When Caldors died two years ago, companies like Wal-Mart took over leases. Many residents assume nothing can be done about these new tenants, but there may very well be new problems related to a high traffic land use that is a public safety problem due to increasing development since the old Wards was built. Find out what permits these new stores require, and challenge them based on the community’s Comprehensive Plan goals and the Zoning code.
