The folks at Home Depot HQ in Atlanta, Georgia may have assumed that they could paint the small town of Rindge, New Hampshire orange, but the reality has turned out to be quite different. This week Sprawl-Busters received the following status report from local residents fighting the world’s largest home improvement chain: “Two years after a new, large Home Depot store was proposed for Rindge, New Hampshire, a group of taxpayers has assembled to fight this proposal. Unlike virtually all other Home Depots in the region (more than 20 were analyzed), this one does not sit near a major 4- lane highway. Instead, it is fed by two-lane highways, some very narrow, that are the only way for accessing the proposed site. The amount of increased traffic on these roads created by the proposed development will be horrendous, and the degradation of the rural
nature of the adjacent communities will be profound. Home Depot has no interest in these issues, and is instead indicating that their store will increase the tax base of this town, whose southern boundary is the Massachusetts state line, where most of the Rindge Home Depot customers will come from. The issue has been cooking for two years, and may go on for many more, given Home Depot’s historic reluctance to give up any fight that it has initiated.”
New Hamsphire has no sales tax, so the border towns are always attractive to retailers trying to bring in customers from Massachusetts. The town of Rindge has several Home Depots within an easy drive in Keene, New Hampshire and Leominster, Massachusetts. A Home Depot could never survive just on Rindge population alone. Home Deport is willing to cannibalize its own stores to increase total sales volume. For local contacts fighting Home Depot in Rindge, contact [email protected]
