Forty Pages, No Words

Zoning absurdity at its finest in suburban Silver Spring, Maryland

My latest piece at Strong Towns, Does a Thrift Store Really Need a 40-Page Zoning Decision?, was a lot of fun, in a certain way. The answer, of course, is no. But taking a deep, granular look at what actually happens in development disputes gives you a whole different, maddening perspective compared to discussing this stuff in the abstract.

The thrift store in question, as I write at the beginning, is a large chain store—the Savers/Value Village/Unique company—in a pretty standard strip plaza in suburban Silver Spring, Maryland. It’s basically the last thing I’d expect to be enveloped in some kind of zoning or land-use dispute.

I don’t remember how, but a couple of years ago I came across the document that inspired the piece. It’s the findings and summary of an appeal brought by a neighborhood association, which argued that the thrift store had wrongly been granted a permit. In the end the store opened, and the whole kerfuffle amounted to nothing. Except a big waste of time and opportunity cost.

There was too much in those 40 pages to recount everything, and too many points to make, so I’ll just give you a little more here.

First I’d like to go back to something I highlighted in the piece, where people who opposed the thrift store were arguing instead for a bookstore, hardware store, or arts and crafts store. As my parents used to say, nice to want. If the overall community could support such a store, it would probably already exist. The thrift store did market research which indicated that the location was a very good fit for them. It’s almost certain that their market research is more rigorous and correct than any impressions held by a community association of old-guard homeowners.

(A bit of a parenthetical: as far as finding a close replacement for the Ames, such stores—larger than a dollar store, smaller than a Walmart—effectively no longer exist. There were once dozens of such chains, some closer to the variety or five-and-dime store and some closer to a “full-line” discount department store like Walmart. Ames, Jamesway, Caldor, Woolworth, Bradlees, Laneco, many more—these stores died out rapidly in the 1990s and early 2000s, for reasons far above anything a zoning board can affect. K-Mart is one of the last surviving incarnations of the discount department store at this smaller-than-Walmart scale.)

At one point in the document, one of the appellants against the thrift store noted that everyone shopped at the old store (Ames, a K-Mart-style discount department store) but didn’t expect to shop at the thrift store. That’s a little bit like the old (and quasi-apocryphal) line to the effect of “How could Nixon have won? Nobody I knew voted for him.” Or, you might say that, channeling Groucho Marx, that community associations are to communities what military justice is to justice.

Here’s that bit:

“She [a state senator] characterized the proposed use [thrift store] as a flea market, and clarified that despite having characterized it as a department store in her letter, she does not believe it is a department store. She stated her belief that the proposed store was not like Ames or Zayre, which she said she and her neighbors all patronized.”

The polite and evasive language to the effect of questioning whether the store really serves the community is, obviously, hiding some racism and/or classism. The head of the neighborhood association declared that she wants to support the local community, but laments that the thrift store is not “community-oriented.” A Safeway representative—the plaza is also home to a Safeway supermarket—argued that a thrift store would attract “people looking for opportunities that can lead to some unsavory associations, all of which may … make our customers apprehensive in general.” Come on, spit it out!

The notion that a thrift store will move in and ruin the community and/or bring in the “wrong people” echoes the old arguments against black families moving into those leafy suburban communities where, to put it far more nicely than it deserves to be put, the residents liked their neighbors like their picket fences.

It also gets the causality backwards. And it also misses the interesting trend of increasing appeal for thrifting even among pretty affluent folks. A representative from the thrift store notes this exactly. Unlike when it was built, the community is now socio-economically quite diverse, and thrifting has appeal for all of those segments, from college students to working-class folks to recent immigrants to anybody who loves a deal.

As I noted in the piece, I have personally been to that store probably hundreds of times. Once I was asked for bus fare, and a few times I waited in line while people paid with coins. Once I almost got into an argument with another collector over who got to the vintage stereo receiver first. That’s the full extent of the “unsavory” or “apprehensive” situations I found myself in. Often, I was one of the only white people in that store. That never made me uncomfortable, but after a few visits, I stopped even noticing it.

Another angle here is the obsession over whether the thrift store as a whole, or even the individual items on the shelves, are compatible with the plaza’s zoning designation—C-1, or neighborhood commercial. We learn in this document that “the C-2 zone [the level of intensity above C-1] allows shopping malls, department stores, auto dealers, and delicatessens, which he testified are not allowed in the C-1 zone.”

Delicatessens? Zoning is legally based on the state’s police power. How on earth is banning a deli in a neighborhood commercial zone a legitimate use of that power? The regulatory creep here is basically absurd.

It also becomes clear that there’s a lack of holistic thinking going on in these debates. For example, there’s concern over how much traffic the thrift store will bring to the community. Of course, a traffic study is recommended. But there’s no consideration of the opportunity cost of having a vacant building sitting there, deteriorating, not producing any tax revenue. Yet that is a real cost.

What about the fact that the volume of donations, especially of things like used electronics, probably saves the municipality some costs on waste and e-waste? Why isn’t that part of the consideration? (E-waste may be a relatively small issue at this level, but it is one that municipalities are forced to handle despite generally being ill-equipped to do so.)

I’m not saying we should layer on yet another level of regulation or analysis, but rather that it’s probably all unnecessary. It isn’t as if nobody has ever opened a thrift store in a strip mall before. Yet the most mundane and everyday proposals are treated as if they’re radical and untested.

That’s enough, but I’ll end by adapting Churchill: we shape our zoning codes, and afterwards they shape us.

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Related Reading:

Supermarkets and Diversity

Assorted Thrift Store Thoughts

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