Midtown Walmart Hits Another Snag
September 19, 2016 by Lucas Lechuga
It looks like Walmart’s controversial plans for a new Midtown store have hit another snag. A couple of months back, they were forced to stop construction because their permit expired and then it was discovered that they didn’t have full chain of title on their site. Oops. Now, a city attorney was caught lying to the commissioner in order to influence a zoning decision. Yikes.
According to Grant Stern, the leader of the #NoWalmartInMidtown movement, the attorney lied about their involvement with the project and then emails uncovered from the IT department showed otherwise. When confronted, the attorney said that it was all just because a lobbyist was bothering them. There is already a big investigation going down at City Hall with the city attorney saying that this is all just a big misunderstanding even though the evidence indicates otherwise.
To be honest, I really hope Walmart isn’t able to complete their Midtown project. My personal thoughts on them as corporate citizens aside, they’re just not a fit for that location. The intersection of NE36th Street & North Miami Avenue just to the north of the build site has been named one of the ten worst intersections in South Florida. Could you imagine how the intersection will be after bringing in the traffic from Walmart shoppers and the trucks that will keep the store stocked?
It is a well-known fact that big box stores (especially Walmart) strip communities of their culture and force local shops to close their doors. The Walmart would affect the culture of not only Midtown, but also the neighboring areas of the Design District and Wynwood. It also just seems odd to have a Walmart within a mile of an Hermes store. No?
It’s called a city. Diversity? Choices? Hello? What’s far more “odd” is to have an Hermes store blocks away from folks in dire poverty — the same folks, most likely, the #NoWalmartInMidtown gang would love to see banished to the hinterland. Fortunate for these condodytes of Greater Midtown that Target passs the whiff test, eh? What of bunch of hypocrites!
To be fair, I don’t love the Target location either. What I do love is the culture of each neighborhood and the diversity that comes with it. I would hate to see the local shops of Midtown go through tough times and potentially close because of the big box up the street. The Design District is all about luxury and design, so adds to the area. Another big box would just poison all 3 neighborhoods and make traffic horrendous.
Taxpayers built Midtown, we asked Walmart to play by the rules and build a store that in size and design required by local zoning. They wanted more, a whole lot more. We fought because they cheated. We won because they cheated, and their store design would endanger the very pedestrians who have revived that area from a contaminated brownfield, and cars driving their with a highly illegal driveway that would snarl traffic forever in the district. Walmart never even tried to accommodate us with a legal and legitimate plan to build, instead they forced it through when city employees betrayed… Read more »