Wednesday Morning Rant [Joe Mannix]

In case you haven't heard yet, news broke this week that Walmart will be closing its last two stores in the city of Portland, OR. In San Francisco, stores have reducing hours or closing down for years. And that's just the big chain stores. In Portland, many small businesses are closing down and leaving and have been for years.

Why? Crime and public safety. Constant shoplifting that goes unresisted and unprosecuted isn't exactly good for the old bottom line, and retailers won't - and can't - put up with it. For non-retail business, the employees still have to walk through tent cities, dodging vagrants and refuse and keeping their heads on swivels to get to work. That isn't exactly conducive to continuing operations for the businesses that reside there. The central business districts of many cities are hollowing out as the businesses pull up stakes and flee and the retailers close down to avoid continuing losses.

Well, that's what the wreckers would have you believe. Professors like Portland State University criminologist Kris Henning, however, know the truth: it just feels unsafe even though it isn't:

"Social disorder is what really drives people's perceptions of safety," Henning said. "Most people aren't going to get robbed, but if they feel unsafe because they see campers or a lot of garbage or a lot of broken windows, that has a huge impact on their perceptions of safety."

A poll respondent in Portland, though (same link as above), seems to have broken the code:

Lago said she also feels that the city and county haven't done enough to hold those who have committed property damage accountable.

"There seems in the last year to be this permission to do violence," she said.

The central business districts of many American cities exhibit many telltale signs of terminal decay. From Portland to Seattle to Denver and many others, you'll find windows boarded up, vagrants living in tents on sidewalks, needles littering the streets and walkways, graffiti, trash and dirt. You'll be hassled or attacked while walking down the street. Your car will be broken into or stolen, your pocket will be picked and drug-addled zombies will lurch at you.

So normal people do what normal people do: leave. The tax base collapses, property values fall, crime increases further, quality of life declines even more and the ability to get stuff falls. These places become deserts. Retail deserts, food deserts, business deserts, peace deserts. The vacuum will, of course, be filled to some degree. When risks and losses are high, the high-efficiency players get out of Dodge. More risk-tolerant, lower-efficiency players will fill the void and do so at a smaller scale. Smaller stores, smaller selection of goods, higher prices. Then come the inevitable cries of racism and redlining because the remaining desert-dwellers must pay outrageous prices for trash.

The talk of "retail deserts" is already kicking off again, and will only intensify. Nobody will remember what led to the big stores being run out of town and nobody will ask why the new, smaller stores are so expensive. They will make blind assertions - it's racism, of course - but never anything else.

Milton Friedman once said, "If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there'd be a shortage of sand." True enough, but he forgot another part of the equation when it comes to this kind of government people: they will rapidly turn once-verdant areas into deserts at a rapid clip, too.

posted by Open Blogger at 11:00 AM

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