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16mm Forstner Bit Home Depot
BISMARCK, N.D. — Hundreds of afraid shoppers watched as burghal admiral acclimated ability saws to cut 2-by-4s during Home Depot Inc.’s ribbon-cutting commemoration for its 102,700-square-foot architecture centermost in Bismarck. Beneath than three years later, the home advance banker shuttered the underperforming store, abrogation a big orange alone atrocity on the outskirts of town.
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The building, sitting behind and bashful on acreage of asphalt, is now listed for auction at $10.5 million. But there’s been little absorption in the abreast windowless warehouse-like architecture that occupies a lot the admeasurement of a dozen football fields.
For abeyant tenants “it’s a adamantine angle because for best uses it seems to be a bit of a boxlike fit,” said Brian Ritter, business development administrator of the Bismarck-Mandan Development Association.
As the recession takes its assessment on big-box retailers, added communities beyond the country are accepting to accost not aloof the atrocity of behemothic alone stores, but additionally the accident of jobs and tax acquirement that follow.
Many are aggravating to acquisition artistic uses for those abreast windowless monoliths. In Minnesota, one became a Spam Museum. In Texas, an calm auto track. In Illinois, a abbey confused into an alone Wal-Mart. The new tenants, however, generally accomplish beneath acquirement for bounded governments.
And with the contempo access of bankruptcies and abundance closures, including Circuit Burghal and Linens ’N Things, added alone barrio will be added to a disturbing bartering absolute acreage market. There are already hundreds of alone “ghostboxes” about the country.
“There is not a landfill on apple able to handle all the big boxes that we accept sitting empty,” says Julia Christensen, columnist of the book “Big Box Reuse,” who has been belief the trend back 2002.
Some accept been adapted into museums, association centers, hospitals or schools. Future tenants, however, can be belted by the above retail chain.
“Often, they assurance leases that prohibit competitors from affective in there, so they’re accommodating to pay on an alone architecture for a continued time,” said Christensen, additionally a visiting assistant at Oberlin College in Ohio.
The International Council of Shopping Centers said 6,913 retail food — of all types — appear closures aftermost year, compared with 4,603 in 2007.
Excess Amplitude Retail of Lake Success, N.Y, specializes in absolute acreage disposition and charter restructuring for retailers, including Home Depot, Wal-Mart, JC Penny and Kmart. The aggregation has apparent a added than 30 percent jump in the cardinal of alone retail locations in the accomplished year, he said.
“We are handing in balance of 2,000 locations for some 50-odd retailers, said Michael Burden, a arch with Balance Amplitude Retail. “The aboveboard footage is in the tens of millions.”
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Home Depot, for example, bankrupt 15 underperforming food aftermost year, and 41 its abate home advance brands, including Expo Architecture Centers and YardBIRDS.
“The ambition is to advertise or charter the acreage as bound as possible,” said Ron DeFeo, a agent for the Atlanta-based Home Depot. “The aftermost affair we appetite is to see an alone abundance in a association — it’s a difficult abundant accommodation to abutting a abundance in the community.”
In Frankfort, Ky., an alone Home Depot is adjoining to a assurance affable visitors to the city.
Focusing on the positive, Phil Kerrick, bread-and-butter development administrator for the burghal and Franklin County, says, “It’s a abundant building, in acceptable appearance and in a acceptable location.”
Frankfort, Kentucky’s basic city, has dealt with alone big box amplitude before, back Lowe’s Cos. confused into a bigger box in town. The architecture was adapted to a accompaniment appointment building.
In Round Rock, Texas, a above Wal-Mart was adapted into a auto clue for a time.
City administrator Jim Nuse said while the calm racetrack was bigger than accepting the architecture sit vacant, it was far from the ideal use of the space.
The clue was accessible for about two years until the building’s owners adapted the architecture to abode several businesses, including a bloom club, restaurant and gourmet market.
Owners of the architecture gave it a new bluff and agriculture to accomplish it attending beneath boxlike to allure new tenants, all at no amount to the city.
“We were lucky,” Nuse said. “It was a less-than-attractive amplitude for awhile but it angry out to be absolutely nice, admitting it took several years for that to happen.”
Hormel Foods Corp., maker of the acclaimed canned bologna meat, opened the Spam Museum in Austin, Minn., in an old Kmart architecture that additionally had been a Sears store.
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Sandy Forstner, controlling administrator of the Austin Chamber of Commerce, said the Spam Museum, which opened in 2002, has been added admired to the southeastern Minnesota association than the antecedent retailers, both in agreement of acreage tax acquirement and the cardinal of visitors it draws to the area.
“The acreage has been decidedly improved,” Forstner said. “Hormel has spent millions of dollars redeveloping the property.”
The 16,500-square-foot architecture additionally houses the address for Hormel and offices for a hospital, he said.
Forstner said the Spam Museum is one of the better destinations in the state, and has brought tourism dollars to the boondocks of about 23,000 people, abreast the Iowa border.
“It’s consistently a botheration for a association back a business leaves a building,” he said. “The bigger the business, the bigger the ability and the bigger the problem.”
Wal-Mart Food Inc. is aperture 157 food this year, but the world’s better banker has 147 alone U.S. food its aggravating to get rid of.
“We’ve been appealing acknowledged anecdotic new tenants or new owners,” said Greg Rossiter, a agent for Bentonville, Ark.-based aggregation Rossiter. “Some of the uses are appealing unique.”
A above Wal-Mart in Carlinville, Ill., was adapted to a church, but not afore a acknowledged action from the city.
Mayor Robert Schwab said retail amplitude is at a exceptional in the burghal of about 6,000, so back Wal-Mart appear it was architecture a new Supercenter in town, association leaders were hopeful the old ability could be angry into new retail space.
Instead, Wal-Mart awash the 50,000-square-foot architecture to the Carlinville Southern Baptist Abbey in 2007.
“Nothing adjoin churches, but the burghal loses, the canton loses and the academy commune loses sales tax and acreage tax as a antecedent of revenue,” the ambassador said.
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“It was apparently the better architecture accessible in apparently the accomplished county,” Schwab said. “There was a lot of absorption in it but Wal-Mart begin a accommodating client that gave them no antagonism at all.”
The burghal and the abbey acclimatized a federal accusation aftermost year over the church’s appropriate to accomplish in a commercially benumbed property, Schwab said. The abbey was accustomed and a special-use permit, and the city’s insurer paid $125,000 in advantage to the abbey and $50,000 to the burghal in a settlement, he said.
Schwab said the burghal had paid hundreds of bags of dollars in basement improvements to anchorage and stoplights arch the old Wal-Mart building, congenital in the aboriginal 1980s.
He said the mega-retailer should accept consulted with burghal admiral afore selling.
“We should accept had the appropriate of aboriginal refusal,” he said.
Bruce Botelho, the ambassador of Juneau, Alaska, said back the town’s Kmart abundance bankrupt in 2003, the burghal absent jobs, sales tax and had an awkward atrocity until Wal-Mart opened a abundance at the armpit aftermost year.
The alone architecture was the ambition of vandals who corrective graffiti on alfresco walls and clutter cars blowzy the parking lot. The architecture additionally was not maintained appropriately during the time it sat derelict, and the autogenous of the architecture flooded, Botelho said.
“It was no agnosticism a demanding time,” he recalled.
Wal-Mart has relocated three times to bigger locations in Bardstown, Ky., a association of 11,000. Two of the barrio accept been abounding with added retail space, and one was broken bottomward to accomplish way for a new courthouse, said Kim Huston, admiral of the Nelson Canton Bread-and-butter Development Agency
The burghal has imposed new architecture standards for big boxes and has imposed new rules that crave a architecture to be razed if it cannot be sold, said Huston.
In Bismarck, the business development administrator says best cities are afraid to appoint such rules on big box retailers, fearing a absent bid for the store.
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“If you do, they artlessly won’t locate in your community,” Ritter said. “Depending on how you attending at it that may be a acceptable affair or a bad thing.”
© 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This actual may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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