In a hissy fit more appropriate for my four year old, the National Trust for Historic Preservation has again placed the entire state of Vermont on its list of America’s 11 Most Endangered Places. Other entries on the list appear to be genuinely historic structures facing imminent threat. For example, heres how the Trust describes the threat to Elkmont, “the last remaining collection of early 20th-century Tennessee mountain resort buildings”:
Since the National Park Service (NPS) assumed control of Elkmont in the early 1990s, inadequate maintenance – coupled with a debate over whether the area should be allowed to return to its “natural†state – has resulted in serious deterioration of the vacant wooden structures that comprise the 60-acre National Register-listed historic district; already, the rambling Wonderland Hotel is in such bad condition that it must be razed. This de facto demolition by neglect is an imminent threat to all of the remaining structures in Elkmont if action is not taken. Viable uses for the buildings exist – but unless the ongoing neglect is halted soon, Elkmont will crumble.
So what’s the imminent threat facing all of Vermont? Why, Wal-Mart, of course:
During the 1990s Wal-Mart located three of its four Vermont stores in existing buildings and kept them relatively modest in size. Now, however, the world’s largest company is planning to saturate the state – which has only 600,000 residents – with seven new mammoth mega-stores, each with a minimum of 150,000 square feet. Theses potential new stores may be located in St. Albans, Morrisville, Newport/Derby, St. Johnsbury, Bennington, Rutland, and Middlebury. Wal-Mart’s plans are sure to attract an influx of other big-box retailers. The likely result: degradation of the Green Mountain State’s unique sense of place, economic disinvestment in historic downtowns, loss of locally-owned businesses, and an erosion of the sense of community that seems an inevitable by-product of big-box sprawl. With deep regret, the National Trust takes the rare step of re-listing Vermont as one of America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places.
First off, it’s not at all clear that 11 Wal-Mart stores in a state with 600,000 people is “saturated.” That’s a ratio of about 55,000 residents per Wal-Mart. According to that ratio, there should be 74 Wal-Marts in Kentucky, a state with a population of 4,041,769 in 2000. Wal-Mart’s store finder does not permit a search by state, but a search on superpages.com finds 291 listings for Wal-Mart in Kentucky - Even assuming 3 listings per store (very conservative), that’s at least 97 Wal-Marts, and Kentucky doesn’t seem particularly “saturated.”
I used to have great respect for the National Trust, and believe the the best way to protect “historic” structures is for those who are interested in protecting such structures to get together and raise funds to protect them, such as Mount Vernon, which is owned and operated by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, a private, non-profit organization founded in 1853 by Ann Pamela Cunningham. In fact, it was the Trust’s work preserving Montpelier that got my attention in the first place. Somewhere along the way, however, the National Trust lost its way, and including Vermont on a list of endangered places just proves the Trust has fully joined the list of chattering classes and professional nags that lives to scold the public for making choices of which they do not approve. To belabor an already-belabored cliche, the professional scolding class are now the ones standing athwart at history, yelling Stop! (with all necessary apologies to William F. Buckley).
The National Trust just can’t accept that people are willing to accept the demise of some traditional ways for economic gain, and envisages Wal-Mart as the Godzilla of retail, stomping into small towns in Vermont and discarding quaint downtowns like so much detritus in its wake. Godzilla at least you can explain via H-bombs. What created Wal-Mart? Wal-Mart hasn’t destroyed communities; it was the slow but steady decline of community in its 1950s sense that allowed Wal-Mart to succeed in the first place. If Vermonters really preferred their sense of community to the impersonal corporate face of Wal-Mart, then the four stores that have opened there since 1993 would have failed, and Wal-Mart wouldn’t be planning seven new ones. Like everything else, the choice of what to buy, where to buy it, and what to pay for it is an individual choice that requires the balancing of various interests. Some people prefer to trade some measure of service for lower prices, some don’t. That the National Trust would prefer that consumers make different choices doesn’t mean that the evil corporation from Bentonville has overwhelmed naive Vermonters, it just means the market values these factors differently than the Trust does. Wal-mart exists solely because consumers want it to, and the public doesn’t need the Natinal Trust to protect it from itself any more than it needs Michael Jacobson to do the same.
In this sense, I’m reminded of the efforts to blame “wrong” consumer choices on factors like “network effects,” such as the choice of PCs over Macs or VHS over Beta. In those cases, consumers valued lower prices and increased choices over what they perceived to be marginally better quality and usability. This doesn’t make the consumers wrong, it means they valued things differently than those who made other choices. The market works when left alone, and market failures are most often the product of bad regulation. That’s just the way it is, and hopefully Vermonters will ignore the National Trust’s efforts to make them feel guilty for exercising their rights to participate in a free market economy.
As always, more in-depth analysis at Always Low Prices.
