Home Depot Seeks 4th store on San Fernando Rd!
How many Home Depots can you cram into an 8 mile stretch of San Fernando Road?
If Home Depot has their way, the answer is 4. Home Depot, to the dismay of the Glassell Park/Atwater Village area, is working overtime to take over the former site of a K-Mart at the corner of Fletcher Drive and San Fernando Rd. This is a location that is already
one of the busiest intersections for miles, and lies across the street from the old Van De Kamps building that is soon to be a satellite campus for LACC.
The area has a CDO (Community Development Overlay) plan up for vote by the Council, a mechanism that would essentially prevent Home Depot from opening. This of course has
Home Depot in full battle mode, and they have recently crashed a locally held Planning Department meeting, mailed out postcards in english and spanish with promises of 200 jobs, and have been attempting to collect signatures in support of their project at the Post Office, and various high foot traffic stores in the Glassell Park/Atwater Village area.
Besides the fact that this would place a total of 4 Home Depots on one short stretch of San Fernando Blvd, there is the misleading claim that Home Depot would bring 200 jobs to the area. Richard Greene, the Home Depot Real Estate manager has already admitted (I am sure he is biting his tongue over this revelation), that
Home Depot actually intends to transfer their employees from their Glendale store to this new location, close their Glendale store for a major upgrade, and then hire new employees at that store when it reopens.
So where do the local jobs come in? And what about the local jobs lost as Home Depot, the Great Orange Elephant, drives out all the Mom & Pops and possibly even the Stock Lumber Co. just a few doors up the street?
And what about the missed opportunity for a retail development that would compliment the new LACC campus, and provide sorely needed retail such as sit down restuarants, bookstores, coffee shops,etc., that this area is almost completely without?
Home Depot wants to hear none of this kind of talk, and has even gone as far as making their postcards appear as some sort of grassroots campaign call to arms to allow their store to open; "Help Us to Help You to Bring in 200 Jobs".
In activist jargon, these kind of corporate sponsored "grassroots" campaigns are often referred to as "astro-turf" campaigns. They may look like grass, but, in reality, they are as plastic and as slick, as they come.
You can find out more by visiting: NoHomeDepot.Org
Posted by Unknown @ 10/11/2006 11:51:00 PM
12 Comments:
With Garcetti as Clowncilmember for the area...you can pencil home depot in. He has been craving for more commercial development along that abandoned part of his district and border to Glendale. He's been too lazy to really get his policy staff, planner, and field deputies to build local businesses and community.
Where are City officials on this? Since when does Home Depot get to lie to the public and counter their own management's previous statements? This is mail fraud! This is false advertising! This is an abomination. Home Depot is the terrorist ready to strike your community! This has nothing to do with fair business practices -- HD is a cancer on the face of small business. Stop them now!
The "No Home Depot" team should become the "No Sales Tax Revenue for Los Angeles" team. Thanks to similar efforts by neighborhoods all over L.A., we've allowed cities like Pasadena, Culver City, Santa Monica, and others to take our residents expendable income without bearing all the costs of supporting those residents (i.e. schools, hospitals, firemen, police, etc.).
I've been to the Home Depot stores in our 'hood, and they are waaaaaay better than just about every mom-n-pop Hardware store in the area. If we wanted small businesses to thrive, we'd make different planning and land-use decisions. We wouldn't have chopped up neighborhoods to lay down freeways. We wouldn't demand that property owners offer up so much free parking. But we have done those things, and the result is we get big stucco boxes operated by massive corporations selling to the lowest common denominator of consumer in an area.
Gentrification is actively fought off by neighborhood "activists" all the time - and so we end up with big box retailers. Now these guys are being fought off too. WTF? What's so bad about Home Depot?
I say (sarcastically): MORE HOME DEPOTS! Screw all this bizarre whining. We've invested in everything that makes a Home Depot thrive and now we don't want them to move here?
San Fernando Road is one of the principal light-industrial arteries through the Eastern portion of L.A. and a feeder area to commercial and residential development for much of the San Gabriel Valley.
Home Depot wants this blighted, railroad-bordered spot, that NO ONE else wants, period. Despite efforts by city staff and locals to bring in other retail, it's all a bust. There's no great drive by anyone to put other kinds of retail development, in fact two major grocery chains (Ralphs and Albertsons) have already abandoned this general area in the last year, as did K-Mart before them.
And, the city won't ALLOW a Walmart, for purely political, grandstanding purposes, even though clientele for it is there in droves. Even though a few hundred unrepresentative "gentrifiers" wearing blinders would like to believe this is Eagle Rock-West, or Glendale-South, it's really Cypress Park-North, and (in part because of the HEAVY TRAFFIC already mentioned), it's never going to become some cozy ex-urb watering hole gathering spot, Not lodged between some of the dumpiest McDonalds, Burger Kings, and Denny's, plus sundry 99-cent store variations on all sides.
You live where you live, people. Wake up and smell what's grilling in the local roach coaches parked on every corner.
I'm sooooo tired of this squabling over Home Depot. They have as much right to open their doors for business in America as anyone else! Competition is what makes business good for all. Who out there is giving Home Depot a run for their money? This is not the way to win the competition, by whinning and being victims. Suck it up, get bigger and run Home Depot out of business if you can! In the mean time Home Depot should be allowed to open their doors just as any other business has been able to in this FREE country!
At October 12, 2006 11:23 AM
I have been to the three Home Depots that are less then 10 mins from my house and every one of them are trashy and messy. Can't find any plumbing parts, many times I have gone there and they are out of the part or it's not in the right place. I end up going to another store for the part. The service comes with an attitude.
Only time I see what your saying is in the first 10 to 12 months the store is open. Tax money, there you not telling the truth.
Home Depot will burn out and over build leaving these sites to cost the cities in the long run.
To much is to much!!!
ubrayj02
You are out there. Money has created the damage your talking about and companies like Lowes has better building supplies. Also there stores are clean and neat years after openning, ulike Home Depot. The employees are better at helping you then Home Depot, but the point is'nt Home Depot Verses Lowes, it's Home Depot instead of a better suited store for the hood.
Have 4 HD's in an area that from one point you can go to either one and only be mins away is stupid and a waste of good land. Tax dollars is not the issue.
Home Depot lies and my guess they have your pocket...
October 12 at 6 something p.m.,
You don't understand how "fiscalized" local government in California has become. I would suggest reading up on "Proposition 13" and its effects on local government.
Also, I live in the area where this business is proposed, and I have gone to many different hardware stores in the area. The mom-n-pop places SUCK! They are dirtier than Home Depot, they have NOTHING in stock, and the people who work at them are typically gruff and dumb.
The reality is that mom-n-pop businesses were killed when we decided to turn a perfectly fine, walkable, neighborhood into a damned auto-topia. We route all human traffic into automobiles, and we built freeways for those automobiles to travel on. Figueroa, Cypress Park, Eagle Rock Blvd., Colorado Blvd., etc. have all turned into commercial wastelands as a result.
The big boxes won before anyone invented the big box style of commercial retail. We have dumped trillions into infrastructure that facilitates commerce of this sort. The mom-n-pops have been getting spanked ever since we tore up historic pedestrian-friendly districts and forced everyone participating in our economy to drive a car.
p.s. I WISH I was getting money from Home Depot to write on this inflammatory blog. Your accusation is a cheap tactic that doesn't come close to masking your intensely obvious ignorance.
"Home Depot wants this blighted, railroad-bordered spot, that NO ONE else wants, period. Despite efforts by city staff and locals to bring in other retail, it's all a bust. There's no great drive by anyone to put other kinds of retail development, in fact two major grocery chains (Ralphs and Albertsons) have already abandoned this general area in the last year, as did K-Mart before them."
I would ask you to back up your claims 5:07. What do you know about efforts to bring in other retail that we don't? As for K-Mart, they closed due to a nationwide bankruptcy settlement, that store was always packed when I drove by. Ralphs has been gone for well over a
year, more like 3, and I doubt you have a clue as to why they really closed.
I remember when even Culver City was considered a light industrial artery. But look at it now!
Just because you live in a neglected area doesn't mean you should just roll over and not try to improve it.
Lets remember one thing, you build a home and live in it for years. Every 5 to 10 to 15 years you fix it up. You need food everyday, need cloths every 4 months, need household goods every 6 months, question what would better serve the hood? How much it to much? Just because they are willing to put a store there does it make it the right thing?
It's not just about this spot but the bigger picture...
5:07
That's how Home Depot got that lot and may others, because K-Marts bankruptcy. If this didn't happened you would not have the problem here and in Sunland and many other X-Kmart lots.
We have enough Home Depots already! I'm in S. Glendale and drive by there every day along with the other thousands that take San Fernando or Fletcher to get to or from work. Yeah the Ralphs left, it didn't serve the neighborhood, and now a thriving Super King market is doing killer business in the exact same locaction. There is a captive audience if the right business gets in there. A Walmart would be perfect but LA is down on that. Also don't want more stacked up housing that will look like crap in 5-10 years and bring in even more crime. We need to hold out for a better fitting business. A fourth Home Depot will just canabalize ther other 3 Home Depots and one will end up getting closed down in the next recession anyway.
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