I spent two hours on the phone recently listening to a Greenfield Conservation Commission Zoom meeting reviewing an application from Benderson Development of Newtonville, New York, “one of the largest privately-owned development companies” in America. In 2008, this company bought a 6.8 acre parcel just west of the Route 91 rotary, from the owner of the former Candle Light Inn for $1.245 million. Benderson struggled for years to find an interested tenant, and finally found one: a 19,432-square-foot Aldi’s grocery store.

Aldi’s opens in Northampton this month. They’re hiring mostly part-time cashiers and stockers at $18/hr. Not a livable wage. And part-timers work “fewer than 30 hours per week.” Aldi’s is renting the building. They don’t emphasize buying from local farmers, and chose not to reuse an existing building in our downtown where we need the foot traffic.

For decades, Greenfield land has been bought up by out-of-state developers — from Florida, New York, Connecticut wealthy corporations who build stores for mega-retailers as far away as the Netherlands or Germany. They erect concrete boxes outside of our traditional downtown, near highways, replacing smaller retailers whose sales they cannibalize. These developers have names rarely spoken: Robar, Benderson, Ceruzzi. Our zoning allows these developers to build near the highways, leaving us with a hollowed-out downtown.

In 1993, Author James Kunstler published “The Geography of Nowhere,” lamenting how all big-box towns looked alike. “To me, it is a landscape of scary places,” Kunster warned, “the geography of nowhere, that has simply ceased to be a credible human habitat.”

Greenfield’s population has hardly grown since the 1950s. But we have been struggling to reinvent ourself as a “city” born from a town. People long for all the stores they see other places — but we don’t have the demographics to support. The Robar plaza off the rotary has 14,500 square feet of empty space right now. We dream of adding new grocery stores, which will capture sales from existing food stores, and reduce existing jobs. Our “city” looks like every other city near a highway. Aldi’s is everywhere: in Hadley, Northampton, Brattleboro, Chicopee, West Springfield, Springfield, Westfield, Pittsfield, and Keene, New Hampshire. Six thousand five hundred stores in 11 countries. Everywhere has become anywhere.

The Greenfield Conservation Commission on March 2 allowed Benderson to squeeze an Aldi’s box right into the middle of the 200-foot riverfront area of Smead Brook, a coldwater fishery, and inside the 100-foot buffer zone of a bordering vegetated wetland. More than 11,000 square feet of “resource area” is being destroyed. To “mitigate” this loss, the developer must create twice as much restoration. They will drop some top soil here and there, and put “some vegetation in the parking area.” Benderson even promised “to reforest” the parcel, “but may take a bit of time.”

Our local wetlands ordinance requires the developer to prove “by a preponderance of the evidence, that … there is no practicable alternative to the proposed project without adverse effects.” The Conservation Commission is supposed to “require applicants to avoid alteration, wherever feasible; to minimize alteration” of adjoining resource areas.

Benderson said it tried to fit CVS into that site, and spent years looking for tenants. On its website, Benderson boasts that they “Bendersize” properties “into highly successful assets.” Yet there was no “bending” in Greenfield. They didn’t ask Aldi’s to “resize” their footprint. Instead, Benderson said: “We moved the project as far away from the river as possible.” They told local officials: “Purchase of another site with similar access to a major arterial roadway and route I-91 would be considerably more cost and likely be cost-prohibitive.” The Commission was told that a “practicable alternative,” was “not a state requirement.” But it is a local bylaw requirement, and the developer got off easy.

Speaking of getting off easy, Greenfield’s 2023 property tax assessment on Benderson’s parcel is $508,300 lower than it was in 2019. That’s a $10,000 property tax break (-34%) the rest of us are picking up.

Benderson now goes to the Greenfield Planning Board for a site plan review. The developer will have to explain how more traffic will fit through the bottleneck just west of the rotary; why Aldi’s is using underground propane tanks to power its building — instead of solar or heat pumps; and why this property owes $54,200 in unpaid fines from the Inspector of Buildings going back to 2011 for the old Candle Light Inn sign.

Aldi’s wants to be the third largest grocer in America. We’re just another pin in their corporate map. When their doors open: “Welcome to Anywhere.”

Al Norman’s Pushback column appears every third Wednesday of the month. Comments can be emailed to: info@sprawl-busters.com.

]]>