Long Island Bookstore Resists Getting Malled

Southampton, New York, on the eastern end of Long Island, is a seaside town with a unique flair often associated with small villages where local, independent shops rule the roost. Part of its charm certainly lies in the fact that the town "has been spared a lot of superstore development," said Kathryn Szoka, co-owner of Canio's Books in Sag Harbor, one of the six incorporated villages of Southampton. And, according to Szoka, the community wants to keep it that way.

Unfortunately, the town's planning department may not share Szoka's view -- a consultant it hired has a plan that involves opening a 27,000-square-foot bookstore in a building complex in the Southampton community of Bridgehampton. Szoka told BTW a superstore would negatively impact the local economy of Southampton, and she wants to bring this to the attention of town officials and the local media.

Toward that end, at 7:00 p.m. on November 16, at the Bridgehampton National Bank Community Room, Canio's and a number of local organizations are sponsoring a public hearing, "Getting Malled: The Big Box Impact."

The keynote speaker of the event will be Civic Economic's Dan Houston, who will discuss the well-publicized reports his company has conducted in Austin, Texas, and just recently, the Chicago community of Andersonville. Both studies clearly illustrate that local merchants contribute significantly more money to the local economy than do retail chains.

Szoka said that it was important to have Houston speak at the hearing, because "in order to appeal to the town [Board members], we had to make an economic argument, too. [The two Civic Economic studies] show that there is a real economic benefit to keeping the community local."

"The Andersonville Study of Retail Economics" built on Civic Economics' 2002 Austin study, which assessed the economic impact of a publicly subsidized Borders Books & Music store in comparison to BookPeople and Waterloo Records. However, the Andersonville analysis had a significantly broader scope: It compared 10 local firms with 10 chain businesses, from restaurants to bookstores to salons.

According to the Andersonville findings, local merchants generate a substantially greater economic impact than chain firms, and, as such, the report stresses that "great care must be taken to ensure that public policy decisions do not inadvertently disadvantage locally owned businesses. Indeed, it may be in the best interests of communities to institute policies that directly protect them." Overall, the results showed that local firms generated 70 percent greater local economic impact than chains. (To read the Andersonville study, click here; for the 2002 Austin study, click here.)

As for the November 16 "Get Malled" event -- which in addition to Canio's is being presented by the South Fork Progressive Coalition (SFPC, a chapter of the Long Island Progressive Coalition), the Group for the South Fork, and a number of local businesses -- it was spurred by events that came to a head this past summer, Szoka noted. "In Bridgehampton, there's a 12-acre parcel of land that is owned by Barnes & Noble and a private developer," she explained. "The town of Southampton hired a consultant on how the land would be used."

In short, it was determined that the land was a Planned Development District, which allowed the town to "rewrite the underlying zoning if it benefits the community," Szoka explained. Instead of a 15,000-square-foot limit for retail space, the zoning for the 12-acre parcel of land was rewritten to allow for a 27,000-square-foot space. "They skirted around ... [the zoning laws]," she said. "A lot of people don't want a superstore."

At present, there are eight independent bookstores in Southampton, and no Barnes & Noble or Borders. If a chain were to move into that Bridgehampton space, "a lot of businesses would be impacted," Szoka said. She noted that the groups that are conducting the November 16 hearing have a proposal of their own where half of the land would be used for housing, and the rest for "small-scale retail." For that to happen, the town would have to purchase the land from Barnes & Noble.

At the public hearing, the groups plan to present their proposal. Neither the planning department's proposal nor the opposing group's have gone to the town board for approval, though that could happen this month, Szoka reported. --David Grogan