The main thing that people need to understand is that suburban big box stores (and I include outlet malls in this category) are a bad return on investment for cities. We go broke on this stuff. The city has to extend and maintain roads, water/sewer, police, fire, etc to what is currently agricultural land. The result is supposed to be increased property taxes, sales taxes and jobs. The problem is that providing / maintaining services in suburban areas costs more than is recouped in taxes. Then, due to parking and other wasteful land use practices, only a small fraction of the property actually creates jobs and taxes. And the jobs that are created are low-paying and often part-time. In the short term, it's a Ponzi scheme (it seems to work as long as there's always new income coming in from more new developments, and the infrastructure is new enough that it doesn't require repairs. Sort of a time bomb waiting to go off.) Over time, the costs are far greater than the returns.
There are a couple great articles that explain the economics of this in terms of "yield per acre."
http://www.salon.com/2013/11/10/walmart_an_economic_cancer_on_our_cities/http://www.citylab.com/work/2012/03/simple-math-can-save-cities-bankruptcy/1629/Both articles cover the same concept in different ways. An economist compares two different properties: a six-story, mixed-use building near downtown vs a suburban Walmart, and compares them "apple to apple" based on "yield per acre." The Walmart (which occupied 34 acres) only contributed $50,800 in property and sales tax per acre, while the mixed-use building (which occupied less than a quarter of an acre) contributed $330,000 per acre. The Walmart contributed 6 jobs per acre, while the mixed-use building contributed 74 jobs per acre. It really helps you understand the efficiency of density and mixed-use buildings in places where all the space isn't wasted on one-story, single-use buildings where 2/3 of the land is covered in asphalt.
The proposed outlet mall is 48 acres. This is 2,102,206 SF in size. Of this, only 350,000 is considered "gross leasable space." So only 16% of this land will be busy generating (low-paying) jobs and tax dollars. The rest is mostly asphalt. In the meantime, they want the city to freeze the taxes at the current rate (as if it's still agricultural / unimproved space) and capture the difference to pay for "improvements" to make this thing work. So all those newly generated tax dollars won't be paying for schools we already have, or roads that you and I actually drive on, or maintenance of existing infrastructure. They will be spent making this boondoggle "pencil" for the developers, who know that it doesn't work without the city paying for all the big new roads, signalized intersections, water/sewer, police/fire, etc.
It's a scam and people need to say no.
Excellent points all around. I wish more people would speak in terms of yield per acre, but since it hurts the case being presented by suburban developers, we won't hear that language from them anytime soon.
Though the city can't mandate a minimum YPA or jobs per acre, the amount of parking allowed is a completely controllable factor that could help achieve better outcomes. This is a great example of the kinds of changes we need to push for in the zoning code update. We don't need to just reduce our parking minimum by an arbitrary percentage, we need to reduce it dramatically (or eliminate minimums all together) and establish a parking
maximum. The current form of the zoning code update calls for a very slight reduction in parking minimums that really doesn't change much. In fact, a wise friend pointed out that parking minimums would actually increase for certain land use types.
When Tulsans participated in the PlaniTulsa process, we overwhelmingly favored a drastic change in the direction our city. The new zoning code draft just kicks the can down the road, and this outlet mall is a continuation of the same.
If we're serious about the desire to change our city, this is our chance to prove it.
So - we have two choices:
We can do the safe thing and approve more of the same suburban developments like this outlet mall (where 84% of the land is used for parking) because we're scared to lose tax dollars.
Or we can stand up and demand better for our city.