Dollar General and the Politics of Land Use

A spectre is haunting Spartanburg—the spectre of land use regulation. All the powers of old Spartanburg have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Business leaders and politicians, Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives.

I’d like to thank Karl Marx for giving me the words—with some minor adjustments—to convey the massive importance of an issue that’s literally been left at the doorstep of our affluent friends just outside the city. I’m writing of course about the proposed Dollar General store over on the corner of Country Club Road and Andrews Road.

Who knew that all it would take to get the “free marketeers” over on County Council to get religion on land use was the horror of low income shoppers, tacky commercial development, and the fear of declining property values in…wait for it…a mostly affluent, white area. If I’d have known that all it would take to start a conversation on county land use was the threat of some discount shopping center being built near an area where the county’s well-heeled residents hang their hats I’d have convinced my mother years ago to sell her house and land over near Carolina Country Club to Wal-Mart so they could build another Supercenter. If only I’d acted sooner we’d have had county-wide zoning by now.

I was brought up with the old yarn about not looking a gift horse in the mouth, and I know that any opportunity to bring the land use debate to the front burner is a good thing. Still, motivations matter whether we want to admit it or not, and it obviously speaks volumes about the way things work in Spartanburg County when the only way to get an issue heard is if the right sort of people bring that issue to the table.

We’ll get back to that part later though.

For those of you who don’t know, Dollar General is a discount retailer that specializes in selling things that most people who make better than a working class income would never buy. The stores themselves are filled with an mishmash of cheap household essentials and tchotchke crap that no one really needs and in Spartanburg County, it seems like you can’t throw a rock without hitting one. If that sounds like an exaggeration try this as little experiment. Go to Google Maps, type in your address and get directions to “Dollar General”. Unless you live in one of the remote parts of the county, I’ll guarantee there are at least two of them within five miles of your home.

In case you’re wondering, there are nine Dollar General stores withing five miles of my address. That’s right, nine.

Needless to say, the greater Spartanburg community isn’t exactly underserved in the discount retail department. In fact, it was that realization that made me start wondering about other local Dollar General stores. Were any of them set in residential areas?

I didn’t have to look far for an answer. The closest Dollar General to my home—a scant mile and a half away on South Church Street Extension—backs up against the neighborhood on South Avenue. As it happens, this Dollar General is also one of the area’s newest, built less than a year ago if memory serves. Where were the shouts of outrage when that Dollar General was built I wondered.

That Dollar General clearly sits in a residential area. There are no boundaries between the store and the homes along South Avenue. In fact, one of the homes sits directly adjacent to the store’s parking lot. The people along South Avenue are presumably subjected to the same things as the people over on Country Club Road would be: higher traffic on neighborhood roads, property devaluation, and the other associated annoyances of having a commercial development right next to a neighborhood.

So what are the differences between the people living on South Avenue and the people living on and around Country Club Road? Well, there are two as far as I can tell. First, the people living along South Avenue have bank accounts with far fewer digits in the available balance line than their counterparts living a couple of miles to the east. Second, most of the people living on and around South Avenue are black.

Things like that aren’t supposed to make a difference I know. I’ve heard all the rhetoric about our supposedly class-free community that’s moved past its old racism, but when the building of a discount retail store in an affluent, white area gets the attention of county council so much that they enact temporary rules just to put a stop to its development and the controversy generates so much ink in the local media that it becomes the talk of the whole town, you have to wonder why. And you especially have to wonder why when that same discount retailer built a store right beside a poor, largely minority neighborhood less than a year ago and no one on county council or the in local media made so much as a sound about it.

I sincerely hope this fiasco over on Country Club Road gets County Council on the right track concerning land use if for no other reason than its a fight that most of the country had settled long before I was ever born. It’s tiring reading about disputes over something as elementary as design standards and zoning, and frankly it doesn’t bode well for an area trying to bill itself as a modern 21st century community to have so much opposition to the idea. This debate needs to happen though, and no matter how it all got started, it’s important that the good guys win this one. The way our county will look in the next 20 years may well depend on what happens in these next few months. It’s important not to lose sight of that.

Still, if we have to wait until some white guy with deep pockets gets upset about something in order to get anything accomplished in Spartanburg, progress will be slow indeed. I didn’t need the first nine Dollar General stores within five miles of my house, and I don’t need a tenth one either.

Our county leaders have been asleep at the wheel a long time on the land use issue, and the people along South Avenue deserved their attention and protection just as much as the people over around Country Club Road and to me, the fact that they didn’t get it speaks pretty loudly about whose concerns really matter in Spartanburg County. County Council’s actions in the face of this controversy have inadvertently provided us with a teachable moment. It’s best we don’t forget the lesson.

This post originally appeared on the Spartanburg Spark.