Wal-Mart Finds Big-Easy Resistance

Residents of New Orleans have been in an uproar about the prospect of a Wal-Mart Supercenter coming to town.

The 200,000-SF Supercenter will anchor a $318 million mixed-use development planned for a 50-acre site on Tchoupitoulas Street that was home to the former St. Thomas housing project in the Lower Garden District.

In August, Pres Kabacoff of Historic Restoration Inc., the project developer, told The Times-Picayune of New Orleans there are three factions: the “extreme preservationists” who don’t want a Wal-Mart anywhere near the city’s historic core, the preservationists and community activists who will go along with the idea as long as the architecture is protected and the historical ambiance enhanced, and a third segment he sees as an “emboldened and angered” predominantly African-American community “loathing the potential loss of hundreds of jobs for the sake of saving old, abandoned buildings.”

Since then, all 728 families have been relocated and demolition is under way.

The housing project will be replaced by a new Supercenter that will resemble an old warehouse, along with a mixture of public, subsidized and market-rate housing, said Daphne Davis Moore of Wal-Mart’s community relations department. Construction won’t be completed for at least a year.

Wal-Mart has Supercenters in suburbs on each side of New Orleans, but this will be the first one in the historic section of the city. Other mass retailers have built stores in the area, and a Winn Dixie supermarket is down Tchoupitoulas a few miles from the Wal-Mart site.

The city made McDonald’s build a two-story restaurant that blended with the local architecture in order to locate on St. Charles Avenue in the Garden District.