Weekend Northcross Wal-Mart Roundup

A few things about Wal-Mart:
DSK took pictures of the people ringing Northcross, and actually asked the people at the bus stop what they thought.
A RG4N supporter took pictures all the way around.
Austin Contrarian just posted a great summary of the neighborhoods around the site. Note that I’ve discussed previously, to the derision of some, that it would be nice for a big box to be located somewhere where lower-income workers could practically travel via the bus. Here’s the map linking all of this together – several bus routes accessible to those denser, lower-income neighborhoods, go straight to Northcross.
Note the other major transfer center at a mall in Austin – Highland Mall – which, not being a dead husk like Northcross, has high levels of both transfer traffic _and_ local (destined for the area in and around the mall) traffic. For the record, I’d be thrilled if a Wal-Mart like the one proposed here would take over some of the acres of awful strip-mall-and-surface-parking-lot area around Highland.
As I’ve said in some comment threads, besides downtown itself, Northcross (and Highland) are the two spots in our area which have the best transit access, bar none. Trish has disingenuously highjacked that into pedantry about the fact that the transfer center isn’t in the Wal-Mart parking lot and so can’t count as a bonus to the plan; but it’s still true: if you’re going to put a large retail center ANYWHERE, these two spots are exactly the right place to do it.
Finally, in an incredibly obnoxious and hypocritical attack-comment, Trish did bring up a point I hadn’t even noticed before: in my entry detailing how the Wal-Mart site isn’t in the middle of a residential neighborhood, I erred by saying that you had to go all the way to Mopac to the west before you hit residential use. I was thinking along Austin’s tilted axis when I made this comment – i.e. the area roughly between Anderson and Foster is almost completely commercial (with one apartment complex I can think of) – but that’s actually a diagonal line. Straight west DOES, in fact, penetrate single-family use in Allandale. Mea culpa. I also used “residential” in the same way the neighborhoods do – to mean “only single-family residential”, and I should have been more explicit, but it’s disingenuous to complain too much about this when the neighborhoods in the area have been so vehemently against multi-family development for so long.
Finally, wrapping up the wrap-up, a lot of arguments have centered around a practice I’m going to refer to in shorthand as “defining down into meaningless”. For instance, arguing over whether Wal-Mart would be “in the middle of a residential neighborhood” can degenerate into defining how far away the building has to be from the first house before it qualifies, OR you can argue in good faith by taking a look at some other major retail destinations in the area and seeing how close _they_ are. Basically, if Highland Mall, Barton Creek Square, 6th/Lamar, etc. are closer (in several cases MUCH closer) to residential uses than is Northcross, you can’t honestly continue this claim about “in the middle” unless you admit that your definition is so generous it catches almost everybody else too. That’s simply not arguing in good-faith.
Same with transit access. Read this blog for even a few minutes and you discover I’m one of Capital Metro’s harshest critics from an under-delivery of transit perspective. But that doesn’t change the fact that if you call transit access to Northcross “bad”, you’ve redefined “bad” so it includes effectively everywhere except downtown. Not good-faith argument, either. To be fair (and notice the RG4N folks, and Trish, never do this), this applies to a replacement development there as well, except that the RG4N folks obviously hope for retail that attracts higher-income clientele than the Wal-Mart. It’d still help the workers either way; just like how good transit service between UT and the Arboretum results in a few college-age kids getting off the bus up there to go work retail every morning.
Wrapping up the wrap-up of the wrap-up: Northcross is a great place to take the bus to, for both choice commuters and the transit-dependent. It’s not any closer to residential development than most major retail centers in our area and is actually farther away from houses than most (Lakeline Mall being the one main exception). The demonstrators this weekend are slapping each other on the back, but none of them bothered to talk to the people waiting for the bus at the transfer center. Hmmm. Wonder why.