JC Penney Might Be Going Belly Up (Along With Sears)

[Inkstainedwretch]

I think the idea of "walkable communities " is not that absolutely everything is within walking distance, but that the everyday necessities are: a grocery, a drugstore, a hardware, maybe a movie theater and a library, a cafe and so forth. I grew up in many such communities. Now the mom-and-pop grocery is a thing of the past, as is the neighborhood theater and most of the others.

 

[Stearmen]

I've lived on the coast all my life, and one thing I know for certain is that a rising tide *doesn't* in fact lift all boats. Those that are mired in the mud end up swamped. Gentrification has been a real mixed bag here, as the increasing number of our people who are mired in the mud will reveal.

It's a double edge sword for me. Where I live right now, I would have been lucky to get $130,000 a couple of years ago, now houses around me are hitting the mid 200 hundreds! Great when I go to sell, in the next couple of months, it will pay for most of my Victorian! But, I do feel sorry for those that are going to be priced out! Even our so called ghetto area is hitting the low to mid 200s. I would not have given you $10,000 for any house in that area. People from Denver are buying down here and commuting, add in all the Californians with more money then sense and you have a sellers market. On the funny side, the only property with a proper lake view is in that neighborhood and a friend of mine was smart enough to buy one of those homes for $86,000. He lives there and likes the neighbors, gets pretty loud on summer nights though!

 

[LizzieMaine]

I think the idea of "walkable communities " is not that absolutely everything is within walking distance, but that the everyday necessities are: a grocery, a drugstore, a hardware, maybe a movie theater and a library, a cafe and so forth. I grew up in many such communities. Now the mom-and-pop grocery is a thing of the past, as is the neighborhood theater and most of the others.

When I first moved to this town twenty years ago, there were still a few independent neighborhood grocers around -- little walk-in places which made most of their money from their deli counter, where you could get a good sandwich at a reasonable price, with beer, cigarettes, newspapers, and lottery tickets making up most of the rest of what they sold. There were actual groceries in these places, but the dust on the shelves suggested this stock didn't move especially well. All of these stores are gone now -- we do have chain convenience stores, "Puffin Stops" and "Irving Circle-K" and "Maritime Farms" to fill the place, but most of these are out on the road and not particularly town-oriented.

There is a high-end "farm to table" grocery store downtown, but it's not the kind of place where Joe Dinnerpail or Sally Punchclock is going to duck in to grab a quart of milk and a loaf of bread after work. We've also got plenty of downtown restaurants, but only one of them is a traditional greasy spoon -- everything else is geared to the "upscale" trade, which basically means "not locals." There hasn't been a downtown hardware store since Walmart came to town in the '90s, and I miss it terribly -- it's a real pain to have to get in the car and drive just to get a handful of washers or a roll of wire for some project or other. But hey, we do have thirty-seven -- count 'em! -- art galleries. Maybe they'll sell me some picture wire if I ask nice.

Our downtown independent drug store was put out of business by their landlord, who cashed out for big bucks selling the building to a bank that wanted the site for expansion of its branch. There had been a drugstore on that corner for over a hundred years, and it still had its soda fountain, its Mr. Peavey-like pharmacist in the white coat, and it delivered prescriptions right to your door. Now we've got a Rite Aid, which lives up in every way to the high standard of service for which that chain is known.

In short, we still have a "downtown," but it's an ersatz downtown, not the kind of place that's really the beating heart of the community. That's gone forever, and it isn't coming back.

 

[BlueTrain]

Well, to be honest, that's better than what my hometown has become. The first clue is, there are no art galleries. I haven't been back since 2014 when I attended my 50th high school reunion. Since the railroad shops moved, the population has shrunk to about 6500 and I have no idea what they all do. There are a couple of big box stores that I'm sure are well patronized, both a Lowes and a Wal-Mart, located near one another. But the town happens to be a major crossroads (sort of major, anyway) and it's also roughly half-way between Florida and Canada. So a hospitality industry had developed out near the interstate with several chain restaurants. In a way, it's like big city decay from the middle out with growth on the outside. There are still some very nice neighborhoods there. My old neighborhood wasn't really that nice, I have to admit, but it was full of life and I knew everybody. If I still lived there, I guess I still would. I still don't know if there's a movie theater anywhere around there or not.

 

[LizzieMaine]

We got a brand new five-story luxury hotel last year, built just two doors up the street from an actual Depression-style flophouse where all the drug addicts and drunks converge. The view from the penthouse roof overlooks the ocean on one side -- but look out the back windows and you see a dilapidated old house with junk in the dooryard. The owner of the hotel wanted to buy the house to demolish it for parking but the owner, out of sheer contempt for the way the hotel was bulldozed thru the zoning hearings, has refused to sell. The neighborhood is zoned residential, and the impact the hotel has had has not been positive for those who live there.

 

[belfastboy]

It's a double edge sword for me. Where I live right now, I would have been lucky to get $130,000 a couple of years ago, now houses around me are hitting the mid 200 hundreds! Great when I go to sell, in the next couple of months, it will pay for most of my Victorian! But, I do feel sorry for those that are going to be priced out! Even our so called ghetto area is hitting the low to mid 200s. I would not have given you $10,000 for any house in that area. People from Denver are buying down here and commuting, add in all the Californians with more money then sense and you have a sellers market. On the funny side, the only property with a proper lake view is in that neighborhood and a friend of mine was smart enough to buy one of those homes for $86,000. He lives there and likes the neighbors, gets pretty loud on summer nights though!

Then you get situations like here in Vancouver, where the average single family home goes for over one million.....studio sized condos for over half a million. If you are willing to face a one hour commute the prices drop some but not all that much.

 

[Fading Fast]

Well, we could all become 21st Century Okies, I guess. With a little modification, my '99 Subaru would make a fine Okiemobile.

That said, it's been my observation here that it's not "undesirables" who get forced to leave by gentrification. It's working class people, the kind of people who work fifty hours or sixty hours a week at multiple jobs selling shiny junk and serving overpriced food to tourists, who end up displaced. Between outright gentrification and the stinking racket that is AirBnB, it's become next to impossible to rent any kind of an apartment in town here that you could live in without fighting rats and bugs all the time for less than $900 a month. That's peanuts by NYC standards, but it's obscene by the standards of what people have to live on here.

The result is that working people get shoved out into the woods -- literally so. And even those types of places are rapidly pricing out of the market, with no end in sight. There's a reason why Lenin wanted to hang the landlords.

There are horrible landlords and, yes, horrible tenants who take advantage of honest landlords. One of my father's best friends was an immigrant from Lithuania (I think I'm remembering that right) who started as a push peddler on the Lower East Side and then married and moved to NJ where he opened a small shop. The shop morphed into a successful carpet store (as told to me, he started out selling a bunch of things, but found the money was in carpet).

As he got more successful (relatively - still, small store), he bought a six unit apartment house and, then, over the years acquired a few more and bigger ones. He never forgot where he came from and was always trying to help families out - lower rent, free month, let a month slide, etc. - but overtime became a bit embittered because some of those "masses" of Lenin and wonderful Proletariats cheated this man left and right. I saw it with my own eyes. From not paying, to skipping out on rent, to damaging the property - and this from some he had rented below market to / had let them fall behind / etc.

To be sure, and he'd have been the first to tell you this, he had many good stories of loyal tenants who appreciate what he had done for them that they didn't want to move even when they could find a bigger or more suitable place. My point is not to make this political, but it is that the landlord - tenant relationship is not one way - there are good and bad people on both sides of that equation.

I've always been a pay-on-time, respect-the-property tenant (I rented for over thirty years before buying) and I have had some wonderful landlords who work with you, especially after you've demonstrated that you are a good tenant. And I had one (kinda two) who were just bad landlords always trying to cheat you. And several in between. But I'll take a world where, yes, I might have to move, yes, I might not get the neighborhood I want, but I can choose amongst many landlords in many places versus one all-owning landlord. I have no desire to have to rent my apartment from the department of motor vehicles.

 

[Fading Fast]

Then you get situations like here in Vancouver, where the average single family home goes for over one million.....studio sized condos for over half a million. If you are willing to face a one hour commute the prices drop some but not all that much.

As a very distant observer, but one who pays some attention to this stuff as part of his business, that market has a very bubble look and feel to it. I am not close enough to the market and all its details to argue that point (I'm sure the local real estate people have a story they believe that justifies the prices), but as a person in the financial markets, the warning signs of a possible bubble are there to me.

 

[Fading Fast]

We got a brand new five-story luxury hotel last year, built just two doors up the street from an actual Depression-style flophouse where all the drug addicts and drunks converge. The view from the penthouse roof overlooks the ocean on one side -- but look out the back windows and you see a dilapidated old house with junk in the dooryard. The owner of the hotel wanted to buy the house to demolish it for parking but the owner, out of sheer contempt for the way the hotel was bulldozed thru the zoning hearings, has refused to sell. The neighborhood is zoned residential, and the impact the hotel has had has not been positive for those who live there.

You've told stories like this before, so I'm just going to say it, that is one horrible local gov't you've got up there. They seem to ignore the rules the minute a dollar is dangled in their faces. That is the exact opposite of what good gov't is supposed to do. Makes the laws, rules, regulations, zoning restrictions, etc., for the good of the entire community (who also votes you into office, directly or indirectly) and, then, objectively enforce them. Your gov't seems to work more like a mafia. Makes you question the wisdom of giving too much power to the gov't.

 

[Fading Fast]

When I first moved to this town twenty years ago, there were still a few independent neighborhood grocers around -- little walk-in places which made most of their money from their deli counter, where you could get a good sandwich at a reasonable price, with beer, cigarettes, newspapers, and lottery tickets making up most of the rest of what they sold. There were actual groceries in these places, but the dust on the shelves suggested this stock didn't move especially well. All of these stores are gone now -- we do have chain convenience stores, "Puffin Stops" and "Irving Circle-K" and "Maritime Farms" to fill the place, but most of these are out on the road and not particularly town-oriented.

There is a high-end "farm to table" grocery store downtown, but it's not the kind of place where Joe Dinnerpail or Sally Punchclock is going to duck in to grab a quart of milk and a loaf of bread after work. We've also got plenty of downtown restaurants, but only one of them is a traditional greasy spoon -- everything else is geared to the "upscale" trade, which basically means "not locals." There hasn't been a downtown hardware store since Walmart came to town in the '90s, and I miss it terribly -- it's a real pain to have to get in the car and drive just to get a handful of washers or a roll of wire for some project or other. But hey, we do have thirty-seven -- count 'em! -- art galleries. Maybe they'll sell me some picture wire if I ask nice.

Our downtown independent drug store was put out of business by their landlord, who cashed out for big bucks selling the building to a bank that wanted the site for expansion of its branch. There had been a drugstore on that corner for over a hundred years, and it still had its soda fountain, its Mr. Peavey-like pharmacist in the white coat, and it delivered prescriptions right to your door. Now we've got a Rite Aid, which lives up in every way to the high standard of service for which that chain is known.

In short, we still have a "downtown," but it's an ersatz downtown, not the kind of place that's really the beating heart of the community. That's gone forever, and it isn't coming back.

Thirty-seven art galleries - is that all the tourist buying on vacation? Are they the ones who also frequent the fancy places in the downtown that the locals can't afford? Are there also (I'm sure you've told us, I'm sorry, I just don't remember) an affluent group of retirees somewhere nearby that also support all this upscale stuff?

 

[LizzieMaine]

Our city government is renowned statewide for its sleaziness. We have a couple new councilors on there now who ran on a reform platform, though, and we got rid of the greaseball city manager, so hopefully things are going to improve. But the damage done by the previous regime cannot easily be undone.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Thirty-seven art galleries - is that all the tourist buying on vacation? Are they the ones who also frequent the fancy places in the downtown that the locals can't afford? Are there also (I'm sure you've told us, I'm sorry, I just don't remember) an affluent group of retirees somewhere nearby that also support all this upscale stuff?

Most of the wealthy-retiree crowd doesn't live or pay taxes in town here -- they move to three particular neighboring towns with better views and bigger house lots and longstanding "upscale" reputations -- but they do come into town to do business. Most of the art crowd, however, is transient -- many of the galleries and shops shut down entirely for the winter, giving Main Street an unsettling ghost-town aspect with dirty dusty windows upon which local rabble-rousers write revolutionary slogans. Have no idea who that might be though.

 

[tonyb]

I've been a renter, and I've been a rental property owner (I don't like the sound of "landlord," not when used in reference to me, anyway). I've been priced out by gentrification, and I've profited from gentrification.

One set of renters expressed an interest in buying the place they were occupying. The "offer" they made amounted to all of 54 percent of what the property sold for when we responded to that offer by putting the place on the market. And half of that couple, an attractive young woman accustomed to batting her eyes and getting her way, portrayed herself as a victim throughout that process. Fine, I said. Far better you be the victim than I be the victim, if that's how you wanna play it.

 

[BlueTrain]

If you like local government, then you'll love big business. The only way "the people" have any say in anything is through government. If you know of any other way of doing things, let us know. Remember, that all governments are democracies. The only differences are in who gets to vote.

A very similiar place to the pleasant place Miss Lizzie describes is the place where my wife's parents moved about 40 years ago. It was already something of a retirement community but still mostly a fishing and farming community. They did not buy a place in town but instead, a place on the water several miles outside of town. They lived there longer than anywhere else they'd ever lived. My father in law died a few years ago and my mother in law moved to a retirement home where she still lives at age 95.

In the time since they moved there, the roads have been greatly improved in the area, a couple of big box stores and grocery chains have appeared, local schools have improved to the point where the private academy (established mainly because of integration) went out of business and a few little restaurants opened, in addition to several established local restaurants around the county. The town itself is not on the water, so there is none of the boating crowd to speak of but many own boats. Although it is a retirement community, it is mostly not a vacation area, although it boasts an old-fashioned big waterfront hotel named "The Tide's Inn." So the number of antique stores and art shops are minimal and such as there are, are near the hotel maybe ten miles from where they lived, as are the two golf and country clubs.

 

[BlueTrain]

By the way, speaking of J.C. Penney et al, does anyone miss G. C. Murphy?

 

[LizzieMaine]

We never had Murphy's here, but we did have J. J. Newberry's, which was, I believe, part of the same octopus-like dime store combine. Our Newberry's was one of the last in the state but it shut down in the late '90s and its building -- a beautiful thing with terra-cotta bricks -- was engulfed and assimilated into just another dreary red-brick annex by the local art museum. Where once old ladies in hairnets sold hamburgers now old ladies in black turtlenecks sell Wyeth postcards.

 

[LizzieMaine]

As far as landlords go, my ex was the super of the building we lived in for nine years -- and it was major surgery with a meathook to get a nickel out of the landlord for maintenance and repairs. He was strictly absentee -- we might see him once a year, if that, and the general sense was he didn't give a squat about the place unless people were late with the rent. We ended up doing a lot of the maintenance ourselves, just to keep the tenants from banging on the door in the middle of the night, because the "contractors" he insisted we use -- probably his relatives -- were so inept.

The louse finally sold the place out from under us so that a drugstore chain could tear it down and build a new store on the site -- but he kept a land-lease deal so that he would continue to collect rent from the corporation, with no expense to him for maintenance of the property. It was a sweetheart deal for him, but it dispossessed eight people at a time when apartments were not easy to find.

It does my heart good every time I open the paper to see that the drug store built on that site has been robbed again by an opioid addict.

 

[ChrisB]

By the way, speaking of J.C. Penney et al, does anyone miss G. C. Murphy?

When our Murphy's closed it started a downward spiral for our town. Lots of other factors involved, but Murphy's was a major draw for shopping. Without it, people had to go out of town for some things, so why not do it all at a shopping mall, even if it was 30 miles away.

 

[Fading Fast]

We had a Newberry's a few towns over, but by the time I was a kid - late '60s / '70s - much like Woolworths, those stores were run down and neglected. Not that great stuff that you couldn't find elsewhere didn't come out of them - and I'd kill for a Woolworth lunch counter to this day - but those were tired stores that, in retrospect you can see, were not going to survive the coming new competition in retail.

 

[BlueTrain]

G. C. Murphy stores were all just about the same, layout, content and atmosphere. Even then (in the 1950s), it seemed old-fashioned. Although they tried, they never quite successfully transitioned to the big box store format. They did have a certain amount of charm, however, at least to a ten-year old, which I was for a while. They had a toy counter and a department that sold small pets. There were always birds chirping away on the basement floor. At Easter, they had colored chicks. I do not recall if they ever had a lunch counter like the drug stores did but they eventually had a hot dog counter that also had popcorn. For some inexplicable reason, I thought that popcorn only went with seeing movies. They also had a fantastic candy counter where candies were sold by weight. All counters had an "inside" where the clerks could go. They also covered all the counters when they closed in the evening. It's incredible now that some stores stay open twenty-fours.