Dollar Stores and Reinvention of Rural Retail
Politics
While doing research for an early TAC essay about abandoned buildings, I did a lot of Google Maps satellite viewing. One rural town in central New Jersey, not far from where I grew up, provided some fascinating aerial views. A tad south of the town of Washington, one can make out what appears to be an aborted attempt to build expensive New York and Philadelphia exurbs. The image shows an almost entirely vacant mid-90s strip plaza surrounded by fields dotted sparsely with McMansions. I find this remarkable because it clearly shows the land frozen in a transitional state. (Absent the 2008 financial crisis, which dealt a still-reverberating blow to the exurbs, the fields might well be gone today, and the plaza, which once sported a large, higher-end A&P supermarket, might be thriving.)
The American Conservative
Feb 26, 2021