Boxes Made Of Ticky-Tacky

When we first heard Pete Seeger sing Malvina Reynold’s classic song about “Little boxes on the hillside, Little boxes made of ticky-tacky” back in the 1960s, Newtown was far removed from the kind of urban sprawl the song was meant to condemn. The town was home to fewer than half the number of people it has today and there were large open tracts of rural land that made Newtown one of the most scenic towns in Connecticut. With the great spurt of growth in the intervening years — most of it in the last 20 years — boxes have sprouted in profusion on the hillsides. But they aren’t little, and they aren’t ticky-tacky. Many of them are quite lavish. Newtown is a different town.

Now, Newtown’s Planning and Zoning Commission is feeling pressure from a developer to allow huge boxes — up to 60,000 square feet — in some commercial areas that would change the town even more profoundly. Newtown currently has two commercial buildings that size — the Big Y on Queen Street and Super Stop & Shop in Sand Hill Plaza. In 1996, in an effort to save Newtown’s commercial areas from the big box store commercial strips that make so many towns and cities across the nation indistinguishable from each other, the commission enacted a 40,000-square-foot limit on commercial buildings. The limitation has so far prevented a Federal Road-East from taking root on town’s arterial highways.

Proponents of the zoning change, which in addition to the developer include Newtown’s Economic Development Commission and community development director, argue that Newtown’s growing population needs bigger retail stores, noting that the extra tax revenue those stores would generate wouldn’t hurt either. They point out that Newtowners travel to other towns to shop in the big boxes. It would be more convenient to have them just down the street. This last observation, however, reveals the biggest problem with this proposal.

Sixty-thousand-square-foot stores are not supposed to be convenient neighborhood stores. They are designed to draw customers from throughout the region. Their viability depends on high volume… high traffic volume. The perpetual traffic snarl on Federal Road in Danbury and Brookfield is evidence of the success of the big box store economic development strategy. Imagine that kind of traffic in commercial areas on Route 25 or Route 34. It would be anything but convenient. This is the kind of economic development success our town can do without. Local roads routinely fail to accommodate the Newtown’s own population; let’s not make Newtown a destination for eager shoppers from every other town in the area.