El Monte Map where City Wants to Put Wal-Mart

Submitted by night reader on Sat, 02/05/2011 - 22:44
in


View El Monte Shopping in a larger map

Now, what's kind of weird is that the lot isn't that large, but it can be expanded by taking over Court Adair street, which appears to be already bought up and mostly vacated. If you go into street view, you'll see boarded up homes.

This makes me wonder why they need to spend $7 million to try and attract Wal Mart. Isn't it enough that the city has created a parcel that only a big box store could fill? It smells like some kind of kick-back to me. The money goes to this developer, who then does what with it?

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Map Perspective

Submitted by Todd Kunioka on Mon, 02/07/2011 - 22:59.

That map gives a good perspective on El Monte. The location they picked has several advantages over the one stupidly selected in Rosemead. The most obvious stupidity of the Rosemead location was that it was/is adjacent to single family residences. By contrast, the El Monte location is surrounded by the Rio Hondo (River), train tracks, and commercial uses.

The original idea behind Valley Mall also looks like it could have been a good idea: Parallel to Valley but designed to be pedestrian friendly rather than suburban sprawl-ly. Unfortunately, they haven't been able to attract the wealth or residential density to support an Old Town. The Transit Village was supposed to address that although I'm not sure if that's going any where.

The idea that Valley Mall could be helped in anyway by placing a Wal-Mart north of Valley is laughable, at least not unless they utterly level Valley Mall and turn it into a similar auto-friendly destination shopping center. The problem there (besides the poor planning practices that would would motivate such a change) is that, again, El Monte doesn't have the wealth or cache to attract enough traffic to support an upscale destination shopping mall, especially one without freeway visibility.

More likely what will happen is that Wal-Mart will gridlock traffic around Valley Mall. The north Valley location lacks efficient freeway access that most Wal-Marts rely upon, so it will wind up drawing most of its customers from non-freeway destinations (mostly El Monte, South El Monte north Rosemead, Temple City, and maybe parts of Arcadia and unincorporated Duarte. Stores developed on outpads of the Wal-Mart could make a go of it, but the stores on Valley Mall would be even further decimated.

Not vacant

Submitted by night reader on Tue, 02/08/2011 - 02:28.

There are some houses in that pink area. It seems to be homes among businesses. The articles said the wal mart would be on city land. It made me wonder if the city bought up the houses.

The area south of valley mall is walkable.