Old Tradition Needs New Home
A proposal to develop a retail center where an outdoor swap meet has been held for almost 30 years is a new twist on the saga of “big box” national chain vs. local mom-and-pop store.
The property in question is a privately owned, rundown lot on the corner of Arroyo Avenue and Glenoaks Boulevard in the city of San Fernando.
On the potential tenant list for the proposed retail center are the usual big box suspects: Kmart, Target, Wal-Mart, Costco, Home Depot and Home Base.
In the role of mom-and-pop store is the thrice-weekly swap meet, where many of the 1,000 vendors are longtime fixtures and customers have been regulars for years.
As one vendor told a Times reporter last week, “This is not just a swap meet, it’s a tradition.”
“Tradition” is the accolade nostalgic customers often bestow on, say, the failing local hardware store even as they buy their hammers and nails at the newly opened discount home improvement store down the street. After all, traditions are fine, but who can be blamed for trying to save a few bucks?
Which brings us to the twist in the San Fernando saga: Not even chain discount stores can compete with the bargains found at the swap meet, where vendors sell everything from soap to shoes, lingerie to auto parts.
So swap meet customers face losing not just their traditional meeting and greeting place but a convenient and affordable marketplace. And the moms and pops who rent space from the property’s owner for $15 a month face losing the business that supports their families.
Of course, one person’s “tradition” can be another person’s eyesore. San Fernando Mayor Jose Fernandez and other city officials overwhelmingly support the proposed retail center, saying a swap meet “doesn’t fit with our image of economic development.”
They’re not the only ones who feel that way, whether in San Fernando or in the greater Los Angeles area.
In Boyle Heights, for example, neighbors have long feuded over noise, traffic, trash and vendors who operate without permits at another longtime “tradition,” the outdoor El Mercado.
Elsewhere, neighborhoods have experienced a rebound when retail stores replaced swap meets, especially if the swap meets attracted shady characters fencing stolen or illegal goods.
Certainly a swap meet doesn’t provide the sales tax revenue a retail center would bring in. But it can provide other things that are vital to the life of a city--jobs, an affordable, varied place to shop and a thriving community of vendors and shoppers who know each other and are sustained by, yes, tradition.
So it’s to their credit that San Fernando officials have offered to help the vendors find a new home. Los Angeles City Councilman Alex Padilla, who represents the northeast San Fernando Valley, should do all he can to help, since vendors and customers alike come from throughout the area. He can take a cue from fellow Councilman Nick Pacheco’s so-far successful efforts to broker a peace between El Mercado and its Boyle Heights neighbors.
History has already shown that nostalgia alone is no match for market forces. But economic development takes many forms. Surely there is room for the old along with the new.
