Wal-Mart Expected to Open at Crenshaw Plaza

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is expected today to announce plans for a store in the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, bringing jobs and lower prices to one of the most underserved regions of Los Angeles.

In expanding from its rural base into a major city’s urban core, Wal-Mart joins several national retailers that are looking inward from an increasingly crowded ring of suburban locations, betting that traditional downtown areas are among the next best places to boost profits.

Target Corp., which last year purchased several urban locations from Fedco, and Home Depot Inc., which is seeking approval to build a Crenshaw-area site, have signaled their intention to move into urban Los Angeles. Other major retailers, including IKEA and Sears, Roebuck & Co.’s Great Outdoors, also are scouting sites in neighborhoods that national chain stores once fled.

“Yesterday’s underserved community’s are today’s emerging markets,” said Los Angeles City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas. “Without a question, it’s been a tough battle to attract major retailers, but I think it’s true that things are beginning to turn.”

Scheduled to open next year, the new Wal-Mart store promises the community new support for local charities, a neighborhood hiring preference for 250 to 300 new jobs, and the promise of benefits for both full- and part-time employees.

Beyond economic development, the announcement of a Crenshaw Wal-Mart brings a morale boost to a neighborhood that for more than a year passed by shuttered entrances of a Macy’s store.

The big New York-based department-store chain closed the store at Martin Luther King Jr. and Crenshaw boulevards in January 1998, two years after converting it from a Broadway store, saying that it was “under performing.” Macy’s, a unit of Federated Department Stores Inc., closed its Westwood store on the same day.

Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, has been expanding from America’s pastoral corners to the outskirts of its most populated communities, drawing shoppers from dozens of suburban towns to one outlying development. In Southern California, those stores have included spots in Paramount and Foothill Ranch.

The company also has begun a move into redeveloping areas, including Panorama City and, outside California, in downtown Phoenix; Portland, Ore.; and New Orleans. The Crenshaw store represents the company’s first foray into a redevelopment zone in one of the country’s biggest cities.

Attracting major retailers to the Crenshaw area, even though the mall already houses a Sears and Robinsons-May department store, has not been easy.

“It was like arm-twisting,” said Jeff Walden, director of Mayor Richard Riordan’s L.A. Business Team and key to bringing Magic Johnson Theatres and the Crenshaw Sav-on Shopping Center to South Los Angeles.

Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton built his company with stores that brought discount prices and a wide array of merchandise to the country’s most underserved areas, which in the 1960s meant building its big boxes in America’s rural outposts.

But America’s retailing industry has changed alongside its middle-class march for the suburbs, and today the nation’s old city centers are among the places most in need of competitive stores.