Thoughts on the new Winn Dixie in Mid City?

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Strella believes more of an effort should have been made to include smaller New Orleans businesses in the development, as opposed to the group of national chains that eventually became the overwhelming majority in the finished product. He points to a study conducted by the Urban Conservancy in 2009 that found that a dollar spent at a Magazine Street merchant brings back twice as much in local recirculation revenue than one spent at a SuperTarget. The study goes on to state that if ten percent of all retail spending in Orleans Parish were shifted from chain to local, it would mean an annual $60 million addition to the NOLA economy.

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Ward notes that often multinationals are allowed into promising retail space for the same reason why it is so difficult to imagine such an impoverished city actually being able to resist the idea of immediately redeveloping blight by any means necessary: money. National companies have plenty to use to move in while New Orleans itself has only enough to fund small developments and many New Orleanians have none at all to put towards shopping local, that is, if they even want to in the face of a personally preferred national option.

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“Due to the cost of this large commercial property and the expense of the serious environmental remediation work that had to be done before the property could be developed, I question whether the Refresh Project model could have been economically feasible there,"

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