Housing village studied for Mississippi Wal-Mart

If economic feasibility studies turn out favorably, there’s a good chance that Wal-Mart will combine its rebuilt store in Pass Christian, Mississippi, with 300 to 500 townhouses and apartments. Since last October’s Mississippi Renewal Forum, new urbanists have been pushing the idea of building a “Wal-Mart village” on approximately 17 acres that the retail chain owns in Pass Christian, a Gulf Coast community devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Many feared that it would be difficult to persuade the Bentonville, Arkansas-based chain to be part of a mixed-use development. Recently, however, a new urbanist contingent led by urban designer Laura Hall learned that Wal-Mart had in fact looked at a proposal for a mixed-use development on the Pass Christian site a full year ago. In April 2005, Pass Christian architect Robin Riley and three New Orleanians — architects Marcel Wisznia and Bob Tannen and developer Pres Kabacoff — went to Wal-Mart headquarters and suggested that housing be built in front of its store on West Beach Boulevard (US 90). The company “didn’t like the idea well enough to disrupt a functioning Wal-Mart,” Riley told New Urban News. “They asked if we could do it in Orange Beach, Alabama, east of Mobile. Then Katrina came along, and Wal-Mart decided to resurrect the scheme” at the original site. Consequently, Riley’s team is now conducting studies of who might occupy the housing, what it might cost, and whether it would be sufficiently profitable. interests coincide Hall, a Santa Rosa, California, designer who has been working on a SmartCode for the 6,700-person community, said she was “stunned by the confluence of interest” between the Riley team’s work and a proposal developed during the Renewal Forum. She said Riley’s concept is not full-fledged New Urbanism, “but it is a step in the right direction.” Riley initially proposed erecting a deck over the parking lot in front of the store and constructing housing on it. The residents would have views across Beach Boulevard to the Gulf of Mexico, and Wal-Mart would have several hundred customers living just outside its door. Now that the store has been destroyed and the company has expressed interest in the development idea, the designers are considering three possible designs. One calls for building the replacement store at the rear of the sloping site, on higher ground, where it would be less vulnerable to any future storm surge. A second calls for constructing the store in the middle of the property, on top of