Paul Eckert wrote about “all the empty buildings” in Cortez (Letters, Journal, Jan. 6). Actually, Cortez pales in comparison to most of America in the empty building department.
There are currently 1 billion square feet of vacant retail space in America. Elkhart, Ind., and Bullhead City, Ariz., are some of the most extreme examples of abandoned retail space. In Elkhart there are dozens of strip malls that have lost all or most tenants, and Hancock Boulevard in Bullhead has a 70 percent vacancy rate at least.
From Hancock Boulevard, one can see the 14 story never-finished hotel tower for the former construction site called the Emerald River Casino in Laughlin — now a carcass that has been sitting for 20 years; a golf course dried up and returned to the desert. Atlantic City is nothing but empty storefronts dotted by empty casino skyscrapers.
Downtown Albany, NY, looks like some kind of strange bomb took out all the businesses and left only government offices open. Saginaw, Mich, only has payday loan stores, and liquor stores open for business. Ashland, Wisc., has about 60 percent retail vacancy.
This year Macys, JC Penney, Sears, Office Depot, Abercrombie, Aeropostale, and Radio Shack will close another 10 million square feet of retail space, cutting about 10,000 jobs. It isn’t just the big chains that close: When Macy’s, JC Penney, and Sears all pull from a mall, the whole mall dies, like Cinderella City, Westminster Mall, Northglen Mall. Metrocenter mall in Phoenix is dying fast and will most likely be gone in two years.
Even Las Vegas has a bunch of empty skyscrapers (the unfinished Fontainebleau, the Harmon, the Las Vegas Club towers, Binions tower, and a tower in front of the Venetian are all empty.) A visitor to Cortez who is from Fresno, Cleveland, Des Moines, Buffalo, Beaumont or a thousand other places with badly dying retail will be impressed at how few empty buildings we have here.
And that things here are booming, and if the boom continues, all but the gas stations will be torn down and rebuilt or rented out.
Nels Werner
Cortez