Wal-Mart fight's Herculean issue: Who crafts communities' future?

VICTORIA2-C-06MAR03-RE-PC Homes have views from Mt. Tamalpais to San Pablo Bay. Victoria By The Bay is the newest housing community sprouting up in Hercules. PAUL CHINN/SF CHRONICLE CAT VICTORIA2-C-06MAR03-RE-PC Homes have views from Mt. Tamalpais to San Pablo Bay. Victoria By The Bay is the newest housing community sprouting up in Hercules. PAUL CHINN/SF CHRONICLE CAT Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Wal-Mart fight's Herculean issue: Who crafts communities' future? 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

Cynics are right: Hercules' old-fashioned new neighborhoods are downright unreal.

The houses are too pristine, the landscaping too prim. They're modeled along the lines of a bungalow-filled village of yore, yet the result looks like a pastel launching pad for commuters.

No matter. I'll root for a David clad in Ralph Lauren over a bottom-line Wal-Mart Goliath any day.

The legal cloud looming over this young suburb across the bay from San Francisco isn't just an eminent domain spat where a city wants to seize private land to impose its will. The issue is more profound: whether communities have the right to shape their futures -- or whether they should be forced to conform to corporate America's one-size-fits-all mold.

Here's the story so far.

Hercules got its name from a powder company that amassed land north of Richmond and used it to manufacture explosives and then produce fertilizer from 1879 to 1964.

As the company moved out, residential developers moved in. During the 1980s, the population shot from 5,900 to 16,800, making it the Bay Area's fastest-growing suburb. It also became a showplace of state-of-the-art sprawl: curving boulevards that pass by shopping centers and community parks, with roads spinning off into cul-de-sac'd housing tracts.

What remained in 1999 was 426 acres west of Interstate 80 along the bay. Great land. Great views. And a great deal of dirty land waiting to be cleaned up and put to higher and better use, as they say in the real estate world.

Rather than wait and see what developers would do, Hercules took a different tack: It invited planners aligned with the New Urbanism movement to talk about how to craft new neighborhoods that had the feel of a pre-World War II suburb, with pedestrian-friendly streets as well as parks and shops and restored wetlands. There were public meetings in 2000 to discuss what the future might hold, and then a plan was put into place.

"They definitely want to grow, but in a fashion that differentiates itself from the suburban sprawl around it," says Gale Connor, the attorney representing Hercules on the eminent domain front. "They want to emphasize community, emphasize people on the front porch talking to each other or walking to a small shopping center."

Enter Wal-Mart.

The world's largest retailer has a straightforward business formula: It wants to be where customers are, and in a big, convenient way. Even though it has a store in Martinez and another going up in Richmond, the chain wants a Hercules outpost as well.

Hercules' plan makes room for a neighborhood shopping center with a grocery store on 17 acres on John Muir Parkway across from Refugio Creek. So when the landowner and Wal-Mart showed up in 2004 with your standard oversize box store, city officials shook their heads. Wal-Mart then bought out the landowner and in November unveiled a proposal for a gussied-up center that was a bit smaller, a bit more scenic, but still exactly what the plans rule out.

The city said no again. Wal-Mart came back again, unwilling to take no for an answer.

The City Council voted last week to use eminent domain if necessary to buy the land and move on. Now Wal-Mart says it's ready to fight.

Watching this dispute from afar -- especially from a perch as self-absorbed as San Francisco -- it's easy to shrug and turn away.

Wal-Mart's enemies depict the 5,200-store chain as a massive feral pig that uproots and devours everything from small-town economies to the national health care system. But Hercules' status as a suburb puts off smug urbanites, and the nostalgic air of the new district would strike condescending outsiders as Martha Stewart-esque.

Personally, I'm not sure what to think when I visit. The built quality is worlds above what you find in other new suburban areas, such as American Canyon to the north in Napa County. The streets are orderly and the weave of parks and walkways is enticing. But there's an air of make-believe.

Strangest of all is Sycamore Street near the bay, where attractively retro structures have storefronts on the street, living quarters up above ... and not a person in sight. Next door is land reserved for a sort-of Main Street that would include small shops and a waterfront park. We'll see when it arrives.

But this is the path the city chose. To its credit.

Hercules did exactly what a growing city should do. Instead of taking whatever developers dish out -- the boilerplate housing tracts and shopping centers that form interchangeable landscapes of no discernible charm -- they laid out a blueprint that could set the stage for something different.

A city that might someday stick in your memory, instead of make you scratch your head.

Last week, a Wal-Mart spokesman told The Chronicle that if Hercules wins in court, "there's virtually no limit on government's ability to take private property through eminent domain." Connor has a different view.

"It was crystal clear what was to be there (on the 17-acre site). The plans are so specific," he says. "This is the largest retailer in the country trying to force its big box onto a site that doesn't permit it."

Actually, Connor understated the case: With $312 billion in sales in 2005, Wal-Mart is the largest retailer in the world. And it should pick a fight somewhere else.