At home here

By Published by The Editorial Board

Published: June 27, 2008

Home Depot opened its new Danville store Thursday to large crowds and high expectations.

Danville worked hard to bring Home Depot — and the other new stores that will soon open around it — to this community. Home Depot has the distinction of being the first Coleman MarketPlace store to open.

The city developed Coleman MarketPlace because of strong growth in its sales and meals tax revenue — a critical measure of the local economy’s strength even as it lost traditional industries. Eventually, Danville came to see itself as the center of a geographic area that was underserved by national chain stores and the increasingly popular big-box retailers found in larger metropolitan communities.

Coleman MarketPlace isn’t just a new shopping center for Danville and Pittsylvania County, it’s a regional shopping center designed to give people an alternative to crowded, larger cities an hour or two from their homes.

In the days since the well-kept, modest homes and tree-covered, rolling terrain on the Home Depot site gave way to construction equipment, higher gas prices have made out-of-town shopping trips even more expensive. That gives regional residents even more reason to shop in Danville.

The city believes it will recoup its $7.8 million investment in Coleman MarketPlace with sales, meals and property taxes. Coleman MarketPlace’s stores and restaurants will provide 1,500 new jobs. Finally, Coleman MarketPlace will give shoppers more stores to choose from.

Home Depot has grown tremendously since the company opened its first store in 1979 in Atlanta. But we don’t know of any Home Depot that has meant as much to a community as the one that has opened here on Thursday.

Home Depot’s opening is part of a larger plan to reinvent the local economy with new jobs, new tax revenue and more shopping choices.