The rest of this thread (including the parent comment you were replying to) seemed to be about city vs suburbia, so that’s how I interpreted that Wal-Mart story. I’m not very familiar with the suburbanisation process in North America - I’ve never lived there - but wasn’t it driven by the desire of avoiding higher crime rates by moving to less densely populated areas? If so, local suburbanites must have hated that new Wal-Mart precisely because it was a point of congregation. Your reasoning is centered around “in vs out-of-area people” but the way I read it is just “not many people around vs lots of people around”.
The Walmart's existence as a crime nexus was because it attracted trashy people from other neighborhoods, not because it was a congregation point. The same problem didn't occur at previous superstores, or high school football games, or the community college.
