Legal Commentary

While my former neighbors back in Michigan wade through autumn leaves, I shuffle through ankle-deep trash here on Court Street in Brooklyn. The thought occurred to me that I ought to start a petition drive for a Business Improvement District -- a BID -- to clean up the menus, fliers, free newspapers, and other urban detritus that afflicts our local commercial strip. BIDs are simply special assessment districts that charge the property owners within their limits for some extra services -- usually beautification like trash pickup, signage, plantings, etc. The charges tend to be small, but the aesthetic improvements can be significant: Nearby Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights is virtually trash-free compared to Court despite the former's heavier foot traffic.

But my proposal for a BID went down with the neighborhood leaders like a wise guy in cement galoshes dumped in the Gowanus Canal. One local activist -- a neighbor who has commendably contributed his time and labor in planning and lobbying for local parks -- told me that BIDs are just a conservative device to privatize the neighborhood. "If picking up garbage is such a good idea, then we should press for better pickup everywhere in the city," he said. "Why should our neighborhood get more services just because we are a squeakier wheel?"

This question raises a surprisingly common complaint about BIDs. (See, for instance, Audrey McFarlane's piece in the Stanford Agora). But the complaint strikes me as egalitarianism run amok. Yes, BIDs could be said to "privatize" neighborhoods in an arguably regressive way: Neighborhoods with greater tax-paying capacity might be more willing to lobby for extra services. But the same complaint applies to any effort to mobilize a neighborhood: Middle-class neighborhoods with highly educated residents form civic associations and complain to police and school authorities more frequently, because education bears a high correlation to having a taste for political and civic activity. Should the lawyers, brokers, psychologists, and other highly educated denizens of Park Slope, Morningside Heights, etc, therefore resign from the PTA and stop writing letters to the Times, just to insure that their neighborhoods are as ill-served by city hall as the rest of New York?

Of course, being a lonely Red State fugitive surrounded by a sea of earnestly Left New Yorkers, I tend to be perversely attached to privatization of all sorts. Distrusting my own instincts, I ask any prawfs out there who care about local government: Does my neighbor suffer from irrational and politically paralyzing egalitarianism, or am I just a privatizing reactionary who will be swept into the dustbin of history after November 4th?