Facing poor public services and deteriorating downtown conditions, businesses increasingly have been banding together to create a new public/private hybrid, the business improvement district. Pioneered in New York City in the 1980s, a BID has a board of directors, can levy assessments, and in other ways resembles a private community association. Yale law professor Robert Ellickson proposes that the private association model be extended by legislatures to deteriorating residential neighborhoods, resulting in what he calls a “block improvement district.”
Educational FOCJs
Schools are the largest area of responsibility of American local governments, absorbing about 40 percent of their budgets. But there are no economy-of-scale or other physical requirements that necessitate a unified public system, and the public school monopoly historically reflected a desire to inculcate “the American religion” throughout society. The current turn to school choice, charter schools, and private vouchers points to a different future for elementary and secondary education, one that resembles Bruno Frey’s “functional overlapping competing jurisdictions.”
Rio’s Favelas
About 1 billion people around the world live in squatter communities, including some 1 million in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Largely ignored by the official governments, the residents of favelas obtain their services through informal arrangements among themselves. Journalist Robert Neuwirth reports in Shadow Cities that he was much safer living in a favela than in the parts of Rio served by public police. With the streets teeming with people and drug lords enforcing strict discipline, the criminals know to stay away.
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