why Smith students should pressure Smith to opt out of the BID before the 21st

This is a speech I gave at the Second Annual Northeast Class Conference at Smith yesterday:

Student activists often excel at working through macro-issues politically—the 5 college march against Gaza recently was really something to see, and the way Hampshire college organizations pressured Hampshire to divest from Israel was laudable and impressive. Or, they can often organize the hell out of oncampus issues—whether or not you agree with what happened at the Don Feder talk in terms of free speech, the Umass Coalition Against Hate really mobilized in impressive force in that instance. But when it comes to town-gown affairs, students often insulate themselves inside campus, never knowing what a huge role they and their school play in college towns economically, especially the influence they have over the lives of a town’s economically vulnerable people .

Smith plays an incredibly powerful role in Northampton politics, so much so that many Northampton citizens are afraid of its influence over residential neighborhoods, local business, and city government. Smith is immensely important to Northampton as a source of tourism in its role as a historical site, as a rich investor with alumni donators and its own resources going into commercial projects, and through the buying power of Smith students. A few years ago all hell broke loose in a city council battle over Smith expanding to build more in a residential/commercial Green St. neighborhood, using an antiquated law called the Dover Amendment that allowed it to control land 100 ft outside its campus borders. Well, Smith won that battle, and I’m not sure many Smith students even heard of it. Now plans to build in that area are under way, creating an early death for many small businesses in that area and affecting many residents, and perhaps most importantly, shutting down one of the few places low income Northampton citizens can live near downtown—a small Green St rooming house which provided a few subsidized and section 8 disability rooms.

But today, and for a very limited time after, students can do something about a new project in the works, in which Smith, a small elite of business owners, and parts of city government have united to control public space in a way that will hurt low income people, small local businesses, most Northampton citizens, and even Smith students themselves, especially those on financial aid or those on work-study.

At first, business improvement districts look like a pretty boring issue, and a non-issue at that. What’s wrong, the hype goes, with Northampton businesses and properties shelling out their own cash to fund public improvements, maintenance projects like sweeping the streets or amenities like setting up holiday lights downtown over Christmas and the other solstice holidays? It all sounds like good, clean fun, and after all, the businesses themselves are picking up the tab.

But going beyond the PR, there’s a much longer story to tell about Business Improvement Districts.

The official definition of a BID, business improvement district, is a public-private partnership in which businesses in a defined area create a contract to pay an additional in order to take on certain powers as a group, and fund projects in the district's public realm and trading environment. BIDs originated in the 1970s and 80s as federal, state, and municipal budgets were cut, and businesses in city neighborhoods decided to fund many municipal services themselves. So BIDs were created as private concerns filled voids when community supports broke down.

An appropriate analogy for a BID is a mall. In fact, the idea of the BID was originally modeled on malls. Malls are single properties managed by one entity that rents out retail space to tenants, and those tenants pay a common maintenance fee to pay for services that enhance the appearance of the mall's common areas and provide cooperative advertising for the mall and its various stores. BIDs operate economically in much the same way. And, much like a mall, it’s a person’s status as a consumer rather than as a citizen that counts in terms of how they are treated by security, and in general. It’s an organization or group of people’s status as an earner, rather than as a stakeholder, that counts.

In fact, our Northampton BID is designed for the same exact demographic as an upscale mall—designed to serve the target demographic of the mostly white female, mostly upper middle tourist who make up the majority of our tourists. This is why our BID in particular has such an incentive to conform to the racist, classist prejudices of such a demographic. And this is why small businesses, that cater to a more local demographic, will be left in the lurch—if they opt in, which many will by default b/c if you don’t opt out before April 21st, you’re counted in, the BID is focused around tourism, so restaurants, gift shops and hotels will receive the benefits while these small businesses, who make up part of the heart of Northampton’s reputation for arts and culture, will be left with the bill and no actual benefits. If they opt out, they will be left without basic city maintenance services they should receive on the basis of being taxpayers.

Imagine living in a mall.

That’s why the first issue many progressives have with BIDs is how they bring about the private control of public space. Public space plays a vital role in democracy, as a site of free speech, association, and protest. Urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg writes that the downtown, with its bars, coffee shops and public spaces, constitutes an important "third place," different from the first and second places of home and work. These third places are central to the health of local democracy and community, giving us respite from the rule of the marketplace in a space where we can interact with each other—where *all* classes and races of people can interact with each other, no matter how marketable they are or how local capitalist interest view them. When the policing of a district and its maintenance are based on profit-driven concerns rather than the need to create and maintain noncommercial space where people assemble, it's difficult to use public space the way it was intended.

For example, one problem with BIDs is private security. Besides private security's long history of civil and human rights abuses---despite the fact that in theory private security is restrained in the same way police departments are by people's Fourth Amendment rights, in practice they have much less oversight than police departments do---the mall analogy works well here to explain another pressing problem with the BID's use of private security: Mall cops are concerned with how your presence affects shopping, not whether you've truly broken the law or not. And mall security is usually selective about whom it chooses to pursue--a well-off tourist on a coke-fueled shopping spree, laden with shopping bags from different stores, won't be touched, but a homeless man loaded up on Thunderbird to keep warm will be thrown out of the premises, if not turned over to the police for disorderly conduct and public intoxication. This is usually true even if both individuals are equally disruptive.

While with the Northampton BID, the city has promised two more downtown police patrols as one of the many “in-kind” contributions it’s supposed to be making (and all the duties whose price they’ll be taking on through their contract with the BID, and the yearly tithe of $85,000, and all the other unspecified to be determined “in-kind contributions” whose bill the city is paying for the BID,like taking on the cost of collecting BID monies, organizing large scale BID events, buying, fueling, maintaining and storing pricey maintenance equipment, the first of which, a street sweeper, cost $35,0000, giving the lie to the BID’s claim that businesses are taking on costs that taxpayers would otherwise handle—but we’ll talk more about that later*), most BIDs use private security. But even in this case, these new patrols will obviously be influenced by the pull the BID has over the city. And furthermore, our BID wants to install a culture of informing in Northampton, where both their CLEAN Teams (made up of free labor) and the uniformed tourist guides they propose are instructed to act as “extra eyes and ears for the police.” Given the BID’s proposition of the ordinance that would have de facto criminalized panhandling downtown, to get rid of people the BID found unmarketable, it takes no great leap of imagination to figure that these "eyes and ears'" instructions will be construing any petty disturbance by poor people as a crime they should report, while ignoring any crimes that tourists or business owners themselves commit.

There's been substantial attention to the manner in which BIDs globally have often attempted to rid the spaces they control of the homeless, ethnic minorities, and political activists who might frighten off shoppers. (We've already seen how the Northampton BID feels about political protesters through the way they influenced the police recently: A few days before the BID passed, our peaceful protest against it garnered two arrests, with one arrestee pulled off the street while pushing another protester’s wheelchair around an obstacle, and another arrestee wrestled down by three cops, and, oh, the irony, charged with assault and battery of a police officer.)Yet, public space is there to accommodate the right of the people to assemble, and to use another, more telling commercial analogy, the city's streets are not a country club. You should not have to be the "right" race or in the "right" income bracket in order to walk them. BIDs have been routinely racist and classist. I'll list a few of the most egregious examples:

--The Grand Central Partnership, in New York, NY: In 1995, the Partership was accused of using "goon squads" of untrained, formerly homeless men to forcibly remove homeless individuals from the BID. It was revealed that these workers were being paid only $1.15 an hour for their services.

--The Madison Avenue Business Improvement District in New York, NY: In 1997, Mayor Giuliani found it necessary to advise the Madison Avenue BID's security department to rescind the distribution of a flier advising the BID's businesses to close and secure valuable merchandise on the day of the Puerto-Rican Day Parade.

--The Baltimore Downtown Partnership. Baltimore, in MD :"To change negative perceptions developed among area employees, consumers and visitors, the BDP hired 'Safety Guides' to discourage crime by curtailing the presence of the homeless." (What right do businesses have to roust poor people from public space?)"... The Downtown Partnership has been working with the Baltimore Gas and Electricity Company and the city to install surveillance cameras along the commercial streets of the BID"---however you feel about government surveillance for the purposes of national security, I think we can all agree that business interests have no right to spy on us in our public space. (Quotations all from Business Improvement Districts: Issues In Alternative Local Service Provisions, by Mildred Warner, James Quazi, Brooks More, Ezra Cattan, Scott Bellen and Kerim Odekon, June 2002, Cornell University)

This BID proposal is no different from any other when it comes to victimizing low income people, especially the most destitute and the homeless. This was the BID that proposed the panhandling ordinance to city council and only tabled it when it was met with huge community opposition and it threatened the political popularity of their entire BID proposal—and now that their little political shell game worked, and the BID passed less than a month ago, the BID proponents have vowed to bring the panhandling ordinance up again, and the language of that ordinance is still in their proposal. On page 18 of the BID proposal, it is strongly implied that homeless people will be used as a pool of free seasonal labor under the guise of “skills training” for the BID maintenance program, the CLEAN Team. The Clean Team proper itself is going to be using free labor like court-ordered community service participants and work release prisoners, instead of creating much needed low skill entry level living wage positions for poor people in this time of economic crisis. Also, this plan has community service participants working for business interests, rather than doing true community service like volunteering at a soup kitchen or a shelter, at a time when funding for social safety net programs like those is eroding. Furthermore, the BID is going to raise rents and prices throughout downtown, as property owners who opt in will pass the burden of the 43% increase in property tax it entails along to businesses and residents in the form of rents, and as the businesses that opt in or lease from those who opt in will in turn pass the burden along in the form of higher prices. BIDs are only supposed to be zoned in areas that are ¾ mixed commercial and industrial use, but Northampton’s Business Improvement District is 27% residential. Low income residents will be forced out of a downtown they can’t afford to live and shop in—and the rest of us will feel the pressure as well.

It would be one thing if the BID’s classist policies had oversight. But the power that the BID has over public space seems well nigh unlimited. Massachusetts General Law, in chapter 40 O, discussing BIDs, gives BIDs the power to sue, incur indebtedness, enter into contracts, acquire real property, design, engineer, and construct urban streetscapes, manage parking, and "administer and manage central and neighborhood business districts." The last clause, in its vague, abstract language, is the most frightening, since it could encompass almost anything. They say the BID cannot legislate, but with this sort of power, they can find many ways around existing legislation.

Furthermore, the BID will literally be making the big decisions the law gives it authority over behind closed doors. MA law does not require the private BID board of directors to have open meetings, or compel them to follow other public provisions that encourage citizen participation and institutional transparency. So, the BID will be making city government decisions without the benefit of voter-elected decision makers. This is one more example of how the BID is constructed to be controlled by people with money—not by THE people.

Now, here’s where Smith comes in. The fact is, the BID does not represent the interests of most local businesses in the area—only a small elite of business and property owners. To get the assent percentage they needed to be legitimate as a BID proposal, the Northampton BID proponents turned to a number of illegitimate tricks. One of them was allowing residential condo owners, who are by law excluded by the BID, to be counted as almost one third of the assents. But since they not only need the assents of 61% of business and property owners in the district to be legitimate, but also the assent of 51% of the representatives of the total assessed value of the BID district, in the second draft of their BID district map, they gerrymandered Smith. 95%, or $135 million dollars, of the 51% of total assessed value representation that they need is made up of Smith, a non-profit institution, which isn’t even supposed to be representative of the interests of the BID. Smith will be paying the BID an unspecified amount of money, to be determined later, and giving it plenty of in-kind contributions.

Basically, Smith is buying more control over the town from the BID. Because the town is also important to Smith, as Smith is important to the town—it is part of its marketing ploy to draw in more students and more tuition. A whitewashed town, beautified and wiped clean of the unsightly poor, is more attractive to the parents of many middle to upper class Smith students, especially the kind of parents who might end up being donors. The town also provides Smith with more territory in which to expand, and now they are buying influence from the BID with which to facilitate doing so.

Smith claims it is responding to student needs. Smith administration state that they put out the word about focus groups a couple of semesters ago, and only a few students ended up showing. (But I doubt they got notices in your mailboxes about this, or were all sent an online survey—they weren’t truly looking for student input, merely making the gesture of seeking it.) They then interpreted the concerns of these students to fit a pro-BID case—the Smith students said they were concerned about the homeless people downtown, and so Smith lauded the anti-panhandling ordinance. The Smith students said they enjoyed town events, so Smith pointed to the fact that the BID is planning many town events, without mentioning that Northampton always has a lot of event programming, like the Taste and the Sidewalk Sale, as it is. The Smith students said they enjoyed an affordable downtown—so Smith isn’t really mentioning the fact that because of the 43% tithe from all business and property owners, the BID will actually make it much less affordable for students to shop and live downtown as prices and rents rise.

During a time when work-study hours are being cut, and financial aid—which 62% of Smith students receive in some form—is endangered by the depression, Smith is agreeing to pay an unspecified amount of money to promote the BID’s classist and community destroying agenda. But there is a good side to all this, a chance for action. Because Smith makes up so much of the total assessed value of the BID, it makes up a large amount of its funds and influence. There is still time for any participant of the BID to opt out before April 21st when the participant is locked into the contract forever. If Smith students take on-campus action and pressure Carol Christ and other Smith high ups to opt out of the BID, they can defuse much of its power. This means they wield a lot of influence in this political campaign against the BID. I can only hope that they take the opportunity to use it.