Neighborhood Futures

Citizen Rights and Local Control

George Liebmann

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351308861
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: Politics

Two conflicting developments have recently characterized civic life in the United States. The first, the centralization of formal agencies of government, too often leads to diminishing political liberties and tyranny. The second, which is characterized by a greater amount of civic participation and individual self-actualization, is the formation of a whole new layer of sublocal institutions, both public and private. These include residential community and condominium associations; property owner-based business improvement districts in nearly all major cities; neighborhood improvement districts in large cities; and even self-governing public schools. Neighborhood Futures is a realistic exploration of how, for a society to move forward and improve, its citizens must exercise the power to act creatively, and feel they are both competent and responsible individuals. Supporting his ideas with the Dutch innovation of the woonerf, or neighborhood street government, Liebmann follows through by discussing other foreign models of civic life forms and illustrating how they have resulted in resident satisfaction. George W. Liebmann is a partner of Liebmann & Shively, P.A., a Baltimore law firm that specializes in local government and education law. In addition to having served as a top aide to one of Maryland's governors, he is a former faculty associate of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and is the author of Little Platoons and The Gallows in the Grove.

CHAPTER 1

The Future of Neighborhood

PROPERTY-RELATED FUNCTIONS

The politics of homeownership in America has traditionally centered on three questions: crime, schools, and the level of property taxation. These are each perceived as matters within the control of local government, properly so-called. The first two at least are in process of being carelessly nationalized. Other means of allowing homeowners to influence and govern their immediate environment have been neglected, though street-level governance has aroused great interest in Western Europe. In recent years, however, condominiums and other organizations to promote the common interests of property owners have begun to proliferate in the United States. A discussion of the principal functions that may be discharged by such narrowly defined property-owners’ associations may be instructive. We shall consider first, street governance; second, the renewal of city blocks; third, the rendition of trash collection and other property-related services; and fourth, the regulation of land use.

Street Governance

It has of course long been recognized that small entities cannot be entrusted with the maintenance of through roads. Parish roads in England were “unmaintained when little used” by local residents.¹ The French and Belgian communes prior to World War II were accorded varying degrees of exclusive control; in Belgium only over roads not serving groups of houses; in France only over footpaths and streets not connecting with railroad stations or other hamlets.² It is said that French communes with populations of between 1000 and 2000 characteristically employed “a municipal secretary, a clerk, and a charwoman and a road-worker.”³

The woonerf, or residential street-government Régime, is a Dutch innovation of the 1970s, although precursors of it can be found in laws in England and New York allowing the closing of playstreets. These earlier mechanisms involved transfer of street uses from traffic to people. The Dutch innovation rested instead on what Rodney Tolley has called the “startling and revolutionary notion that in residential areas traffic and people should not be segregated but instead should be integrated … admitted on the residents’ terms … slowly and without superior rights.”

Woonerven in The Netherlands began in 1976, when a law authorized elimination of curbs and the integration into one surface of sidewalk and road areas, giving the visual impression of a residential yard.

Pedestrians may use the full width of the road within an area defined as a woon-erf; playing on the roadway is also permitted. Drivers within a woonerf may not drive faster than [about 8 to 12 m.p.h.]. They must make allowance for the possible presence of pedestrians, children at play, unmarked objects… traffic approaching from the right at whatever speed always has priority. Drivers may not impede pedestrians. Pedestrians may not unreasonably hinder the progress of drivers.

This innovation offers important benefits to the upbringing of children, to safety, and to the creation of a sense of community in both suburban and city areas.

Traffic in woonerven is controlled by ramps, speed bumps, narrow-ings, changes in axis, street furniture, planters, and trees. Parking is permitted only in specially designated spaces. Woonerven in The Netherlands may be petitioned for by a 60 percent vote at a meeting attended by a majority of neighborhood citizens. Because they result from local initiative, woonerven have proven highly popular. By 1983, 2700 woonerven had been created, leading to a 50 percent reduction in injuries within them. In Germany, there was a 20 percent reduction in accidents and a 50 percent reduction in severe accidents.

Advocates maintain that children and the elderly “should not have their links to the outside world severed by traffic flows past their doors.” The creation of these zones has become a major environmental cause in Germany.

An Organization for European Community Development (OECD) study in 1986 stated as requisites to success the prevention of residential areas being used by through traffic, regulations and signage influencing driver behavior to follow planned routes at moderate speeds, and the use of physical measures in support of regulations. In Britain, where only physical measures in new developments have been used, the concept has been slow to take hold, due to the absence of legal provisions for the creation of traffic restraints on neighborhood initiative. Pending government proposals would empower parish councils to fund traffic calming works from their general revenues.⁴

The mechanism has been highly popular in Denmark. This may be due to the fact that many Danish streets in new developments are in private ownership. “Residents, if they wish [calming], must pay for it themselves,” the cost approximating that of a new refrigerator. Similar private-street Régimes exist in parts of St. Louis and in many of the newer American residential community associations, although as yet, aside from crude speed bumps and speed limit and stop signs, there has been little interest in the more sophisticated traffic calming devices.

The popularity of woonerven on particular streets has led to broader efforts to calm traffic in residential areas generally, through the use of 30 k.p.h. speed limits, numerous four-way stop signs, and street narrowings, speed bumps, and other speed reducers, popularized in the United States by Oscar Newman and others promoting concepts of “defensible space” to protect neighborhoods; The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has issued a pamphlet written by Secretary Cisneros sounding similar themes.

If woonerven are to be used and accepted in a country with the libertarian political traditions of the United States, they must be perceived as being an expansion of the legal rights of property owners. This result can be achieved through use of the Dutch mechanism for creation on neighborhood application, or by including their creation within the arsenal of powers of residential community associations as defined by their deed covenants, or by street privatization on the St. Louis model. In the short run, the Dutch mechanism is simplest, and has been found to result in “stronger social cohesiveness, much brought about by the involvement of the residents themselves in a sophisticated process of planning their own surroundings.”

The developers of Seaside, Florida found that in order to avoid street width and curb regulations, it was necessary to characterize woonerven as “parking areas.” In Germany, civil engineers resisted the encroachment of landscape architects into their field; it is now established that the former design the subsurface, and the latter the surface. Traffic calming, however, has some natural allies other than residents. According to Rodney Tol-ley,⁵ in the most recent survey of the field: “The employment effects of traffic calming are labor intensive, with few machines being used and much planning and discussion required … employment effects are reported to be 4 or 5 times higher than the employment effects of conventional large-scale road construction….”

There is a large literature on traffic calming, beginning with the pioneer work of the late Donald Appleyard, an American,⁶ and including several books by Carmen Hass-Klau, Annette Moudon, and Rodney Tol-ley. Useful surveys have appeared.⁷

The paradox is that a form of privatization is needed for streets to fulfill the function of public property identified by Carol Rose:

In the absence of the socializing activities that take place on “inherently public property” the public is a shapeless mob, whose members neither trade nor converse nor play, but only fight, in a setting where life is, in Hobbes’s all-too-famous phrase, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

The general rule in the United States is that street closings require the assent of a majority of abutting owners, who may be assessed for the cost of works only to the extent of benefits conferred.⁸ Cities like Laredo, Texas engaging in closings on a large scale accord owners the right to acquire the adjacent street beds.⁹ The benefits from closings include “income from the sale, return of the property to the tax rolls; employment generated both by the construction and the occupants; elimination of the municipality’s liability and reduction of public-maintenance responsibilities”¹⁰ as well as “opportunities for additional parking [and] open space.”

In St. Louis County, beds of streets were deeded to residents abutting them, subject to assessments enforceable by lien. The several-hundred resulting associations provide repairs, street lighting, traffic regulation, sweeping, and tree trimming; some provide a security patrol. Privatization is now permitted on petition of 95 percent of residents. “Provision by subdivisions allows for greater variation in service bundles among neighborhoods than provision by overlying municipalities.”¹¹ It has been suggested that local governments stimulate the voluntary formation of additional such associations by offering one-time block grants or priority in allocation of municipal services as well as transfer of municipally owned real estate and relief from a portion of municipal taxes.¹² A British commentator has urged that street privatization and partial closing is complementary to the effectiveness of neighborhood security patrols.¹³ Other commentators, reviewing the literature on “defensible space,” have noted that

Territoriality does not apply to such a large scale as a neighborhood. Further, neighborhood populations, in contrast to street-block groupings, are not face-to-face groups…. The main practical implication is that, for now, crime-prevention efforts should focus on street blocks rather than on neighborhoods. Block-level theories have advanced substantially in recent years. Models describing both the resident-based and the offender-based processes linking design and crime have been specified and tested in several cases.¹⁴

A. bolder suggestion is that

all property-owners along streets would be considered required members of amenity cooperatives … public subsidy could be granted depending on detailed correlation and determination of improvements provided by and perhaps required of the amenity cooperative. … Preferential treatment to capital expenditures for approved street development, if properly rewarded, could lead to far-flung private programs to improve street quality according to revised concepts.¹⁵

Some American jurisdictions, led by Montgomery County, Maryland have provided tax abatements to residents of community associations maintaining streets.¹⁶ Scandinavian neighborhood councils in larger cities are accorded jurisdiction over street closings and the location of ...