Originally designed to further business development to improve the tax base of the entire city, BIDs are increasingly being used by affluent city neighbourhoods to enhance what are viewed as inadequate municipal services. Because cities are often divided into affluent, white neighbourhoods and poor minority ones, BIDs are troubling in that they reinforce race and class divisions within what is theoretically an urban whole. The author argues that we must consider BIDs in light of the competing egalitarian and group formation principles embodied in voting rights jurisprudence.

Just as the proliferation of suburban homeowners association raises serious issues of democratic participation in the affairs of the community by non-property owners, so too does the rising number of business improvement districts raise the issue of democratic participation.

Because the BID manifests the almost irrefutable logic of decentralizing certain municipal functions to the neighbourhood level, we can expect this to be an ever-increasing trend in municipal governance. One aspect of these districts that has not been adequately examined is the fact that improvement districts need not be only commercially justified or of benefit only to commercial districts. Their methods, and benefits can be applied to residential neighbourhoods as a community development tool.

In fact, many improvement districts are not strictly commercial - they either have individual residents living in, around or near the commercial district that has formed an official improvement district. As a consequence, we have a de facto, yet unexamined, trend in urban place making: the mixed improvement district, currently characterized as a business improvement district can more correctly be considered a residential improvement district, (“RID”).

University of Baltimore - School of Law
Audrey G. McFarlane

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Audrey G. McFarlane

research

Urban Policy > Social inclusion & integration

Community development