I leave my apartment, walk down a set of cracked cement stairs, and, a few minutes later, am turning onto Steinway Street: the mile-long commercial drag in southeast Astoria, Queens. Segments of Steinway, lined with old leafy trees, offer respite from the summer sun; others will be packed with pedestrians later in the day as people wait for their orders at the Mediterranean food trucks, or for their family members to leave the neighborhood clinic.
From these bustling sidewalks, I descend into the sweltering subway system and wait for the R train. On hot days, it’s an easier route than the M train, since the R will take me within a half-block of my workplace, just off Union Square. The R follows a zigzag route that traces various aboveground points of interest: it passes under 36th Street, where Astoria abuts Sunnyside, and heads due south across a forbidding stretch of train tracks known as Sunnyside Yards. Along the adjacent Northern Boulevard blocks, new condo and rental developments, all brick and concrete and dark polished metals, seem to spring up overnight; hundreds, if not thousands of units of this type may follow in coming years.
All these little corners of the city share one thing—something in common with many, many little corners, in cities and towns across North America. Each neighborhood, in a way that’s all but invisible to many of those commuting, working, and living in them, is a zone of contention, caught between their status as public spaces and creeping claims of private control. Outwardly, each would seem to be part of New York’s vibrant public realm. But in truth, considerable expanses of that realm—in the literal sense of real estate, and figuratively, in public decisionmaking and control—have been quietly carved away and ceded to private interests.
Thanks to innovations in contract law, new corporate-municipal models, and decades of compromised policy choices, our quintessential “public” spaces—city streets, sidewalks, plazas—have in many cases become no less the purview of private interests than the products those interests sell or the extravagant offices they inhabit. Multiple mechanisms have whittled away at the spaces of the demos and allowed private power to requisition them from everyday citizens, so that they can, in effect, be commoditized and sold back at a markup—or, just as commonly, cordoned off and secured so that they can serve only certain preferred segments of the public.
Many of these zones of privatization lie along the R train’s route, invisibly laying claim to whole neighborhoods along my daily commute. After crossing beneath the East River, the R begins traversing Manhattan, hitting multiple important transfer hubs—Lexington Avenue, Fifth Avenue, 57th Street—and the supertall luxury towers of Billionaire’s Row. In Queens Plaza, the industrial past has almost entirely given way to glass skyscrapers and speculative condo developments. As Samuel Stein described it in his 2019 book Capital City, “real estate in New York is like oil in Texas.” Unquestionably, it’s the ”biggest business” around, one which “lurks behind every other major fight in the city,” including those over labor, climate resilience and the environment, and civil rights.
The R goes on to pass some of New York’s most well-known landmarks—Broadway, the Plaza Hotel, Rockefeller Center, Times Square, the Flatiron Building (soon slated to become luxury condos), and more—along with countless theaters and shopping districts, universities and community parks. What’s less well-known is that virtually all of them rest on numerous city blocks that have been claimed by private capital in various ways, subordinating the bustling sidewalks to a state of governance that can no longer qualify as fully public in any meaningful sense. The expanding borders of New York’s business improvement districts (BIDs) have swallowed them up.
Per New York’s office of Small Business Services, a BID is “a geographical area where local stakeholders,” who are largely the owners of in-district properties and businesses, “oversee and fund the maintenance, improvement, and promotion of their commercial district.” Fees, or “special assessments,” that are levied on these stakeholders go to the BID, which then uses to “supplement” existing municipal services by providing beautification, “public safety and hospitality,” and similar functions.
Well over a thousand BIDs exist across the U.S., ranging from small commercial strips of a few blocks in smaller cities—like the Downtown Missoula Partnership in Montana—to multiple dozens of high-rise blocks surrounding Times Square in the heart of Manhattan. Most are established by coalitions of local property owners on their own initiative.
After banding together to establish a BID and incorporate a nonprofit to administer it, those founding property owners will usually contract with the municipal government and assume leadership roles on the BID’s governing board. In the early stages, at least—from the first BID in Toronto to their proliferation across the U.S. during the 1980s and ‘90s—BIDs were meant to allow local businesses to contribute additional funds to civic maintenance within the district, above and beyond the obligatory taxes, to complement standard public services. These might involve everything from hiring additional cleaning, graffiti removal, and trash services to full security regimes, involving private (sometimes armed) guards and, remarkably, even the paid employ of regular police officers, both on and off the clock.
Different state and local laws impose distinctive requirements, meaning BIDs may operate in idiosyncratic ways. Some boards can be reasonably transparent in terms of both their finances and their routine decisionmaking processes. The Steinway Astoria Partnership in Queens, for instance, makes its annual meetings open to the public and to local media; the Partnership also discloses detailed financials and helps take the lead on some nominally progressive local initiatives, like introducing mid-block crosswalks and traffic-calming measures along busy commercial thoroughfares.
Another group recently announced plans for a similar style of traffic-calming “Complete Streets” transformation in Buckhead, the uptown district of Atlanta, GA, including bike lanes and pedestrian-oriented improvements. As the sort of culmination of a 15-year partnership with Georgia’s DOT, however, the project also involves widening Piedmont Road to three lanes in each direction—anathema to progressive planners’ efforts to reduce auto dependency.
But transparency and any quality-of-life improvements may be exceptions to the rule. Regardless, by definition—even in the case of Steinway Astoria—these decisions are driven by business coalitions, and are therefore responsive to the prerogatives of capital. Private interests are only too happy to exercise control over once-common spaces. BID-contracted security and police are commonly deployed to forcibly remove unhoused individuals and intensify crackdowns on so-called “quality-of-life crimes,” like panhandling or sleeping on the sidewalk. All too often, this intensified enforcement shuttles vulnerable people into punitive fines and incarceration; invariably, its consequences break down along class and racial lines.
As modes of urban privatization, BIDs have received somewhat greater attention and scrutiny than other privatizing mechanisms, like tax-increment financing (TIF) or the broader class of public-private partnerships (PPPs) that have flourished over the last four decades. (An entire alphabet’s worth of bland acronyms and initialisms are involved in privatization schemes.) All of these forces have been brought to bear in service of a unifying goal: to maximize businesses’ appeal, and thus profit. In many BID sectors, the fear of capital is that the presence of “undesirables” will drive away customers or drive down property values.
Ultimately, BIDs have come to provide business coalitions with an extra lever for exerting control over whole swaths of their larger communities, managing opaque zones in which they are free to decide amongst themselves which surplus “public” services are to be provided—how much, and for whom—often in the absence of public oversight or robust accountability. To describe the function of such organizations as transfers from the public realm to private interests is no exaggeration—on the contrary, this is a plain and literal accounting of their operations.
Though BIDs exhibit an enormous variety of financing structures, many rely on sources of public money to supplement district budgets, allotting them funds in excess of their members’ standard assessment fees. The Downtown Waterfront BID in Yonkers, directly north of New York City, reported that about $330,000 of its nearly $1.4 million in funding for 2021 came from government grants. While many of America’s largest BIDs report their revenues as coming primarily from members’ assessments, sparse and inconsistent public disclosures, opaque operations, and a lack of oversight are commonplace, complicating the picture of their use of public funds.
Much of the spending of the larger, better-funded BIDs is devoted to two expenses: private security, and BID executive salaries. Also in 2021, the Yonkers BID also paid out nearly $1 million in salaries, benefits, and consulting fees, including $113,500 to its executive director. Many BIDs around New York pay out similar salaries—or higher, as with the more than $200,000 paid in 2021 to the president of the Hudson Yards Hell’s Kitchen BID, and sometimes much higher.
The former Chief Development Officer of New York’s Fifth Avenue BID received just over $300,000 in 20223 (as the BID spent $2.5 million of its $6.1 million in “program services” on enhanced security), while the Executive Director of King of Prussia BID, a city outside Philadelphia best known for its mall, received nearly the same salary in 2022. And even when looking to seemingly modest salaries—like the $65,000 paid to a former Downtown Reno BID executive in 2022—such figures are part of a development-related political economy: that same former executive took over the reins of the San Jose Downtown Association in late 2022, where salaries ranged from $130,000 to nearly $250,000.
The longstanding defenses of BIDs, which have been rolled out since the late 1990s, tend to claim that BIDs are ultimately “subject to public control” and simply reflect the historical reality that property owners long have “played an important role in local governance.” It’s true that lines of governance can certainly be blurred between “public” and “private” realms, as the example of the Hell’s Kitchen BID president aptly illustrates. But BIDs do not merely reflect that relationship—they provide a mechanism for exacerbating it, strengthening the hold of the wealthy and propertied. In addition, it’s because they often operate in the absence of democratic oversight and accountability that BIDs have served as a particularly effective means for business interests to nominate themselves to undue power.
As legal scholar Richard Briffault put it decades ago:
BIDs create distinctive fiscal and service enclaves. They threaten to replicate within cities the fragmental political and fiscal structure and the interlocal public service inequalities characteristic of most American metropolitan areas . . . Moreover, BID services supplement city-provided services while non-BID neighborhoods continue to receive preexisting levels of services. [And] once the principle of additional taxes for additional services is established, the inequalities could grow.
Briffault’s hopes at the time were that BIDs might provide “a mechanism for providing the public services and investment that cash-strapped cities need if they are to survive.” Almost a quarter-century later, suffice it to say, such hopes have not materialized.
Today, the overarching issues come into even sharper relief outside the New York region. In central Hampton, Virginia, the Coliseum Central BID (CCBID)—one of the nation’s largest by area—encompasses the city’s convention center and the decades-old Coliseum arena, along with hundreds of businesses in multiple planned commercial developments arrayed around the junction of the east-west arterial Mercury Boulevard and Interstate 64.
While the broader community has committed to progressive environmental and infrastructure goals in long-term plans, and the city itself has invested in community amenities, the same concerns are just as salient for Virginia’s CCBID as they are for New York: a privatized para-police force, membership (and decisionmaking authority) that only elevates and empowers business and commercial property owners, pointedly “exclusive” residential developments, and high compensation rates for BID leaders that are out of scale to the surrounding community’s incomes. (Even the CCBID director’s income is barely a third of the salary paid to the president and executive director of National Landing BID, a few hours north in Arlington, Virginia.)
Apart from the shortcomings inherent to all BIDs, the effects of Hampton’s CCBID can’t be understood without reference to the racial disparities that characterize the region’s unhoused population—the populations most likely to face exacerbated hostility from security forces in these sorts of built environments. Hampton, like its neighboring cities and counties, partly owes its municipal boundaries to mid-20th-century annexation and exclusion at the federal, state, and regional levels—the work of racist local politicians that sought to bar large local Black communities from public power and preserve their own, along with the South’s many other creative efforts to evade federal anti-discrimination demands.
A UC Berkeley study of Californian BIDs found not only do BIDs intensify policing of the unhoused, but also that some BIDs’ funds have been used to produce pro-BID media and lobby local governments for more punitive homeless-criminalization ordinances. Worse, in Portland, Oregon, BIDs used funds to directly manipulate the criminal justice system: a prominent local BID paid for the hiring of additional Assistant District Attorneys and in doing so directed the operations of an entire community court.
Unhoused people were charged by those new ADAs in the very same court, often for minor “quality-of-life” violations like street-sleeping. Among those who were convicted, some received “community service” sentences—namely, performing free cleaning labor for the BID’s own sanitation contractor. Researchers estimated that those sentenced by the court performed over a million dollars in free cleaning labor. In other words, a powerful BID, manipulating prosecutors and courts, did far more than simply punish or exclude the unhoused; in effect, it enslaved them.
The BID model exerts both social and financial tolls on surrounding communities. From Milwaukee to King of Prussia west of Philadelphia, Hartford, Connecticut to Honolulu, it’s not uncommon for BIDs to draw considerable shares of their annual funding from local jurisdictions’ tax revenue, pulled from the wider community as “grants” to one or more BIDs. Some state statutes (like the one in the Code of Virginia) stress that “special” districts may be understood as incurring only additional tax burdens, rather than taking up funds that would otherwise go to the surrounding community, to provide “additional, more complete or more timely services of government” above and beyond baseline public services in a given BID. But BIDs’ access to government grants—paid from tax revenues—hints at other ways these arrangements really work.
In truth, a BID’s day-to-day operational expenses may indeed draw on public funds. BID allies in city halls around the country may even have the power to wield eminent domain “as may be necessary and desirable” in the furtherance of a district’s interests. Taken together, private interests are empowered to both define who can exist in or pass through what are undeniably traditional public spaces and to influence exactly whose ownings might be removed to create the “revitalized” versions of those spaces they envision. As is the case with many topics in American law and municipal politics, overwhelming complexity and local contingencies make the overall picture appear fragmentary.
Cities—from their local and municipal politics to their physical spaces—have been venerated by legal institutions and theorists over the last two centuries. To those who study the First Amendment, the sidewalks, plazas, and street corners of American cities are the quintessence of “public” spaces, where the rights to speech, assembly, and association are realized. The persistence and use of these spaces will be required to make the country’s systems, institutions, and rights “democratic” in any meaningful sense. (At least in theory.)
Nevertheless, by mid-century, prevailing narratives of the city were focused on urban “decline” and “decay,” and the corresponding need for “renewal,” the need to plan for “revitalization.” Today, these terms are recognized as euphemisms for the mass demolition of predominantly poor minoritized communities and the reliance on mammoth “projects” developments. “Urban renewal” also evokes the suburbanization and white flight that went on in parallel, enabled by vast federal subsidies and freeway-construction investment.
Also related are the widespread discriminatory practices like “red-lining” that were rampant among mortgage-lenders and developers, who sought, often successfully, to skirt expanding non-discrimination laws. By the 1980s and 1990s, the ideological portrayal of the American city had turned to new terminology, but employed it to the same ends: stoking public fears of crime and “blight,” and calling for “broken windows” policing, defending racial hierarchy. Echoes of the same racist and carceral narratives are still clearly heard today, saturating local news, TV, and the Internet.
The proliferation of BIDs and the myriad concerns associated with them since the 1980s are merely one piece of a larger story—how American government at all levels was not simply “captured” by private interests, but has instead entered into complex new forms of mutualism. As illustrative examples, the BID model gives specific form to broader apprehensions about our modern-day cities. It marks a significant shift from preceding eras’ relations between “public” and “private” domains in urban contexts: a subtle and oft-overlooked shift, but nonetheless one that is important to recognize for those seeking to understand why modern urban life is untenable for so many.
Material conditions have changed radically in many American cities over the last few decades. Long population declines over the latter half of the twentieth century have been reversed in many, though not all, former industrial centers; the children of “white flight” have returned to older urban areas of the Northeast, Midwest, and elsewhere. Major corporations—after draining urban tax revenues in the latter half of the twentieth century, working in tandem with federal and state authorities to hollow out older cities to the benefit of capital—have moved in step with shifting demographics and younger generations’ preferences.
Looking back to before the pandemic, or even before the 2008 financial crisis, such companies left obvious marks on the cities they’d returned to: from new glossy towers in San Francisco and Seattle to Manhattan and the inner D.C. suburbs, a proliferation of massive “new urbanist” and “town center” developments at major cities’ exurban fringes, and the creeping homogeny of the tech-corporate-minimalist aesthetic seen in large projects and individual residences today, as exemplified by the ubiquitous greige (beige-gray) laminate flooring that can be seen all over Zillow listings.
Beyond the inequality-eliding effects of this “greigification” (which, arguably, has corollaries in elite fashion trends more broadly), major corporations’ resurgence in cosmopolitan America has come at a steep cost. Changing tastes and preferences certainly are part of the story, but so too are the vast sums of public money—so-called “incentive” packages—thrown obsequiously at the largest firms every time they so much as hint at a planned corporate relocation or expansion.
It’s no wonder these incentives to mega-corporations have become so contentious. Recent cases underscore both the stakes of these struggles and the brazenness of certain corporate actors, including those which, despite coffers comparable to those of sovereign nations, pit states and localities against each other, forcing them to squabble and stumble over themselves to appear more servile. These competitions often become extremely lucrative—for the corporation, anyway.
Amazon requested the first “incentive” grant for its much-ballyhooed “HQ2” complex in Northern Virginia just this April. To lure Amazon’s attention for a secondary headquarters to supplement the main Seattle offices, Virginia would need to pony up $153 million—this being just the first installment of what would ultimately total roughly “$750 million in economic incentives.” It’s a pattern seen in cities all over the country, from early incentives packages ($200 million in 2007) for a plan that has ballooned into a mammoth headquarters project for JPMorgan in Manhattan, to the roughly $125 million incentives package offered to Microsoft for a major expansion in Atlanta.
A couple dozen blocks west-southwest from JPMorgan’s ascending skyscraper, total incentives and tax breaks for the Hudson Yards megadevelopment were estimated in 2022 to cost the city at least $1.1 billion over the next 25 years. Among other tenants of Hudson Yards are both Amazon and JPMorgan, each taking over 300,000 square feet of office space. There, they will join BlackRock, KKR, and Warner Media, all of which are simply moving or consolidating offices from other locations across Manhattan. In addition to labor disputes and safety issues during various phases of construction and the closure of major anchor locations during the COVID-19 pandemic, Hudson Yards management has been condemned for deploying private security alongside NYPD to harass longtime street vendors in the community.
As for the billion-plus in incentives already mentioned, this total only partly overlaps with city and state funding for infrastructure improvements to the broader neighborhood – and from which the whole development draws its considerable value. These include a multi-billion-dollar extension of the 7 subway line, the refurbishing of Hudson Park and Boulevard, and other grants or transfers, all totaling billions more. Phase 2 of Hudson Yards has been under development, with the latest splashy renderings of clustered supertall towers and a Vegas-scale casino feature that opened late this summer.
These are just cases of individual corporate developments—they represent a tiny sample of the public spending sprees of recent decades that have been earmarked for private interests. These also comprise giveaways to major-league sports franchises (subsidies for new stadiums, or the transportation, parking, or other infrastructural investments needed to make them viable), to corporate partners in district-wide redevelopment projects that can span dozens of city blocks (and involve the eviction of families by eminent domain), and to numerous other private actors that, by various ways, manage to tap into and drain public funds for constructing their own projects—or just for making mere assurances, some of which are never met.
Case in point, again, is Amazon’s HQ2: progress on the second phase of that development has stalled due to the pandemic, still-high rates of remote work, and other post-2020 trends, leading one commentator to dub the HQ2 project a “half development.” The 90-acre Atlanta Microsoft project, too, is presently considered on “pause,” and there are fears that the corporate giant’s promises of lavish returns will go unfulfilled.
A corporation’s aim is to maximize profits. That’s it. Indeed, doing so is a legal duty owed to shareholders, per customary incorporation arrangements and corporate-law commandments. Even for smaller, local businesses—whatever the personal commitments or involvements of owners—the same incentive structures pit public interests against private. All modes of privatization then at least raise the possibility that they will facilitate zero-sum acquisitions of wealth and power, at a cost to the public. This might come in the form of an expense covered by the public purse, or might be expressed as a change to the built environment in which citizens live—or from which, thanks to changes in policing, others are now excluded. Regardless, privatization of these sorts of resources and governance structures inevitably degrades the public’s means of democratic control over their city.
Late in the summer of 2008, on the cusp of the global financial crisis, David Harvey laid out his reflections on these matters in a piece titled “The Right to the City,,” published in the New Left Review. Harvey wrote that “the question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from that of what kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic values we desire. The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city . . . a common rather than an individual right.”
If there’s one thing that the American ideology embraces, or believes that it embraces—whether in midtown Manhattan or in Missoula’s suburbs—it’s the imperative of individualism. Regardless of whether we would again choose to adopt Harvey’s “human rights” framing, his collective conceptualization of our claims over the cities in which we live ought to resonate as much as his broader critiques of capitalism. So how might we make those claims in practice? How do we take back what has been, and currently is being, taken from us?
Alongside the renewed urban growth of recent decades, activists’ and scholars’ efforts to center issues of equity and inequality, public power, and democratic control have been forced to rapidly adapt. In part, this also requires owning up to past mistakes, and reversing course once they come to light. In the five years I’ve been studying urban development and its intersections with U.S. law and politics, my somewhat optimistic hopes for the reformational potential of certain legal tools—like community benefits agreements (CBAs), which are binding multi-party contracts that can require private developers to include public spaces and amenities—have ultimately come to require that same sort of reflection.
A faith in CBAs, or similar half-measures, as a means of hedging our bets against the inequality-driving effects of private or speculative developments implicitly concedes that such private development inevitably is the causative force determining the economic and social dynamics of American cities.
That’s no small concession. Rather than accommodate the intrusion, we should push to reclaim all that has become bound up with private actors—the multitude of public spaces and common goods that have been commandeered over the decades. They were, and still remain, our common inheritance. ♦