Suchergebnisse

Urban areas are increasingly populated by new organizations called private governments that are created within the boundaries of existing local governments. Examples include homeowner associations, community benefits districts, and business improvement districts. Citizens attempting to form private governments that supply public goods may encounter collective action problems. Utilizing transaction resource theory, the article examines potential collective action problems in forming private governments and explains how solutions to these problems emerge as a consequence of a political contracting process between stakeholders, where the rules of the resulting relational contract define expected cooperative behaviors. The article also applies transaction resource theory to a case study of the contracting process used to overcome potential collective action problems in creating a private government in Baltimore, Maryland. The case study demonstrates the complexities of the contracting process and illustrates how collective action problems might be intertwined in the prephase, negotiation phase, and postphase.

One of the issues in the local political economy literature revolves around the advantages of a centralized system of government versus a decentralized system of metropolitan governance with overlapping jurisdictions. Supporters of the creation of suburban communities within metropolitan areas suggest that a decentralized system creates a quasi-marketplace amongst suburban communities where residents and businesses as a whole benefit from a more attractive bundle of public services. The success of this type of system has traditionally been evaluated based on criteria such as efficiency, equity, and political feasibility. We turn the logic of metropolitan fragmentation/overlapping jurisdictions inward to explore theoretically whether the creation of Community Benefits Districts (CBDs) can similarly achieve efficient service delivery benefits for residents and businesses in inner cities, while also including equity and political feasibility in service provision as additional evaluative criteria. CBDs are new city sub-districts whose residents and businesses both agree to pay an additional property tax in order to receive supplemental public services such as safety, garbage collection, and economic development. We then attempt to apply the concepts of efficiency, equity, and political feasibility to a case study of a Baltimore sub-district.

Applying the polycentric model to the urban core, the authors first examine how the polycentric model may be applied to an increasing number of large cities that are using subdistricts to provide supplemental public services that district residents desire such as security, sanitation (garbage collection), and economic development. They next analyze the recent creation of the Charles Village Community Benefits District in Baltimore, Maryland, as an empirical example and briefly discuss this subdistrict's positive impacts. The article concludes with some observations on the implications of subdistricts for equitable and efficient service delivery.