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Public Goods, Private Solutions: Essays on Private Governments and the Supplementation of Public Services Author: Rachel Meltzer Dissertation School: New York University Pages: 171 Publication Date: September 2009 Availability: Access Number: 10859 Abstract: There are nearly 40,000 local general purpose governments and approximately 50,000 special districts in the United States. Throughout the past two decades the number of local governments has increased by only 9 percent and special districts by 14 percent. During this same period of time, however, we have witnessed the emergence and rapid proliferation of another type of local governance and service provider. Scholars have often described these entities as "private governments" (see Helsley and Strange 1998, 200a, 2000b) or micro-institutions" (Liebmann 1993, 1995; Ellickson 1998; Nelson 2006); they are exclusive in membership and possess the authority to tax their members and supplement public goods. The numbers are less definitive (as these is no Census that keeps track of their formation and existence), but estimates suggest that there were upwards of 300,000 of these organizations in the United States as of 2008, a number that has nearly doubled in the past two decades. Herein referred to as private governments, the current analysis will take a much-needed in-depth look at these organizations and how they shape outcomes for individuals, neighborhoods, and cities. The current analysis is comprised of three chapters, each of which examines private governments at a unique level of geography. These entities are governed by individual property owners, serve sub-municipal neighborhoods, and function within the larger municipal system; therefore, in order to understand their workings, multiple levels of analysis are essential. The first two essays look at the impact of private governments on two outcomes of interest: service provision and residential segregation. The first essay focuses on Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) in New York City, and specifically the interaction between BIDs and the local public sector in the neighborhood-level provision of sanitation and police services. The second essay looks at homeowners associations (HOAs) in Florida and whether or not they affect racial and economic segregation within jurisdictions over time. The third and final essay looks at the formation of BIDs in New York City. It identifies the determinants of which neighborhoods form BIDs and which properties opt into BIDs at the borders of the districts. Together, these three analyses examine both commercial and residential private governments in places that have spearheaded the proliferation of such service providers. All three analyses exploit the variation in BIDs and HOAs over time and space in order to disentangle important differences in causes and outcomes associated with their emergence and popularity. |
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