Business Improvement Districts

Urban Studies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Stokes ◽  
Julia Martinez
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Economic Restructuring ◽  
Academic Work ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Affairs ◽  
Business Improvement Districts ◽  
Real Property

Business improvement districts (BIDs) are a form of special purpose government that utilize special assessments on real property to deliver services to a spatially defined commercial area. The first BIDs emerged in North America in the early to mid-1970s. They grew tremendously in the early 1990s, with some current estimates exceeding 1,500 BIDs globally as of 2018. While the legal and administrative process to create and govern BIDs varies in the United States based on state laws and local ordinances, they are typically created through a vote of affected property owners after some period of public disclosure and hearings. BIDs vary widely in their geographic size and capacity for assessment collection, ranging from $20 million-plus annual budgets and covering entire central business districts, to sub-$100,000 budgets with service areas that cover a few blocks of a neighborhood commercial strip. Assessments are typically collected by local governments and then passed on to BID operating organizations, which are usually governed by nonprofit organizations. Many BIDs also augment their assessment budgets through gifts, grants, contracts, and fees for services. These funds are used to support services that often include some mix of common area sanitation, security, marketing, and landscaping. Many large US cities have extensively used BIDs as an economic development tool, with cities such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles each having over forty BIDs. The growth of BIDs has been linked to set of larger of fiscal, social, and economic problems that cities faced during the era of economic restructuring and deindustrialization. BIDs filled a void left by many city governments’ inability to organize, fund, and manage services directed toward the problems facing many commercial areas, which often included crime, homelessness, and disorderly public environments. As BIDs have matured and are now a common feature of the urban landscape, they have grown in their capacities as organizations, with some comprehensive organizations fulfilling more ambitious functions related to infrastructure provision, social service coordination, urban planning, and public space management. Academic work around BIDs has been pursued by researchers and theorists across law, social science, and public affairs literatures. The dominant themes in academic work on BIDs has been organized around their various forms and functions; their accountability to the public; their effectiveness, especially in the areas of crime prevention and economic development; and social equity issues, with special attention often given to their interaction with homeless populations.

The Rise of Anchor Institutions and the Threat to Community Health: Protecting Community Wealth, Building Community Power

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence T. Brown ◽  
Ashley Bachelder ◽  
Marisela B. Gomez ◽  
Alicia Sherrell ◽  
Imani Bryan
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Health Research ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
Anchor Institutions ◽  
Health Related Research ◽  
Research Parks ◽  
Wealth Building

Academic institutions are increasingly playing pivotal roles in economic development and community redevelopment in cities around the United States. Many are functioning in the role of anchor institutions and building technology, biotechnology, or research parks to facilitate biomedical research. In the process, universities often partner with local governments, implementing policies that displace entire communities and families, thereby inducing a type of trauma that researcher Mindy Thompson Fullilove has termed “root shock.” We argue that displacement is a threat to public health and explore the ethical implications of university-led displacement on public health research, especially the inclusion of vulnerable populations into health-related research. We further explicate how the legal system has sanctioned the exercise of eminent domain by private entities such as universities and developers.Strategies that communities have employed in order to counter such threats are highlighted and recommended for communities that may be under the threat of university-led displacement. We also offer a critical look at the three dominant assumptions underlying university-sponsored development: that research parks are engines of economic development, that deconcentrating poverty via displacement is effective, and that poverty is simply the lack of economic or financial means. Understanding these fallacies will help communities under the threat of university-sponsored displacement to protect community wealth, build power, and improve health.

The Help-Yourself City

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon C.C. Douglas
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Urban Design ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Design Elements ◽  
Community Needs ◽  
Urban Political Economy ◽  
Important Trend ◽  
Do It Yourself

When cash-strapped local governments don’t provide adequate services, and planning policies prioritize economic development over community needs, what is a concerned citizen to do? In the help-yourself city, you do it yourself. The Help-Yourself City presents the results of nearly five years of in-depth research on people who take urban planning into their own hands with unauthorized yet functional and civic-minded “do-it-yourself urban design” projects. Examples include homemade traffic signs and public benches, guerrilla gardens and bike lanes, even citizen development “proposals,” all created in public space without permission but in forms analogous to official streetscape design elements. With research across 17 cities and more than 100 interviews with do-it-yourselfers, professional planners, and community members, the book explores who is creating these unauthorized improvements, where, and why. In doing so, it demonstrates the way uneven development processes are experienced and responded to in everyday life. Yet the democratic potential of this increasingly celebrated trend is brought into question by the privileged characteristics of typical do-it-yourself urban designers, the aesthetics and cultural values of the projects they create, and the relationship between DIY efforts and mainstream planning and economic development. Despite its many positive impacts, DIY urban design is a worryingly undemocratic practice, revealing the stubborn persistence of inequality in participatory citizenship and the design of public space. The book thus presents a needed critical analysis of an important trend, connecting it to research on informality, legitimacy, privilege, and urban political economy.

Government and Fiscal Policy in American Economic History

2018 ◽  
pp. 194-224
Author(s):  
John Joseph Wallis
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Property Tax ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Governments ◽  
Payroll Taxes ◽  
The Third ◽  
State And Local

Over the last 225 years, government finances in the United States have gone through three distinct stages. In the first stage, 1790–1850, state governments actively pursued policies to promote economic development and financed them from revenues from state investments. In the second, 1850–1930, local governments became the most important level of government, as measured by revenues and expenditures, and revenues shifted toward the property tax. In the third period, 1930 to the present, the national government became the most active and largest level of government, financed through income and payroll taxes, and developed an extensive network of grants to state and local governments. The chapter tracks the changes in sources of revenues and purpose of expenditures, with specific attention paid to military spending over the entire period.

Book Reviews

2012 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 809-818
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
The United States ◽  
Factor Endowments ◽  
University Of Wisconsin ◽  
European Colonization ◽  
The University ◽  
Relative Differences

Jeffrey G. Williamson of Harvard University and University of Wisconsin reviews “Economic Development in the Americas since 1500: Endowments and Institutions” by Stanley L. Engerman and Kenneth L. Sokoloff. The EconLit abstract of the reviewed work begins: Eleven papers explore differences in the rates of economic growth in Latin America and mainland North America, specifically the United States and Canada, and consider how relative differences in growth over time are related to differences in the institutions that developed in different economies. Papers discuss paths of development -- an overview; factor endowments and institutions; the role of institutions in shaping factor endowments; the evolution of suffrage institutions; the evolution of schooling – 1800–1925; inequality and the evolution of taxation; land and immigration policies; politics and banking systems; five hundred years of European colonization; institutional and noninstitutional explanations of economic development; and institutions in political and economic development. Engerman is John H. Munro Professor of Economics and Professor of History at the University of Rochester. The late Sokoloff was Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Bibliography; index.

Zoning in 20th-Century American Cities

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Silver
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Due Process ◽  
Land Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
Court Case ◽  
Real Property ◽  
German Cities ◽  
The U.S

Zoning is a legal tool employed by local governments to regulate land development. It determines the use, intensity, and form of development in localities through enforcement of the zoning ordinance, which consists of a text and an accompanying map that divides the locality into zones. Zoning is an exercise of the police powers by local governments, typically authorized through state statutes. Components of what became part of the zoning process emerged piecemeal in U.S. cities during the 19th century in response to development activities deemed injurious to the health, safety, and welfare of the community. American zoning was influenced by and drew upon models already in place in German cities early in the 20th century. Following the First National Conference on Planning and Congestion, held in Washington, DC in 1909, the zoning movement spread throughout the United States. The first attempt to apply a version of the German zoning model to a U.S. city was in New York City in 1916. In the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case, Ambler Realty v. Village of Euclid (1926), zoning was ruled as a constitutional exercise of the police power, a precedent-setting case that defined the perimeters of land use regulation the remainder of the 20th century. Zoning was explicitly intended to sanction regulation of real property use to serve the public interest, but frequently, it was used to facilitate social and economic segregation. This was most often accomplished by controlling the size and type of housing, where high density housing (for lower income residents) could be placed in relation to commercial and industrial uses, and in some cases through explicit use of racial zoning categories for zones. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Buchanan v. Warley (1917), that a racial zoning plan of the city of Louisville, Kentucky violated the due process clause of the14th Amendment. The decision, however, did not directly address the discriminatory aspects of the law. As a result, efforts to fashion legally acceptable racial zoning schemes persisted late into the 1920s. These were succeeded by the use of restrictive covenants to prohibit black (and other minority) occupancy in certain white neighborhoods (until declared unconstitutional in the late 1940s). More widespread was the use of highly differentiated residential zoning schemes and real estate steering that imbedded racial and ethnic segregation into the residential fabric of American communities. The Standard State Zoning Enabling Act (SSZEA) of 1924 facilitated zoning. Disseminated by the U.S. Department of Commerce, the SSZEA created a relatively uniform zoning process in U.S. cities, although depending upon their size and functions, there were definite differences in the complexity and scope of zoning schemes. The reason why localities followed the basic form prescribed by the SSZEA was to minimize the chance of the zoning ordinance being struck down by the courts. Nonetheless, from the 1920s through the 1970s, thousands of court cases tested aspects of zoning, but only a few reached the federal courts, and typically, zoning advocates prevailed. In the 1950s and 1960s, critics of zoning charged that the fragmented city was an unintended consequence. This critique was a response to concerns that zoning created artificial separations among the various types of development in cities, and that this undermined their vitality. Zoning nevertheless remained a cornerstone of U.S. urban and suburban land regulation, and new techniques such as planned unit developments, overlay zones, and form-based codes introduced needed flexibility to reintegrate urban functions previously separated by conventional zoning approaches.

Inland Shift

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan D. De Lara
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Distribution Systems ◽  
Southern California ◽  
Economic Restructuring ◽  
The United States ◽  
Business Practices ◽  
Spatial Politics ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Production And Distribution ◽  
Global Logistics

This book uses Southern California to explore a series of questions about the relationship between globalization, race, space, and class. It begins with an analysis of how growing consumer demand, innovative retail business practices, and the infrastructure required to support global commodity chains made Southern California into the largest trade gateway in the United States. Warehouse work and the contentious spatial politics of inland Southern California’s logistic landscape provide the data to examine how the shifting ground of money and people intersected with local histories to reterritorialize race and capitalism at the turn of the twenty-first century. While global logistics innovations provided the impetus for capital and the state to transform Southern California’s economy, it also created pockets of resistance among labor, community, and environmental groups, who argued that commodity distribution exposed them to economic and environmental precarity. How people gave meaning to space and mobilized them to contest logistics space is at the crux of this project. The book is divided into three parts. The first part provides an introduction into the spatial politics of Southern California’s logistics regime by showing how the forces of global economic restructuring after the 1980s intersected with regional entrepreneurial actors to produce Los Angeles and inland Southern California as a space for logistics. I argue that logistics represents a major rearticulation of modern capitalist space. Part 2 examines how the flexible production and distribution systems that were critical to the expansion of global capitalism during the neoliberal age were responsible for creating social and economic precarity for logistics workers, many of whom were undocumented. The final part of the book shows how regional development policies and global restructuring combined with demographic change to reterritorialize Southern California’s geographies of race and class. The book concludes by showing how inland Southern California became a key site for the production of new Latinx geographies.

scholarly journals Exploring the Trade-Offs Local Governments Make in the Pursuit of Economic Growth and Equity

2020 ◽  
pp. 107808742092664
Author(s):  
Eric Stokan ◽  
Aaron Deslatte ◽  
Megan E. Hatch
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Planning Process ◽  
Policy Decision ◽  
The United States ◽  
Development Planning ◽  
Economic Development Policy ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
Lock In Effect ◽  
Lock In

Economic development at the municipal level often necessitates that local governments make trade-offs between firm- and locality-based strategies. In recent decades, economic development researchers have described these efforts over time as exhibiting certain patterns and metaphors: as a series of waves, as embodying a type of lock-in effect, and as a policy layering process; however, the mechanisms behind these patterns remain unclear. This article draws upon 30 years of economic development policy decision making across the United States to understand what leads local governments to prioritize growth- or equity-oriented policies. We find that equity-enhancing economic development policies are more likely when local governments face less competitive pressure, have greater resource capacities, and experience greater intergovernmental involvement in the economic development planning process. Leveraging these factors can aid governments as they struggle to navigate a more sustainable path toward growth and equity.

Beyond “Little Taipei”: The Development of Taiwanese Immigrant Businesses in Los Angeles

1995 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yen-Fen Tseng
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Census Data ◽  
Economic Restructuring ◽  
Business Owners ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ethnic Integration ◽  
New Type ◽  
Asian Pacific ◽  
Depth Interviews

Both in their choice to settle in predominantly noncoethnic neighborhoods and in their economic development, recent Taiwanese immigrants in Los Angeles represent a fundamental break with the past. It is this new type of economic development that brings an unprecedented impact on the society at large. However, these unique features of Taiwanese immigrant business and their implications to the host society remain understudied. Quantitative as well as qualitative methods were employed in this study. The data were obtained from document files, field observations, in-depth interviews, U.S. census data, and a telephone survey of 310 Taiwanese business owners in the greater Los Angeles area. The data analysis closely examined entrepreneurial process, ethnic integration, and industrial diversity among Taiwanese immigrant businesses. Provided with entrepreneurial capacity, Taiwanese enterprises grow rapidly within the context of Los Angeles's economic restructuring and dependency on Asian Pacific trade.

Immigrant Small Business and International Economic Linkage: A Case of the Korean Wig Business in Los Angeles, 1968–1977

1996 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 485-510 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ku-Sup Chin ◽  
In-Jin Yoon ◽  
David Smith
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
South Korea ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Economic Restructuring ◽  
The United States ◽  
Korean Immigrants ◽  
Asian Immigrants ◽  
Economic Linkages

This article investigates factors that have contributed to the growth of the import-export business among Asian immigrants. The central argument is that the development of Asian immigrants’ import-export business has been closely related to the increasing economic linkages between Asian countries and their countrymen in the United States. Such economic linkages are a product of the global economic restructuring whereby some developing countries of Asia have become major exporters of low cost/low price consumer goods to the United States. The Korean immigrants’ wig business in Los Angeles is studied as a case of contemporary import-export trade among Asian immigrants, with major findings summarized as follows: first, the increased reliance of the United States on imported goods by the 1970s led to a rapid growth of the export-oriented industry in South Korea; second, wigs became the major export item of South Korea due to its cheap labor force and government-aid loans to the wig industry, third, a strong vertical integration developed between Korean wig manufacturers in South Korea and Korean importers, wholesalers, and retailers in the United States – that integration provided Korean immigrants with initial business opportunities in the U.S. economy, particularly in the low-income minority areas.

scholarly journals Business improvement districts as a management instrument for city center’s regeneration in Serbia

2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Uros Radosavljevic ◽  
Aleksandra Djordjevic ◽  
Jelena Zivkovic
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Governance ◽  
Local Economic Development ◽  
Policy Instruments ◽  
Business Environment ◽  
Business Improvement Districts ◽  
City Center ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Management Instrument

Urban regeneration and economic development in the context of competitive global markets and impacts to Serbian cities represent challenges calling for new responses for transformative action in urban governance. Policy-makers understanding of that relation may contribute to suitable use of policy instruments for creating good business environment in cites. Business improvement districts (BIDs) represent possible model used as a management instrument for fostering local economic development, city promotion and improving the quality of urban public space and life. The paper presents theoretical approaches of policy instruments use and sets recommendations for management of BIDs based on two cases of city center?s regeneration in Serbia. We argue that for BIDs to be a useful model for city center?s regeneration, an appropriate use and combination of regulatory, economic and informational management instruments is necessary.

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