10/11/2021
BID's - the not very well understood evil that not enough people are talking about:
"BID overseers collect fees from both private and public property owners in-district, “fund[ing] their activities partly with assessments on publicly owned buildings — in effect, using taxpayer money to achieve their goals,” noted the Berkeley report. This siphoning of public and private funds alike is facilitated by a legally binding assessment fee structure that is tantamount to private taxation.
Some who own properties in the district object to the levied fees, questioning the utility of improvement programs and aspects of their financing. One point of conflict over the Clean & Safe renewal centered on the fact that, as Willamette Week reported, Clean & Safe funds are channeled to the Portland Business Alliance, paying 45 percent of PBA staffing costs. These types of exploitative practices reflect a dearth of oversight and a fundamental accountability problem with the BID model.
Furthermore, BID income is commonly put toward lobbying in favor of criminalization ordinances. From the Berkeley report: California BIDs “advocate for anti-homeless policies … [using] property assessment revenue, including from public properties,” in violation of state law. The report also found a close correlation between the rising number of California BIDs and an increase in anti-homeless ordinances.
Examples abound: BIDs fervently supported sit/lie ordinances in San Francisco, while in Berkeley, a BID CEO was a major financial backer of another sit/lie law. To support a Chico, California anti-homeless ordinance, a BID coordinated with police and encouraged its members to attend and testify at city council meetings. A BID in Los Angeles advocated that the municipal code be amended “to preserve the city’s ability to confiscate homeless people’s property.” Relatedly, in 2017, the City of Los Angeles settled a lawsuit alleging that Los Angeles Police Department officers led BID contractors to confiscate the property of unhoused individuals, while threatening to arrest anyone who attempted to stop them. For their part, the California legislature has also been complicit: A 1994 law reduced oversight of BIDs and broadened their power to collect and spend revenue.
BIDs can be found lobbying against a payroll tax on big business in Seattle, or, in Denver, urging the city to pass a camping ban, then enforcing it. A BID in Washington, D.C. took over management of a public park and moved to expel unhoused people that had gathered there. California BIDs have also acted collectively, partnering together in a statewide alliance to oppose an act that would have limited anti-homeless laws in the state legislature. And, in a telling example, this coalition worked to defeat the passage of an unhoused bill of rights.
BIDs, of which the public is largely unaware, effectively grant private interests an arm of forcible social control, which they readily deploy to ward off perceived threats to the flow of profit. It’s true that they may contribute to city beautification and urban improvements, and some do at least attempt to connect unhoused people with services. But any fringe benefits of the model do not justify its exploitative architecture. It is not necessary to cede public spaces to private control, empowering business conglomerates to make decisions affecting the public square, in order to achieve the same ends.
BIDs worsen the discriminatory policing already ubiquitous in U.S. society and represent another conduit of the creeping privatization of public services. The result is that inequalities are reinscribed: The unhoused and underserved, the majority of them people of color, are immiserated, subjected to harassment and punishment and driven deeper into abjection. These structures represent another incarnation of the primacy of the profit motive over civil rights in the United States — and the unconscionable human toll that those imperatives exact."
These corporate zones operate as an arm of forcible social control to ward off perceived threats to the flow of profit.
