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Show people can visit their home, and even what age their co-habitants must be. As Setha Low notes, CID legal restrictions "may be far more restrictive than any state statute or local ordinance." According to Gerald Frug, professor of local government law at Harvard, "The privatization of government in America is the most important thing that's happening, but we're not focused on it. We haven't thought of it as government yet." [8] Authors Blakely and Snyder have written that homeowner associations are a government growth industry growing at a rate of over 10,000 per year. They note: "while at the national and state levels the public is asking for less government, at the local level, people are creating more governance institutions." [9] Moreover, the growth of small, privately governed taxing jurisdictions has created a new impetus for municipal secession. Homeowners in CID's often resent having to pay both municipal taxes and homeowner association fees. With the latter funding road and common space maintenance within the development, homeowners often feel that they are being taxed twice for services, and that the roads and parks outside their developments are not their concern. One of the results of these trends is that the "public realm" - public areas and buildings such as streets, schools, libraries, museums, community centers and parks that knit together private property and function as spaces of interaction open to all citizens in a democracy - are slowly attenuating as the notion of a "greater public good" becomes increasingly circumscribed by private interests, which are often motivated by fear and a drive for personal safety. For when the outside world appears unstable and unpredictable, people are more likely to take interest in the immediate needs and personal safety of their families, rather than in the problems and long-term concerns of the wider community and region. Perhaps this is part of the explanation for the dramatic decline is civic participation documented by Harvard Sociologist Robert Putnam in his groundbreaking book, "Bowling Alone." [10] Putnam has quantified the erosion over the last several decades in America of what he calls "social capital," which is our level of social connectedness and community involvement. He examines trends in U.S. political participation, civic participation, religious participation, connections in the workplace, informal social connections, as well as trends in altruism, volunteering, and philanthropy, and concludes that over the last third of the century there has been a large decline of public involvement in all these areas. Putnam concludes that there are a number of concurrent factors causing the decline in social capital, including pressures of time and money, especially with two-career families (10% contribution to the decline); suburbanization, commuting and sprawl (another 10%); electronic entertainment, particularly television viewing, which is the single most consistent predictor of civic disengagement, with every hour of TV viewing causing a 10% decline in civic participation (25% total contribution to the decline); and lastly, generational change - the replacement of an engaged civic generation by their less involved children and grandchildren (50% of the total decline). What the trends in this section indicate overall is the strong social and political pull away from concentrated urban development and toward a further dispersion and balkanization of regional population patterns in the future. 1/7/2010 Effects of Alternative Development Sc… cdtcmpo.org/policy/june07/wa-doc.htm 42/60 |
