Local Self-reliance

For the past several years, the good folks at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance in Washington, D.C. have worked to help urban residents gain greater control over their lives through the use of low-technology, decentralist tools and concepts. We strongly believe that more people (city dwellers and country folk alike) should be exposed to the Institute's efforts ...which is why we're now making this "what's happening where" report by ILSR staffers one of MOTHER's regular features.

Can the people of an urban neighborhood form their own government? The answer to that question is absolutely ...through a little—known legal mechanism called special districts. Such legislature created structures are real, functioning governments, and their inherently small size makes them well-suited for control by neighborhood/citizen organizations.

Special districts are hardly a recent phenomenon. In fact, there are already close to 24,000 of the miniature legal systems in the U.S. Furthermore, many of these organizations supply goods and services—running everything from airports, cable TV stations, and baseball teams to hospitals, libraries, and theaters—so there is no reason why more grassroots neighborhood groups can't make use of special districts to control their own productive enterprises.

Unfortunately, though, that's not often the case. More commonly, the governing structures are used to help special interest groups of one stripe or another get private credit subsidies. For example, California real estate developers have, for decades, reduced their capital expenses by organizing special housing districts to float tax-free general obligation bonds that finance those costs. Many of the groups (some no larger than a single subdivision of new housing) were formed with little more than the votes of the developers and some of their business cronies, friends, and relatives ...but the debts incurred by such districts become binding on anyone who later buys into the housing projects. Land promoters and developers are thus able to get much of the risk capital for their enterprises without having to draw on their own credit lines.

Over the years, there have been many variations on this private interest government scheme ...including water districts that primarily serve agricultural interests at public expense and road districts that —by means of similar funding maneuvers —make mining possible in formerly inaccessible areas. Under different circumstances, though, the governments can be remarkably progressive tools.

As a hypothetical example of a locally controlled special district, let's consider a residential section of Baltimore that contains several dozen neighborhoods and one old shopping strip. In recent years, retailers in the area have been losing business to newer outlying shopping centers. The result has been that the available services have deteriorated as many of the local businesses failed and the unrented storefronts were allowed to run down.