Neighborhood Futures
by George Liebmann

The Bush administration's creation of an Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives gave hope to many of those concerned about the withering of civil society and the growth of ever-larger public and private bureaucracies. The more recent volunteerism initiative announced by the President has given many of these same people pause, however, over concerns that volunteerism will be replaced by government agencies and increasing bureaucracy. The successful encouragement of volunteerism by government in other countries provides a model for how the administration can combine its two major domestic initiatives.

The Administration made a mistake by making well-publicized grants to particular religious organizations and by seeking to vary the 'charitable choice' language in the 1996 welfare reform legislation. Legislative controversy was allowed to take the place of vigorous executive implementation. The best way to extend the concept of charitable choice to other areas of policy is to demonstrate its possibilities by vigorously implementing it in the areas where it is already authorized: with respect to welfare-related services and in the very general federal statute relating to appointment of probation officers. Similarly, instead of providing limited grants for creation of 'charter schools', the President might have done better had he urged states to imitate the British Education Act of 1988 by making all schools charter schools, with their own self-governing boards.

If the new initiatives are to make a positive difference, they will have to generate new neighborhood secular institutions as well as explicitly faith-based ones. Local control will go a long way toward ensuring that nonprofit groups do not outrage the sensibilities of religious believers. The conflict between cultural cosmopolitans and fundamentalists is as old as the Republic and has traditionally been solved by allowing the contending factions local sovereignty in separate geographic spheres.

Courts, the press, and elective politicians have continued to engage in a thoughtless centralization of formal agencies of government. Tocqueville observed of the similar development set in train by the eighteenth-century French Economists, the Thatcherites of their time: "They were...very favorable to the free exchange of commodities, to laisser-faire and laisser-passer in commerce and industry; but as to political liberties properly so-called, they did not dream of them...No grades in society, no classes distinct, no fixed ranks; a people composed of individuals almost alike and wholly equal, this confused mass recognized as the only legitimate sovereign, but carefully deprived of all the means which would enable it to direct or even to superintend its own government." This presaged the centralized tyranny produced by the French Revolution.

Prince Kropotkin's criticism of fifteenth-century advocates has considerable relevance to the contemporary American bar, with its centralizing influence: "Lawyers versed in the study of Roman law, flocked into [cities]...The very forms of the village community, unknown to their code, the very principles of federalism were repulsive to them as 'barbarian' inheritances. Caesarism, supported by the fiction of popular consent and by the force of arms, was their ideal and they worked hard for those who promised to realize it."

However, there has also developed, under the politicians' radar screen and in response to felt need, a whole new layer of sub-local institutions, public and private, "in the real estate field, outside the cognizance of the social sciences.". These include several hundred thousand residential community and condominium associations established by private deed covenants, governing about a quarter of the American population, with $100 billion in housing stock,$12.5 billion in expenditures, and $5 billion in reserves in 1987; property-owner-based business improvement districts in nearly all major cities; historic preservation and special districts in many towns, not all of them old; an increasing number of neighborhood improvement districts in large cities; some street and block associations; and a handful of self-governing public schools. This hopeful development is just beginning; there are additional functions which can be assumed by sub-local instrumentalities..

There are means of dealing with concerns based upon oppression of minorities and upon adverse effects on economic equality.

A student of underdeveloped countries, W.Hardy Wickwar, has described the uses of village-sized communities: "uniquely fitted to reinterpret custom in terms of modern needs, to mobilize leisure-time labor, to add new facilities to the ancient patrimony of communal resources, and generally to help its people take their place in a market economy and in a professionally-serviced society...if its... self-management rather than its governmental character is stressed."

One prerequisite to this happening is that concerns about economic inequalities that have fueled centralizing approaches be addressed. As Warren Magnusson has observed : "The most powerful argument for consolidationist reform is that it will equalize conditions of life as between town and country,slums and suburbs... It is time to recognize that the old form of neighborhood democracy provides what is lacking in the new. It can enable people to govern themselves. As such, it can contribute to both equalization and social integration. " A number of devices, familiar to students of public finance, are available to address concerns relating to equality: tax sharing, revenue sharing, vouchers, grants in aid, and co-optation of members.

The critics of public choice theory on the left frequently confirm its insights as to the value of small political units. We are told by Robyn Dawes that "discussion promotes cooperation vis-a-vis the parochial group but not the group with which there was no contact"; by Jane Mansbridge that "arrangements that generate some self-interest return to unselfish behavior create an 'ecological niche' that helps sustain that unselfish behavior".

The writer believes that bureaucratic institutions have reached their limit, and that the time is ripe for a partial reversal of the movement toward centralization that has dominated American politics from its inception. Two economists, Robert Bish and Hugh Nourse have told us that "the most likely functions for community control would appear to be functions where face-to-face service delivery by a labor-intensive bureaucracy is characteristic and where economies of scale are exhausted at a rather small size... police patrol, education, garbage removal, fire protection, and street maintenance..."

'Community policing' is a now fashionable mantra in the United States as it has always been in Japan; self-governing schools on the Swiss model have been introduced in Britain, Australia, and New Zealand; American residential community associations increasingly assume responsibility by 'contracting out' for trash collection and local road maintenance functions long performed by equally small French communes; the volunteer fire department continues to function in most parts of the United States.

One benefit is a greater amount of civic participation. Demands for participatory democracy on a national scale are misplaced, but, as Jane Mansbridge has said, "with decentralization, a nation operating primarily as an adversary democracy need not condemn its citizens to selfishness or amorality." In Mill's words "The spirit of a commercial people will be..essentially mean and selfish, wherever public spirit is not cultivated by an extensive participation of the people in the business of government in detail."

In the United States, government's most significant role has been promotional rather than regulatory. As Mueller says, "Active participation should enhance each individual's willingness to comply voluntarily with the rules of society, because he feels that they are his rules, the legitimate expression of a decision process in which he has participated and consented."

We need to respond to Robert Nisbet's appeal for "a new kind of laissez-faire, one directed at social groups rather than individuals."

There is little doubt as to the practicability of these suggestions for radical devolution. To again quote Dennis Mueller: "Both police and fire protection can be supplied at neighborhood and town levels as supplements to their provision at higher levels of government. Trash collection can be provided either directly by smaller units of government or by these units contracting with private haulers, Most importantly, the local community could be responsible for educating its children..."

Robert H. Nelson has suggested that "If [residential community associations] were to become the prevailing mode of social organization for the local community, this development could be as important as the adoption… of the private corporate form for business property." That private business development was preceded by an era described by Eric Monkkonen in which "[m]unicipal corporations were the dominant type of corporation...the difficulties of obtaining private corporate charters prior to the general incorporation statutes... made municipalities the best outlets for the savings of strangers. Municipalities competed fiercely with one another for... development."

Elder care, child care, and supervision of probationers are all services that churches, service clubs, and neighborhood associations have competitive advantages in providing, including means of communication among neighbors (newsletters and bulletin boards), control of physical facilities that could serve as meeting places, knowledge of local personnel, and confidence in the local mode of governance. If there is a lack of supply of services, it is explained by an explosion of single-parent families, new vocational expectations on the part of women, and the aging of the population. The removal of regulatory and information barriers to cooperative forms of provision is already proving more effective than government efforts to provide monopoly services.

Even smaller entities than municipalities have a role to play. My recent book is thus a call for re-creation of an earlier era of municipal and sub-municipal creativity; a re-creation that can combat the dangers of centralization and the withering of civil society that Tocqueville warned against.

Mr. Liebmann is a lawyer and author in Baltimore, Maryland. Neighborhood Futures is available from Transaction Books, www.transactionpub.com, 300 Campus Drive, Somerset, N.J.08873, tel. 1-888-999-6778 for $23.95 plus $5.50 shipping ($1.00 for each additional copy), or from regular or on-line booksellers