fts, Hawthorne Court, Park Lane or Terra Cotta Village.
But increasingly, it is not just community but basic city services that private governments are providing. The appeal of these neo-governments in the big city is thatthey render corrupt or incompetent city agencies moot. Such parallel governments have their price—residents in effect pay a surtax for services in the form of dues or fees on top of regular local property taxes—but paying less for what you don't get in the first place apparently doesn't strike people as a bargain.
One of the things that people think they don't get from public government is police protection. "Personal security is as basic as it gets," explains Scott Dixey, president of the Marquette Park Community Association on the Southwest Side. (In one recent Chicago Tribune article about new in-city residential developments with controlled access, words like "security" and "safe" appeared 14 times.) "The police don't have the horses," Dixey explains. "Someone in the crowd at one of our meetings said, 'Why not do it ourselves?' "
The association undertook a two-month experiment in which private security personnel patrolled a 100-block area south and east of the park itself. The patrols were paid for through voluntary donations of $20 per month per house. The experiment succeeded in law enforcement terms. "The neighborhood was quieter and safer," Dixey recalls. "The patrols knew who the right guys were and who the wrong guys were. They were like a beat patrol out there."
However, the voluntary system was a failure in bureaucratic terms. The association found itself functioning as a collection agency and the participants were getting tired of carrying free riders. "The patrols were being paid for by a relatively small number of participants," Dixey says. "To be fair, the service and payments should be spread evenly across the neighborhood." Thus, the proposal for the SSA—the first in Chicago set up to deal solely with crime.
The results of the subsequent advisory referendum to set up an SSA for security surprised Dixey. "I expected a negative vote because of the tax increase." The surtax was modest— 0.0041 per $100 of equalized assessed valuation, or enough to generate about $50 per homeowner per year—but many in Marquette Park are of modest means. People voted 3 to 1 in favor. "There's a real big difference from any other tax increase," Dixey says. "People understand that the service will be community-based and community-run. The money wasn't going to just be shoveled off to City Hall."
Making payments equitable in a mixed—commercial and residential—neighborhood isn't easy. Some 30 percent of the assessments would be paid by higher-valued businesses in the area, especially Kraft General Foods (which does not oppose the SSA); the Marquette Parkers plan to give local business representatives seats on the SSA governing board proportional to their funding share.
That is, all of that would occur with the City Council's approval. That hasn't happened. It was only in August that the council received from the mayor's office the ordinance setting up the SSA. And the ordinance itself prompted a brief dispute over who gets to control the commission that would rim the SSA.
The Daley administration drafted language letting the mayor make most appointments without community input, while Dixey's group wants an ordinance specifying that most appointments come from its own list of nominees. Meanwhile, other civic groups in the affected area have spoken up, saying they want a cut of the appointments.
Noelle Gaffney, Daley's deputy press secretary, says the language in the original ordinance was "fairly standard" but that the administration agreed to change it as soon as the community voiced objections. "We have bent over backwards to help them on this. The mayor's attitude is that the people voted for this, so they should have it." She says the ordinance will be amended to parcel out the appointment power in whatever manner the community sees lit.
Private and public governments exist in a state of symbiosis. The latter will tolerate the presumption of their private counterparts only as long as it is convenient—or politically unavoidable. No SSA can exert true municipal police or taxation powers independently, for example, and the powers of other kinds of special districts are legislatively constrained as creatures of state, county and municipal authorities, with whom ultimate power still resides. And while the management of residential enclaves enjoy more latitude of action, they exercise it over very limited territory.
Creating what amounts to a new tier of government within the existing one leads to predictable complications—and misunderstandings, at least at first. Dixey, for example, complains that city officials he dealt with "kept saying, 'We have to make a policy decision' about this or that’ and I said, 'Our people voted for it. That's the policy decision.' "
Current state law requires that all property owners be notified of any resulting tax increase. Most commercial SSAs include a few dozen properties; the Marquette Park SSA includes some 3,700, which required a long slog through the swamp of county records that was expensive (the city says it will cost $165,000) and time-consuming. What an impatient Dixey first saw as foot-dragging he now recognizes as a result of ambiguous legal language and red tape. "Bureaucracies can't turn on a dime," he says. "They're working with us now."
In meetings with the Marquette Park representatives, the city's corporation counsel expressed concerns that even though the city acts only as a pass-through mechanism for SSA money, it still is exposed to liability for actions taken by private security officers under SSA hire. The typical private security guard is ill-trained and supervised compared with the best of professionalized cops.
Neighborhood patrols have been derided as local militia and Chicago Police Supt. Matt L. Rodriguez publicly has raised questions about coordinating his force with Marquette Park's private cops. For a model, he might look to Hyde Park, where the University of Chicago runs a highly visible police force.
U of C spokesman Jonathan Kleinbard explains that the operation changed from night watchmen to a full-fledged police unit beginning in 1968. Today, U of C employs a full-time force of 62 officers, plus many part-timers—trained to the same standards as Chicago police—and a fleet of 13 cars.
"We share radios. When someone at the University of Chicago calls to report a criminal act, we immediately call city police," Kleinbard adds. And the Chicago police superintendent has deputized U of C police so they have full arrest powers within their bailiwick—from 47th to 61st streets and from Cottage Grove Avenue to Lake Shore Drive. Kleinbard acknowledges that, given the pressures on the city budget, the U of C police have handled an increasing share of the calls in their region. "We're pleased and proud of the public-private partnership we have with the city. But it's very expensive. Philosophically, we agree that it's a city responsibility."
City services are the common coin of Chicago's political as well as its government system. The trend toward enclave communities has a political dimension; some builders talk of "organized clout" that these instant neighborhoods achieve by aggregating constituent interests. But if people can get their garbage picked up by calling their SSA, what's an alderman good for? Aldermen nevertheless generally follow their constituents when it comes to setting up SSAs, even when they think they're a bad idea. Stone thinks SSAs are easily misused, even when they are set up to address a legitimate need. "There are other things that can be done in the way of self-help," he insists, such as expanding support for community policing. "That creates a relationship between law enforcement and the community."
Aid. Mary Ann Smith (48th), whose ward includes the Edgewater SSA, fought with Stone on the issue and calls the taxing districts "an incredibly valuable option for communities." Losing the Edgewater SSA has been "devastating," she says. "We know that in many parts of the SSA, we have seen more garbage in the streets and more loitering." Not only does she want to get it back, but she suggests a new task for an SSA—hiring lawyers to challenge property reassessments in reviving neighborhoods.
SSAs can be a valuable option for mayors, too; they offer city bosses a way to defuse chronic complaints about the levels of taxation and policing by letting residents tailor levels of services (and taxation) for themselves.
Everyone has heard of school choice. SSAs would give police choice and garbage choice. Daley in March said he was considering making the whole city an SSA. Neighborhoods that wished could opt in for extra police protection in return for a supplemental property tax, thus adding "extra cheese" to the menu of government services.
The trend seems likely to grow even without City Hall's sponsorship. Dixey says his group has received calls from four or five curious neighborhood groups in other parts of the city, which should find it easier to set up their own SSAs; a bill passed by the most recent General Assembly and awaiting action by Gov. Jim Edgar would eliminate the canvass of property owners.
The obvious danger is that cities may become balkanized. But the cities already are balkanized; the issue, say advocates, is whether the dissection is done by the people or by City Hall. Basically, SSAs would replicate on a neighborhood scale the same sorting out that began on a metropolitan scale at the turn of the century. Then, an expanding and prosperous upper middle class exploited congenial laws to create same-class residential enclaves in the form of new suburban municipalities. These were, and remain