It’s supposed to be a deal where the building owner gets a variance on zoning restrictions if they promise to maintain a public space. But the reality is that a lot of them are inaccessible and there’s no enforcement. http://gothamist.com/2017/04/19/pops_balderdash.php
There is no "insidious creep" - this is private land, and owners are -- or at least should be -- free to allow what they like. be glad they turn some of it in a space that can be enjoyed. If you don´t like it, you should turn to your government to get them to buy it back, and make it real public space.
Because the very act of being on private land means relinquishing some rights to the property owner. I don't like the idea of suddenly being under the jurisdiction of private security just because I walked into an non-distinct private area. Especially since, as the article shows, plenty of them enforce regulations you may not know the details of.
The article is long on words and on Concern, but short on actual compact statement of the problem. Can you help me out here and list some of these problematic private rules?
Another point of the article is that the majority of the land owners refused to answer the question. You don't even know what you can and can't do until you're trespassing. Please RTFA.
One example from the article: the London City Hall, where the major works from, is in private space so there can't be any demonstrations there. Don't you think this is problematic?
Yes, along with Canary Wharf, both private places with even private police. But I'd say the City Hall example is a level more problematic than that because that's where you would demonstrate, there's where the decision making is happening. Imagine not being possible to gather in front of the Houses of Parliament...
I'm not that familiar with British laws, but what madness is this?
Owners of privately-owned public spaces (POPS) need not delineate their property boundaries, or provide any kind of indication when someone may be crossing from a truly public space into a POPS. Owners of POPS may establish rules of acceptable conduct for their space, but are not required to publish them. The only way to discover what those rules are is by breaking one, at which time they may be enforced without prior warning, and with no due process or appeal. The rules may be changed at any time, for any reason, with no notice.
That system is so arbitrary and capricious, and so broken, that I can only conclude that it is entirely incompatible with liberal democracy. It is the very soul of plutocratic, pseudo-libertarian oligarchy.
How do you feel when you enter a clearly private space such as a shopping mall, or stadium, and they don't publish a 100%-complete set of rules for you? Is it oppressive?
How do you feel when you enter public (government) property, but they make available for you thousands of pages of by-laws that govern your behaviour? Is it oppressive?
When I enter a stadium or theater, there's a lot of fine print there on the ticket, but generally, it doesn't contain any blatant WTFs and I know that I can't be kicked out arbitrarily without a refund of my entry fee. I don't specifically obey rules I don't know about. If there are any rules I do know about, and don't want to obey, I can easily avoid entering the private property. Going to a football game or rock concert is not an essential part of public life.
Malls have no entry fee, but they often post their rules on their websites. I don't feel very oppressed by them, because I don't frequent malls much. I didn't even visit often back when they were popular. Places like Universal City Walk or Disney Springs in Orlando are actually like Hell for me, crowded, noisy, and commercial, and I am pretty uncomfortable with how the Reedy Creek Improvement District is like an independent fiefdom, and the acme of all tourist traps. It sometimes feels like you could be black-bagged and whisked away just for showing too much stress on your face and not having enough money in your pockets.
Yes, that's oppressive. And creepy. I don't like it when people look at me like I'm either an overflowing bag of cash to be drained or an unpleasant insect to be shooed away.
Rules for public land use are frequently organized by intent, and one does not need to read every last rule on every last page to enjoy any particular use. If you are just day-hiking, you don't need to read the parts about hunting or overnight camping. If you also want to camp or hunt, you can read those sections and not also the parts about cell tower sites or water rights. You also have the knowledge that if any rule for use of public land conflicts with your rights, it is void from the start, and if someone attempts to enforce it against you, you will likely eventually get some compensation.
But I have also read some of those thousands of pages of rules, and in some municipalities, yes, they are oppressive. In others, they are mostly reasonable. That also depends in part on the strictness and uniformity of enforcement. Policing for profit can make reasonable rules oppressive, and oppressive rules, laxly enforced, don't seem quite so bad when there is no real penalty for breaking them. In either case, the locals usually have some means by which to change the rules that they may disagree with, including loud and well-attended protest demonstrations.
The danger of POPS is that they replace some of the functions of truly public spaces, while leaving out one or more vital functions (like protest and free expression), then those public spaces wither and die, leaving people effectively unable to exercise the vital functions.
Try pulling out a camera. On public land you may run into idiot police officers that don't know your rights, but mostly they won't bother you. On private land they have the right to tell you to stop and make you leave.
Given that e.g. large parts of the pedestrian routes along the Thames for example are private, there substantial stretches where you can't even stand and take pictures of the river where no part of said private property features in the picture, because the property owners have instructed their security to just blanket refuse all permission to take pictures.
Only being slightly facetious, but given the lack of council funding for parks (or how they prioritise their spending) you can tell the private spaces as they are better maintained and tidier.
(Source: Working in Canary Wharf on and off for 8 years)
It is insidious, as the land is being sold off by public bodies (local councils etc) without any announcement, and then there is no signage to let people know that the land is no longer public. The first that most people know is when they've broken some rule (not law) and are kicked off the land by private security guards.
Most of the time, there is no sale; it's just a planning application. Those are usually public, but there's a huge difference between losing a few square feet of footpath to a privately-owned bench/telco cabinet, and losing a previously accessible green/brownfield site.
The places mentioned in the article (Granary Square, More London, Canary Wharf, etc.) were never public spaces.
They were predominately disused or abandoned industrial areas that have been developed to become vibrant and attractive places to live and work, creating entirely new 'public' spaces in the process.
It absolutely is, because at the most cynical view, it's an ingenious way for governments to also reduce the number of areas where people can gather to protest in large numbers, etc.
They can just shrug and say "it's private land."
(I'm talking about cases where the gov sold public land to a private entity, not where a private entity just opened up their property)
The local government also gives permission for new development, and looks favourably on a planning application that includes an area open to the public. It is worth something to create such an area, but we shouldn't value it as highly as an area that is really owned and regulated by the people.
Why should they be free to allow what they like? I don't know of any culture where there is an assumption that private property is absolute - that's a pretty extreme view.
On the other end of the spectrum, though, you will find plenty of examples of cultures - and nation states - where there is a historic assumption that the public good and/or liberty requires substantial restrictions on property rights, on the basis that land is a scarce resource and that while some property rights are necessary, or even desirable for the economic benefits it may bring, other such rights severely restricts the liberty of everyone else by depriving them of access, or actively harms society (e.g. most places place restrictions on carrying out various dangerous activities on your property without appropriate permissions).
For my part, the shock of moving to London (from Norway) where many parks have gates that are locked at night, was something I have still not quite gotten over - 17 years later. It feels oppressive, after being used to open spaces - most parks in Oslo have no gates or fences, and most of those that do have large gaps and any fencing is largely to block specific routes. Part of this is more public lands, part of it is a culture where fencing in semi-public private spaces is largely still seen as offensive restrictions on others freedom, helped by extensive rights of access ("freedom to roam") outside urban areas that gets people used to expect to be free to access open spaces.
To me the idea of liberty in a society with strict property rights makes a total mockery of liberty.
In places like Edinburgh it's all a bit complex - there are public parks that are always open, public parks that close at night, Royal Parks that are always open but that have funny rules [e.g. no "commercial vehicles"], large private gardens that are basically private parks and a general right to roam on private land anyway.... (with some common sense restrictions).
I disagree with you and take the extreme absolute property rights view.
I believe that only through strong property protections can we experience liberty: when one's ownership in property is secure, then one may plan for the future. Conversely, when one's control of property is subject to the arbitrary whims of the state, then one may not plan for the future, and economic growth is not possible.
Many poor nations, for instance, have terrible land title systems, and the land may be taken from you by the local magistrate if you are not the proper color / religion / race or have not paid the proper bribes. Such is not a good environment in which to experience liberty. Sure, your empty field will always be open for the public to play football, but there will never be a factory in that field providing jobs and improving the general prosperity.
I won't attempt to tackle "the public good" or "actively harms society" here.
(I'm assuming that when you mention property that you mean "outside, unenclosed spaces." Do you also extend your view to the buildings on property? Offices? Private homes?)
Meanwhile as land becomes more scarce as population increases AND ownership of wealth which includes land becomes more concentrated in the hands of the few a shrinking minority will have any liberty by your own definition at all.
In the US approximately 60% of households owned their home however of those most are owned by the bank. Only a steadily decreasing fraction are actually owned free and clear by those who reside there.
Most of the US is in fact divided among those who will be kicked out next month if they don't make their rent and a higher class of renter who will be kicked out several months later if he doesn't catch up his mortgage payments.
Both classes have little savings and may easily be a lost job away from homelessness.
I've been to most countries in Europe, but I have only seen large swaths of land fenced off in the UK. So freedom to roam must be working well enough at least somewhere. There are a few legitimate reasons to have fences e.g. to along highways to keep out animals, but there is no reason why there couldn't be a gate every few hundred meters.
Actually most of Europe do not have freedom to roam in the legal sense, though might have more limited forms of it, and customs certainly are for not fencing everything in even when there is not explicit legal right of access. The UK on the other hand does have a legal form of freedom to roam that's very new, but very limited in terms of what is covered, so it affects very little land.
Compare to the Nordic countries where e.g. it is actively illegal to e.g. fence in a privately owned forest most places, and barring restrictions on disturbing farm animals or ruining crops you can walk almost anywhere in rural areas, freely pick berries (outside of planted fields), mushrooms etc. even on private land, and even camp without needing to ask permission (but custom is to ask where it is convenient if you want to do so e.g. near a farm).
Norway (the others might too, but it's Norway I know about) also have strict legal restrictions on building near the sea and blocking access to beaches etc. to protect public access.
Secure ownership does not require absolute property rights.
There is not a single country in the world today that offers you absolute property rights, because it actively harms those around you.
You are conflating the lack of absolute property rights with the other extreme.
> I won't attempt to tackle "the public good" or "actively harms society" here.
So in other words you constructed a strawman and didn't address the actual issue at all. The actual issue is the public good and the active harm to society and your neighbours that allowing anything near absolute property rights bring.
I agree. I am trying to make the point (badly, it seems) that business will do what business whats to do, if the Government allows them to. We (the people) should be able to direct government as to the things we would or wouldn't like to allow business to get away with.
I know this system is broken - I firmly believe that if voting were able to make a difference, it would immediately be made illegal. That is the fight we must fight - that is the root cause of the problem.
It may be a creep in the sense that otherwise it would be a truly public space rather than closed private one. The government may be treating it as a kind of 'outsourcing' and public space gets gradually privatised. So it's not the opening of private properties, but twisting of the public ones.
Reminds me of being told "you can't lay in the grass" in Millennium Park in Chicago by a security guard. They build something nice and then you can't use it properly.
That's probably an anti-homeless thing. We try to make it hard to sleep in public spaces to push homeless people to the margins. Like how they put arm rests in the middle of park benches to make it hard to sleep on them.
> We try to make it hard to sleep in public spaces to push homeless people to the margins.
It's much more complex than that. Every homeless person I've every offered to help has already rejected the systems in place to help them. Maybe they should have for various reasons. Reform and innovation in this kind of social work is sorely needed. But the whole story isn't that "society" just wants to give dirty people the boot.
The systems in place to "help" them are typically also there to control them in some way, and may also be blind to the new risks they may be creating.
The few genuine charities that offer help with no strings attached, and with sensitivity to potential unintended consequences, are frequently underfunded and subjected to frequent attacks by the powerful. For instance, the city might pass an ordinance criminalizing the act of giving away food gratis, if it was not prepared by trained personnel in a commercial kitchen with a current health inspection certificate, just to shut down a group that gives away sandwiches that were prepared in a church kitchen.
I don't think that "society" hates the homeless, but its self-appointed lords and masters sure seem to hate how they don't play the grossly unfair games that seem to have been set up just for them to lose. And there's my tinfoil hat, creeping back onto my head.
There is a vein of Puritan/Calvinist/Prosperity sadism running through the US. Adherents believe that those people are in the gutters because God is punishing their poor character with unfavorable circumstances. So in order to solve their financial problems, they must first accept that it is all 100% their own fault, and that random chance has no role in success or failure. People become rich only through hard work and public virtue, therefore poor people are all lazy degenerates. This twisted logic poisons public policy, because some rich people like to believe all their money makes them better than other people, and they spend a significant fraction of it on politics.
Those who genuinely believe in charity and "as you treat the least of you, so you treat me" may have greater numbers, but they have lesser funding, and therefore smaller political influence in the US. They can't seem to pass any public program to help people without someone amending it to punish the poor in some way for the sins made obvious by their financial condition. This leads to homeless rejecting official help.
From the outside, it just looks like institutional cruelty. I just cannot fathom the type of thinking that would spend thousands of dollars installing unnecessary armrests on park benches, just so that poor people derive less benefit from them. It is embarrassing for a supposedly advanced and modern society to have the human detritus of its public policies on display for all to see. But instead of fixing the broken policies, or accepting responsibility for those that were hurt, the evidence of brokenness is swept under the rug.
I have seen it personally in my spouse's godparents. I have heard it secondhand about the Uihlein family (Uline company). For the most part, it is twice-removed hearsay regarding wealthy people and families based around the Chicago-Milwaukee corridor. Some of those people are apparently real shitheels--constantly getting detained for drunk driving, but never being held accountable for it. They're super racist, too. It's likely all an intrinsic part of Chicago's endemic corruption problem. I don't live there any more, but am acquainted with a lot of people who still do, and they occasionally like to tell horror stories about their clients/customers/employers/blind-dates/random-encounters from hell. Some of it could be exaggeration or whole-cloth fabrication, but I can believe it easily.
This is because I have overheard with my own ears a serious suggestion that it would be acceptable to vanish homeless people in the darkness of night and turn them into dog food, to be sold at a premium. Some people are just evil, delude themselves into thinking they are good, and they have far more money than a just world would ever allow them to touch. Maybe you don't hear that kind of thing often in places where the rich folks are mostly hippy-dippy liberals, but hearing it from even one pair of lips, without an iota of shame, is unsettling--like seeing one cockroach in your kitchen. What is being said when I'm not around to overhear it?
I also detect signs of it in written legislation and political discourse, particularly with regard to amending welfare programs to include work requirements or blanket consent to arbitrary searches by state officials. It's as though the default assumption is that recipients are out to cheat the system for a free ride, and spend all their benefits on illegal drugs.
I can't imagine how anyone could become so rotten and yet live, but from the anecdotal evidence, they do exist, and for bizarre and unfathomable reasons, their opinions count more than mine, even when we have the same number of votes to cast.
I think of this as attitude as "Rich white trash"... The thing about being rich is that you can afford to isolate yourself for a long time, wrapped up in a community of similarly isolated people. Those attitudes grow and fester without being challenged by different opinions. That isolation creates ideologically-driven people who just don't see how hurtful thier ideas truly are.
The worst part of it is that some people who do know better and should be able to give contrasting opinions are unable to do so because they are in some way dependent on the rich bubble-dweller. They could get fired, or the person would stop paying for their rent or medical bills.
In the case of the personal anecdote, they had just finished replacing one $100k pedigreed lap dog--that had been run over--with another, when the d-bag refused to help his own nonagenarian mother with some of her bills, actually suggesting that she go on food stamps if she's having so much trouble.
Many of our cities are social disaster zones compared to those of other first world countries, largely because we've cut our social programs to the bone. It might just be greed rather than any puritanical morality, but I wouldn't be surprised if the lack of empathy stemmed from thinking that one's success is much more deterministic than it actually is. If people reminded themselves regularly that "there but for the grace of God go I", they'd probably agitate for better social safety nets.
Ironically, the unmitigated social problems that result from lacking basic social safety nets increase expenses many other places, including in healthcare, possibly by more than the programs would have cost. Instead of getting rehabilitation, an addict has to steal to feed their addiction, prompting more spending on police forces, plus fear and mistrust of others, and the addict uses a series of emergency room visits when things inevitably go badly.
They get plenty of food. They have access to food banks, soup kitchens, etc. It's one of the few things charities can sustainably do on a day-to-day basis.
It's literally everything else that they don't have.
In the US the semi public spaces will be concentrated in urban cores. Elsewhere real parks will dominate.
Especially in terms of actual use. People might not even realize that some little set aside green space is semi public, whereas municipalities like to advertise their green spaces.
The private commons I'm most concerned with are actually digital commons: sites like twitter, reddit, and facebook. They have and enforce speech codes and otherwise curate and filter the content.
In this way, a park or two that you can't have a picnic in isn't all that alarming to me. Town squares used to be partially about places for bottom-up speech and marketing. In that world, silencing the riff-raff in squares had serious social consequences. These days, much of it seems digital.
That's a bit like saying you're less concerned about being waste-deep in a tarpit and more concerned about the prospect of your arms getting stuck.
The analogy is especially apt because if you think of web/net commons actually replaces free physical assembly (rather than augmenting it), then you can be convinced to give up your freedom of web/net assembly when whatever next new digital shift comes along. (E.g., not terribly concerned about my arms stuck in the tarpit because my head is connected directly to the VR meshnet...)
Although what seems to be replacing malls, at least where I am, aren't revitalized public shopping areas but rather "lifestyle centers" which are areas that look like traditional downtown shopping areas with blocks of connected stores along streets, but which are as privately owned as the enclosed malls were.
Yeah, there are outlet malls near me (http://www.startribune.com/twin-cities-supporting-two-outlet...), that resemble a traditional city in some ways, except the fact that there are no people living above the stores... so no multi-use vibrancy... just chain stores and food courts.
The death of the public commons, and its replacement by privately owned pseudo-commons (just don't break any corporate or brand rules) is a major theme of Naomi Klein's seminal book, No Logo. I have't read it for a while, so I don't know how it holds up (more, rather than less, I would guess) but I enjoyed it both times. Here's another article from the Guardian, discussing No Logo.
To build a development you need planning permission. This will often include an agreement that public open space will be provided as an amenity for the community. Sometimes this will be as mitigation for loss of other space. Or just as a something the local authority wants. It is probably better than stricly gated communities that exclude the public community, which is what the councils want to avoid.
Also, the council may not have the funds to properly maintain the open space if it was handed to them. It makes commercial sense for operators to do landscape work themselves if that is something that matters to them. People want retail, housing developments or high end office blocks to be attractive and well maintained.
It's explicitly transactional, in consideration for the property owner providing and maintaining the space, they get to build XYZ. And as the spaces are typically adjacent to their properties, they are motivated to keep them well maintained.
The alternative seems to be that the developer build smaller, or not build at all, and provide not public space.
in my hometown Charlotte, NC, the downtown had some of the worst crime growing up, now many spaces that were completely ignored are beautiful parks, futhermore, dozens of artists have received financial support for soemtimes a lifetime of work or otherwise significantly reimbursed by the local banks that utilize and maintain the public spaces and install artwork.
There is the obvious concept of the potential for abuse encompassing all spaces so you could conceivably not ever be allowed to walk outside without potentially being discriminated against, or utilizing artwork to convey disturbing messages to try to influence public opinion, however, this can be the cases for government owned lands in all countries as well, and it is their private land, and I find the idea of not allowing people or organizations to own private land just because the public who is sitting in the park created to be used by them are noticing its not owned by the government, as an immediate abuse of government power to intervene on weather companies can buy land, and furthermore, choosing to take away their rights to do so because they are creating public spaces for everyone and making them nicer, and its annoys the public who benefits from it, as opposed to the perceived threat that one day it could be abused. Everything that is currently legal can be potentially abused, it just so happens in this case its not at all, and turning abandoned dumps and warehouses into public parks, green spaces, open musuems, and hosting events for the public on them.
in NYC, many of the parks when I worked there were previously total dumps and havens for crime, entire areas of manhattan have been turned around and they have the following effects
1. free urban green space the government cant afford
2. a clustering of small businesses around parks who pop up and do very well catering to lunches and outdoor cafes, 3. immense number of otherwise unrecognized groups being supported such as fashion shows, concerts and other events companies choose to support, public ice skate arenas
4. paying otherwise unrecognized artists millions to install their artwork in one of the most coveted places in Manhattan, etc
5. Making urban places desireable places to live and not just work, which is im pretty sure what the goals are for progressive humanity
Furthermore, I've never personally observed people being removed for looking scruffy, and I think in general you are removed for harrassing people, which police would do anyways.
In the current area I used to live in, there are 28 parks. 27 of them are complete dumps and noone takes care of them, particularly the young activists in town. There is one nice gated park own privately by a private community, who takes care of it, and you must live in the nieghborhood to have a key. Given the rest of the city is ridden with crime, its a safe spot for families to take their kids, or a women to read in the park without fear of beign a victim.
Regardless, despite the 27 other parks which the local government has asked hippie acitivists to come in and help clean etc, they are fixated on the idea of the one private park and trying to make it public, without understanding that the only reason its nice and noticeable is because its privately maintained, and the only reason people want to hang out there is because its safe, which is also because its privately maintained. Instead of taking the concepts that make the park desireable, and putting in the work to show that any of the other 27 complete dump parks could also become desireable and safe for gentrified communities to inhabit, and then use that as proof of concept that this park can be public and safe as well, and benefit more people, it turns out thats more effort than they are willing to put in. They only want to take the one nice park that is, without any plan on how to make the park not turn into the other 27 which are basically abandoned places people are sacred to go so, and as a female I would never go to alone. The government is too broke to maintain them.
I wonder if these types of privately owned parks have gained popularity precisely because of the restrictions placed on them. People discover one and then keep going back because it's nice, and then overtime it becomes a more popular place for locals to visit because it has lots of visitors and is more kept up then the actual public places.
For example, I've been disheartened by some of the parks I've visited in Baltimore. There's trash everywhere and sometimes I wonder if the city even knows the park exists.
Oh Baltimore. The park I walk in every morning has a dog park with no signs. They just put up fences, didn't announce it. I really appreciate having that off leash area everyday for my dogs, but they could market it a little better. (This is technically in Baltimore county.)
They have trash cans in the dog park but no one was collecting them. I had to flag down the trashmen a few days ago and ask them what needed to happen for them to get it. They thought the dog park was a locked area.
A lot of the nicer streets in the more neglected areas are nice because residents go out and pick up the trash. I've given people shit who I've seen littering in my neighborhood, but at the same time, there aren't trash cans on every corner for them to use.
You know what I do when there are no trash cans? I carry it around with me until there are. I have walked 3 miles through residential areas carrying a damn can so screw the assholes littering.
Public spaces aren't anarchist lands of lawlessness. Cities can and do prohibit uses that have a negative impact on the space or other visitors. They can also invest in up keeping, and there are many examples of public spaces that rival anything private. New York's Central Park comes to mind, or Yellowstone.
But at the end of the day, US citizen always seem to agree when asked if taxes are too high and the government is wasteful, and that opinion does not correlate with actual taxation or spending. The result is the decay of public property.
A nice comparison that I recently came across, illustrating the last point: The government spends just about half as much on IT per office worker compared to the private sector.
In London there is a wide array of low level nuisance and antisocial behaviour that the authorities are unwilling/unable to tackle.
Drug dealing and use, drinking on the street, prostitues loitering, homeless people begging, women being catcalled and harassed, groups of youths congregating, littering, etc. are all commonplace in truly public spaces.
Many of these 'pseudo-public spaces' (think Granary Square, More London, Canary Wharf) are enormously popular with families and businesspeople precisely because they have security personnel who do a good job of tackling these things.
Good grief, which London do you live in? I've lived here for nine years, mostly in Brixton and Bermondsey.
> Drug dealing and use
Barely visible compared to virtually every other city I've been to
> prostitues loitering
Haven't been a thing in London for a decade, from what people tell me. Certainly never seen it. Evidently that business has moved wholly online.
> homeless people begging
A fraction of what it is in any comparable American city -- but certainly on the rise in recent years due to Tory policies.
> women being catcalled and harassed
This is definitely an actual problem.
> groups of youths congregating
Good grief, how is this even a problem? They're citizens and that's their right. A city which helps young people to congregate is doing its job. More power to them, provided they behave well.
> littering
Yes, that's sometimes a problem. Not so much associated with youth, in my experience: yobs come in all ages.
> Many of these 'pseudo-public spaces' (think Granary
> Square, More London, Canary Wharf) are enormously popular
> with families and businesspeople precisely because they
> have security personnel who do a good job of tackling
> these things.
There's nothing that prevents public servants from doing the same -- except of course that they're underpaid and diminishing in number, thanks to austerity policies. The bargain which is making here is:
1. Reduce taxes / enforcement of taxes on large corporations
2. De-fund and generally decrease the quality of public service
3. Shift the burden of responsibility for providing said services onto said large corporations, who now provide a facsimile of the commons, minus inconvenient concepts like civil rights (right to assemble, speech, etc).
4. Use people's growing discontent with public services to argue for lower taxes. Go back to 1 and repeat.
This is then propped up by a "Broken Britain" narrative like your own, which is, forgive the bluntness, tabloid-fueled bullshit. Despite the the government's diligent efforts to undermine public services, London remains one of the cleanest and cities on the planet, and is certainly doing better than at any point in its history.
The world isn't going to hell in a hand basket, but take a stroll past the McDonald's in Brixton of a weekend evening and you will find some drug dealers.
Evidently not the same parts of London that I see (for the past 40 or so years):
> Drug dealing and use
Literally every day. There's a man who sits on the next doorstep that I call 'Mr Subtle' as he is continuously 'reading' a newspaper. He has many friends who stop by for a quick chat. Then they smoke drugs that he has sold them.
> homeless people begging
Every day. Also stealing from Primark, sleeping in tents on the street, pretending to fall in front of traffic, pretending to read maps then asking for change, etc.
Certainly different parts of London have different homeless populations, but Camden and central London are not great.
What have these issues got to do with public/private spaces? The ownership of the land won't solve drug use, nor will it end homelessness. All that happens is the problem gets pushed elsewhere.
Agreed that we've drifted off-topic. Private spaces wont solve drug use or homelessness, but it could certainly affect it. It's harder to sleep on the streets if there is nowhere to go.
> It's harder to sleep on the streets if there is nowhere to go.
I'm puzzled by what kind of psyche underlies a statement like this. I'm sorry to frame it in these terms, but honestly it seems... evil to me. Do you not understand that for many people, sleeping on the street is last remaining alternative to death? Take away the ability to sleep on the street, and you are killing people. If that is your intention, there are faster and more humane ways to do it.
Or do you believe that that were it not for the myriad comforts of the streets, the homeless would simply go back to paying off their mortgages or at least crashing on friends' sofas? Because if that's what you believe, you're simply wrong. Homelessness is a last resort. (And no, the government services which one ought to be able to avail oneself of are no longer always available. Particularly if you are a working-age male, it is often virtually impossible to prove to a social worker that you are not "voluntarily homeless", which then disqualifies you from receiving help.)
I'd like to believe that nobody participating in this discussion is that malicious or that ignorant. If you can show me a third way, I'd genuinely appreciate it.
Huh. I grew up very poor -- there were months when the bins behind supermarkets were a primary source of food -- and I've seen rough-sleepers die from exposure. It's hard to reconcile that one could make a "simple neutral comment" about something that, for me, is a very real life-or-death issue. But I accept that was your intention.
Very generous of you to accept my intentions. Perhaps next time you could not build a tower of assumptions on top of a single sentence that ends with concluding the other person is evil?
That sounds like a horrible way to grow up, and yes people on the streets do die from exposure. Presumably they also get infections that can kill them, get beaten to death, get in to fights over who stole whose lighter, etc.
In the London that I live in, the homeless are there for all sorts of reasons - poverty, mental illness, addiction, running away from a bad situation, and so on - and not all of these people will die if they are not on the streets. They might be in all sorts of worse (to them) situations - low paid menial job, mental institute, rehab, back home with abusive parents.
Most of the time, they have little choice. Or the alternative choice is worse. Forcing them off the street would not just be morally wrong, it would be largely ineffective. Unless you privatise the whole world.
The main issue that I see with private spaces is that it shifts the responsibility of low-level policing of the space from the public to security guards. Obviously the first people to come up against this will be the homeless, as they are most likely to be breaking whatever hidden rules these spaces have.
Anyway, I don't have the time to discuss this. Good luck with the infrastructure software, it looks well made.
Yes, apologies for building too many assumptions; I guess this is a bit of a hot-trigger issue for me. I've seen people genuinely believe that if one makes life sufficiently difficult for the homeless, they'll just go away. In London this has lead to appalling incidents like [1]. I thought that was where you were coming; I see now that it wasn't. Sorry again!
In any case, I haven't got time to discuss this either -- gotta get back to work!
I'm not saying London is a hellhole, but all of the issues I mentioned are commonplace, and I will see every item on that list in the course of a typical week.
I've lived in various areas, currently a bit further out in Zone 3, which means I should add rampant fly tipping and unlicensed/uninsured/abandoned cars to the list.
Eliminating these nuisances from an area is a costly business. It requires round the clock security, extensive CCTV monitoring, constant maintenance and adherence to the "broken windows" philosophy.
It is essentially a luxury, which private property owners bestow upon their 'pseudo-public' spaces. The public would be outraged if councils sought the funding, through taxes, to apply the same to truly public spaces.
Arguably the biggest social problem to effect public space is massive amounts of car traffic. That causes orders of magnitude more problems than any of the things you mentioned. Our most important public spaces are overrun by cars that mix well with nothing.
Granary Square and More London are in areas that don't tend to have that much of the issues you mentioned.
Canary Wharf is busy in the week because it's full of skyscrapers. But I live just round the corner from it, and it's dead in the evenings or at weekends unless there's a special event going on, despite the relative safety. Other public areas in the surrounding neighbourhoods tend to be a lot busier. And actually, there's a large group of young drug dealers that regularly hang out in the west area of the Canary Wharf development.
That said, the private security forces do indeed do a good job of keeping these areas safe, and free of threatening homeless people and such. Still debatable whether or not that's a thing we should be solving by privatising public spaces...
Sure but we're talking about paying for the upkeep of public parks on an ever decreasing government budget and the upkeep of a corporate space that has every financial incentive to make sure it's safe, civil, and clean.
I'm guessing these parks aren't built out of the goodness of corps hearts so tax breaks are probably involved. You know maybe I give so many thousands of dollars to someones campaign, then you get back so many millions back in tax breaks to build and maintain a park. Spend half on the park and pocket the rest.
On the whole it would probably be cheaper just to have kept the revenue and made a park.
> US citizen always seem to agree when asked if taxes are too high and the government is wastefu
For the price of developing that infamous fighter jet, how many parks could be upkept for how long?
Not a citizen, but paying taxes, and I think that maaaaybe some savings could be made by not having a military force that's five times bigger than the next three combined. Maybe 2x is enough?
That said, I do appreciate that pax americana has been very beneficial overall. So maybe it's not as wasteful as it sometimes sounds.
They can, but in Baltimore's case, and probably in the case of other cities, there are areas that seem to have been created just to check a box. Ferry Bar Park, for instance, is an official park that I found behind a closed down WalMart. It had a broken picnick table and trash was everywhere (ex: https://www.flickr.com/photos/40423570@N07/24766355732/). It's like the city had forgotten about the place.
I'm not saying I prefer private, but I understand how they could gain popularity if the city isn't doing it's part to keep up it's own areas. Your IT stat doesn't surprise me, and is definitely a good point.
Round Falls, while not an official park, is an open area along the Jones Falls trail that runs through Baltimore that is in complete disarray (see http://thebaltimorechop.com/2012/06/26/round-falls/). Riverside Park was also pretty dirty when I visited, though it has good reviews online, so maybe I went on an off day.
As a few others have already noted, this is also an issue of interest in New York. Here's a dataset of privately-owned public spaces from NYC's data portal:
(it's a MDB file of around 275K, so I imagine it just holds point data as opposed to full shapefiles)
One of the most well-known debates over the use of privately-owned public spaces was in 2011 when the Occupy Wall Street movement took over Zuccotti Park:
The relevant part which describes how these spaces come with benefits to the developer, even as the developer is left to come up with "reasonable" rules:
> Among the better spaces is Zuccotti Park. The developer never received a floor-area bonus for the 26,000-square-foot park, although it did receive other valuable zoning concessions. The current owner, Brookfield Office Properties, voluntarily installed trees, seating, lighting and art over the last decade. (It also changed the space’s name from Liberty to Zuccotti Park, after John E. Zuccotti, one of its co-chairmen, creating a personal interest in the park’s quality.)
> Nevertheless, the events at Zuccotti Park highlight the continued inadequacy of the laws regarding privately owned public spaces. Other than the requirement that this space remain open 24 hours a day, the owners were left to promulgate their own rules; the only limit is that they be “reasonable.”
> Until last month, Brookfield’s rules barred skateboarding, in-line skating and bicycling, but said nothing about long-term occupation by any group. New rules, announced Oct. 13, permit passive recreation only and prohibit things like camping and lying down on the ground or benches if it interferes with others. The rules remain unenforced; no one is sure what will happen next.
A father waiting to pick up his kids from day care sits in an ambiguously public-ish place. He refuses when an employee asks him to leave. Then the police arrive.
At that point he voluntarily gets up and starts walking away, but the cop follows him and continues pestering him to identify himself, etc.
It doesn't end well. I'm sure you can guess what he looks like.
It's an unpleasant story, but the ending seems OK.
Cops play the role of corporate lackey (like they do everywhere, in the USA and everywhere else), treat citizen badly, with probable significant racist component, and end up shooting him with a taser and arresting him. All bad so far.
But then he sues, and they settle for $100,000.00.
>But then he sues, and they settle for $100,000.00.
Not really. The police decided to act like corporate lackeys and TAX PAYERS paid a $40,000 settlement to a person who was physically injured by their misconduct. There are several ways this story should end that are not that
1) the settlement should not cost the tax payers money
2) the cops, or at least the property owner, should pay the settlement
3) those officers should not be officers anymore AND they should be held to some level of personal responsibility for their actions
4) there should be consequences for the police brutally attacking someone who asserts their (legal in MN) right not to identify themselves to police officers
If you try to make the police financially responsible they will price that into their decision to do that job; there's no way to really separate the public purse.
First, in many places the police are paid more than the market clearing rate for various reasons. So there's room to cut compensation without having shortages in applications.
Second, if officers are forced to seek out indemnification on the open market these policies will be underwritten. Bad risks will be forced off the job through unaffordable policies. Whereas blanket indemnification by the taxpayer has no selection effect at all.
I don't take it as a given that bad police get blanket indemnification. They lose jobs all the time.
Maybe market magic would be more efficient, I doubt that in practice it would particularly show up.
I also wonder if cutting the above market clearing compensation would come for free, or if there are real reasons for it.
Edit to add: also, notice that you've addressed something different than what I said; you argue that it could cost less, not that the public would avoid paying.
Indemnification just means that they don't have to pay out civil judgments against them. It doesn't mean they don't lose their jobs, though I'd definitely push back against "all the time" even there.
My study reveals that police officers are virtually always indemnified: During the study period, governments paid approximately 99.98% of the dollars that plaintiffs recovered in lawsuits alleging civil rights violations by law enforcement. Law enforcement officers in my study never satisfied a punitive damages award entered against them and almost never contributed anything to settlements or judgments—even when indemnification was prohibited by law or policy, and even when officers were disciplined, terminated, or prosecuted for their conduct.
Right, but losing a job is very similar to no longer being able to get an insurance policy that allows service in a jurisdiction, in terms of the costs that will be transferred to the public.
If you had to guess, in what percentage of 1983 (civil rights) cases that a municipality settles or loses do they fire the police officer(s) responsible?
In what percentage of cases would you guess that automobile insurance premiums rise where a driver is found liable for an incident and the insurance company is forced to pay out?
Honestly, I'm gonna go with my edit above. I didn't say that there was no money to be saved, I said that there is no way to stop the public being the payer.
So sure, there's a good possibility that requiring police to carry individual liability insurance would lower costs. The public would still ultimately fund the premiums on that insurance.
Sure there is: As with other professions with potential for high liability, police could be bonded. This would price high-risk individuals out of those positions.
"1) the settlement should not cost the tax payers money"
What would happen if the cop responsible for the act could not cover the settlement money ?
The one affected by brutality would be doubly screwed.
The Police as a whole should be held accountable, and victims should be ensured compensation, they are by all accounts being brutalized by the state, and the state is run with taxpayers money.
Basically the most reasonable strategy is that the employer which is the public is on the hook for the immediate cost and has the privilege and duty of recovering the money from the guilty.
This insures that the city who is guilty of hiring the miscreant ends up with the onerous duty of collection and the victim is compensated hastily.
> What would happen if the cop responsible for the act could not cover the settlement money ?
What happens to normal mortals when they can't pay their debts. Are policemen really so much above the law that they don't have to pay their debts either?
>What would happen if the cop responsible for the act could not cover the settlement money ?
Then you seize their property and sell it until there's enough to cover the settlement. Just like any other debtor. If they don't have enough property, you seize portions of their income.
>What would happen if the cop responsible for the act could not cover the settlement money ?
Should a debt ordered by a court due to deliberately taking actions that harm another be treated differently than a debt occurred through a consensual transaction? If so, could the courts be given more power to seize resources (not just money) from the one owing the debt?
There are a lot of things that I would consider immoral to do to recover a debt that results from a consensual transactions that I wouldn't view as immoral to do to recover a debt incurred by criminal actions.
Eh, but on the other hand, the tax payers are the ones who keep voting in governments that do not hold members of the police force accountable (and who hired policemen that do this to begin with). Such is the beauty of democracy: as long as there is no deception involved (and it doesn't seem like in this case, there was), the voters get exactly the government they deserve.
Not really. The $100,000 comes out of general funds. So the citizenry is victimized twice -- once by having public servants that don't serve them and again by having to pay for their misdeeds.
Officers Lori Hayne, Michael Johnson and Bruce Schmidt, who not only used excessive force but also perjured themselves in their official reports, paid not one penny of that settlement, faced no criminal charges, and didn't even have any adverse employment consequences.
So long as we refuse to hold police officers responsible for their actions they will continue to act as though they are above the law. Because they are.
But in a legitimate democracy, the citizenry cannot be "victimized" by "public servants that don't serve them".
If you hire some servants, and those servants don't serve you, and you don't get some new servants... whose fault is that?
But you're right on the essential point: the democratically elected government (== citizenry) involved here is paying an arguably reasonable price, but the individuals responsible probably are not.
Perjuring themselves can't be interpreted as a legitimate job function. Just as the city would sue an accountant to recover embezzlement, the individuals responsible for this liability should have reimbursed the municipality.
the specific people who are most hurt by bad law enforcement also tend to have the least power to "get some new servants."
so who's fault is that? usually not the victim. or at least the most direct victim, since obviously, society as a whole is hurt by this sort of thing (just not as much as the person who's wrongly harassed/injured/killed by the cops).
but maybe your point stands, because is that really a "legitimate democracy"?
"Legitimate democracy" is a long lost true scotsman if you take it to mean a perfectly functioning democracy. Constantly being under threat of violence and arbitrary harassment from an armed force legitimized by the government undermines the fundamental principles of democracy. When you get beaten up for protesting, harassed for speaking your mind or fitting some fundamentally class-based stereotype, you can't exercise the command and influence you would be entitled to in a legitimate democracy.
You're double-counting - if the restitution is fair, then the unlawful arrest isn't a net victimization. Restitution just means a transfer of unfairness from taxpayers to those their police department victimizes.
So if I beat you to a pulp and then pay your expenses and cover your losses, would you consider that a zero sum in terms of victimization? What sum of money would be necessary to get you un-assaulted and un-beaten up?
Restitution, legally, covers monetary losses. It should not be taken to mean that all is well when the bills are paid. You can't pay away a black eye.
Taxpayers cover the bill, police (and the corporate tenant) vindicated, they all move on and everything else pretty much stays the same?
Maybe a better ending would move the needle at least slightly in favor of preventing this kind of thing in the future.
Among several things that ought to happen in an ideal world, perhaps we could give non-lawyers clarity on what is a public or private space: If a corporate tenant wants to regulate a private space this way, it has to clearly separate it from the public with some specification of doors, gates, etc. Otherwise, it will be considered public in a conflict like this one.
Until you said that I was picturing a white person. Maybe there is a natural tendency for people to picture themselves in the shoes of the story.
There is definitely a stereotype that police pick on African-americans more. But they also pick on a lot of all of people in general and there are way more white people in the USA, so I don't immediately assume that a person being picked on by police is black. There is also the stereotype that blacks are not attentive fathers, so the setting (picking a kid up at daycare), would have at least canceled out the police stereotype IMO. I'd be surprised if most people had the same assumption about skin color that you had.
Either way, I think calling attention to his skin color in the way you did is petty and rude.
As a Polish person, it has absolutely not even crossed my mind that the person in the story would be black. HN is read all over the world and not everyone understands the same assumptions.
On a related note, is there any good date on how sex plays into this instead of (or in combination with) race? I wonder if a white male or a minority female faces greater police harassment. I'm also guessing age and appearance of wealth play significant factors as well.
The stereotype that police pick on black people more than white people stems from reality (not just in America); the stereotype that black men are not attentive fathers stems from racism. It's important to understand the difference.
> the stereotype that black men are not attentive fathers stems from racism.
Non preset African american fathers also stems from reality, just like the police stereotype. The Washington post source you gave actually did not dispute the absent fatherhood statistics - the article was about explaining why.
in the USA, 18% of non-Hispanic white fathers do not live with their children compared to 30% of hispanics, and 42% of blacks.
Rephrased from here:
"Non-Hispanic white men aged 15–44 had the largest difference between those with coresidential children (37%) and those with noncoresidential children (8.2%). The difference was smallest among non-Hispanic black men, with 33% having coresidential children and 24% having noncoresidential children. Among Hispanic men, more than twice as many had coresidential children (44%) than had noncoresidential children (18%)."
That's my mistake. Here is the article I meant to post:
Now to the mythology of the black male dereliction as dads: While it is true that black parents are less likely to marry before a child is born, it is not true that black fathers suffer a pathology of neglect. In fact, a C.D.C. report issued in December 2013 found that black fathers were the most involved with their children daily, on a number of measures, of any other group of fathers — and in many cases, that was among fathers who didn’t live with their children, as well as those who did.
That source has some good points , but it too does not dispute the statistics. Just explains some of it.
The one statistic it gave that disputes for more daily activity was for children under age 5, for certain activities, and only for black fathers that live with their children - not on the whole.
> Either way, I think calling attention to his skin color in the way you did is petty and rude.
This line was not in the reply I got by email (via HN Replies). I'm glad I caught it here because it illuminates a core problem with these conversations about policing and race.
I did not at all mean or knowingly suggest that the individual officers are bad people who thought bad things about this man because of his race -- i.e., these bad racist officers need to be removed and replaced with good non-racist officers, if any such unicorns exist.
But I understand why it might seem that way to family, friends and other defenders of police because so many critiques of policing do demonize them personally.
I wasn't trying to make this point, but good people acting in concert can easily end up behaving very badly, and even bring out the worst of human nature and its often false, reflexive assumptions about others. This ought to be particularly true for police, who confront the worst of humanity more than the rest of us.
You may disagree that black Americans are disproportionately victimized in this way by the police or that this played into what happened here, but that argument is not a personal one.
Privatization of public services, the dystopian scifi future I've always dreamed of is becoming a reality. I am really glad that these spaces are being created though. A land owner has the option to do what they wish with their land and I'd much rather have a pseudo public space than a residential block. The rules should be clearly posted though so that everyone knows what game they're playing.
>free wi-fi and big screens showing summer sport, as well as activities like table tennis, climbing walls and outdoor gyms
I would even pay for a space like that, it sounds really nice.
Some UK cities, such as Edinburgh, have private shared gardens where you pay an annual subscription to get keys and the gardens are managed and provide services and maintain play areas for different ages of kids, puts lights in the trees at Xmas, provide barbecue areas etc.
The annual subscriptions generally aren't that high although they do tend to be linked to living in nearby properties (with some degree of flexibility).
Yeah, they're run that way to keep out homeless, riff-raff, scum, and tourists visiting for the Festival. They should be genuine public places, managed by the council.
Given that Edinburgh council seems more interested in selling of parkland for development I don't think there would be much chance of that. I'd be worried that if the council did somehow take ownership of them they'd end up being developed and a lot of green space (albeit private) would be lost.
>The rules should be clearly posted though so that everyone knows what game they're playing.
The public library in my town sits on land that is part of a larger office park. The green space behind it is pseudo-public with walking/biking trails and ponds. I had to laugh at the rules posted opposite the library exit. Among them was a prohibition on the distribution of literature.
It seems to me that this stems from a misdefinition of the phrase "public space". Public space shouldn't be defined as "space that is owned by the state", but as "space that makes no attempt to prevent entry". An open park on a lot that someone owns should be legally considered a public space, but if the owner puts up a fence and a door, then it starts to move towards private space.
This is a lot better than companies fencing off huge swathes of land so you need to meander around their properties.
I really like recent development in my hometown (Warsaw) where you can walk around new buildings, sit on a bench and watch a fountain. Usually the local government doesn't have a budget to stick those facilities everywhere.
Lots of these places are horrible as well. I remember being hassled by a security guard for cycling through a part of the City of London. No loss, it is a concrete hellhole, I'll find somewhere else to cycle.
Whenever these concerns are raised I find it difficult to gather any information on what the land was before it became "pseudo-public".
"insidious creep" implies that land that was previously public has become pseudo-public. But the examples cited seem to be land that was previously private has become pseudo-public. That just doesn't seem so dystopian to me.
Suppose the land was private buildings turned to private park. Seems dystopian to me since it seems public but it is not. No public protests can be had near the MegaCorp for example.
> The entire system of private property is terrible and I hope it will be abolished within my lifetime.
Would you be okay with having random people just entering your house, sleeping in your bed, using your toothbrush and then taking your computer on the way out?
Obvious straw-man, but my point is: There's got to be _some portion_ of the system of private property that you agree with on some level. You might for instance disagree with the way private property is distributed, or how access to it is made difficult for some groups, or how we value it more than public property. You might be in favor of more taxation, or of “fairer” taxation (whatever that actually entails would be hard for everyone to agree with) or of revamped eminent domain laws, but I find it really hard to believe that you'd hope for the entire system of private property to be abolished within your lifetime.
There's a distinction between personal property and private property. My house, bed, toothbrush, and computer aren't private property, they're personal property.
Not even remotely. Political thinkers have been making that distinction since the 19th century. Go back to the 18th century and people generally wouldn't even have used the term "property" to refer to things other than land.
The police absolutely have a role. Are you suggesting that if you came home to find squatters living in your house that the police would simply shrug their shoulders and suggest you move elsewhere?
Lots of types of access come with conditions. This is true of both publicly and privately owned land. Huge amount of public land are restricted (Salisbury Plain for example), and we have good access rights to some private land (most of Scotland). In a small country there needs to be some rules as everything is so close together. It is not as clear cut as you suggested.
The 'pseudo-public' areas referred to in the article are signposted.
Why is that such an issue though? In the worst case, someone tells you it's private property and asks you to leave. Only if you refuse to leave do you commit an offence under English law.
Maybe. Another poster brought up the impact that having a lot of private land conditionally open to the public could reduce demand for actual public land, which leads to less places where certain behaviors (those that are allowed on public land but which are banned on the private land) can occur.
Imagine someone who built a bunch of private parks all over a city that were open to the public, to the extent there was no demand for any public parks, but who decides to add a clause that no group activities related to sexual orientation (parades, protests, rallies, etc.) were allowed (of any orientation, so there was no discrimination issues).
Though, perhaps the blame still lies on the whole city for not keeping their public parks.
In your scenario, you're no closer to MegaCorp than you would have been before the parks (because the land was all private anyway, apparently). Not that this matters; there's nothing dystopian about MegaCorp buying land to insulate itself from your protest. In a free society, you have the right to speak, and others have the right to avoid you.
The dystopian part is that as private corps build up psuedo-private squares it reduces demand by the people for actual public areas. Eventually you just end up with streets and nothing else being public, because the private landowners provide all the "public" pedestrian areas.
Even the streets are frequently psuedo-public. There are plenty of cities where you must have a resident permit in order to park on the street for more than a very limited time. If you don't "belong" in the neighborhood, you are not welcome.
The root of this issue is that cities maintenance departments dont have the funding and hence ability to maintain new spaces (despite increased populations) espsecially to a high standard. So they push it on private owners in perpetuity as part of the planning process.
Theres two ways to solve it better - the first is to ensure that the public is the owner, in which case we need to accept increased government spending on maintenance (the even worse alternative is no new open spaces because neither the public or private sectors will accept the ongoing cost).
The second is to ensure that the publics rights in privately owned places are unfettered. In which case there are liability issues to overcome legally (e.g. is the owner to blame if someone gets assaulted?) - the owners duty of care is a big reason for pushing undesirables out, even if that means the problems just move to proper public domain nearby. And there are also general maintenance issues - e.g. what happens when someone is destroying the high quality landscape or threatening to.
Your classic 'kids on skateboards' are a risk to both of the above (may cause wear on materials and also risk of accident) even if as a society we would normally accept this in a public place its hard for private owners to do so
Occasionally theres some other private policing arrangement too (eg the city hall london example above where they are trying to stop MPs being harranged as they walk in and out).
Its gets complex when you get into these issues. We also should seriously consider the disparity in quality and upkeep between these new spaces which often 'sell' a development but need expensive upkeep in perpetuity (even if privately owned this liability is usually passed from the original developer to some other body) and the reality of most public parks which are usually neglected, poorly designed and with much more basic materials. And along with this what kinds of public spaces we actually want and need as modern humans in cities
> Pseudo-public space – squares and parks that seem public but are actually owned by corporations – has quietly spread across cities worldwide. As the Guardian maps its full extent in London for the first time, Jack Shenker reports on a new culture of secrecy and control, where private security guards can remove you for protesting, taking photos ... or just looking scruffy
This is confusing. Why is the Guardian trying to make private property sound scary and oppressive? Why should I expect that I can use someone else's property however I like and without permission from the owner?
Because it's duplicitous on the part of the property owners, and it also probably isn't a welfare-maximizing use of space. Whenever I see a corporate campus with a huge manicured lawn, it raises my blood pressure.
There's nothing duplicitous. A private entity is providing a free service along with terms of use. Why should anyone think they're entitled to another person's property?
> it also probably isn't a welfare-maximizing use of space.
Probably not, but that doesn't make the property any less private. Anyway, it hardly sounds like the corporations' terms are unreasonable, or significantly worse for "welfare" than those of a public park.
There might be certain expectation in society that certain kind of property is public, which usually means, that you can use it within certain limits, even if you don't own it.
Often this is because the property would be owned by i.e. state/city, and that would provide citizens certain freedoms, such as freedom to gather on a public square.
I understand that many people might see a park and assume it's public because frequently parks are publicly commissioned, but that doesn't explain why I should feel afraid or oppressed. Even if I thought a park was public and then escorted away with the explanation that the park was private, I wouldn't (and shouldn't, contrary to the Guardian's implication) feel like my rights were infringed upon.
Well, in my country, there is this a "Freedom to roam" that guarantees me the ability to travel through private parcels (with some exemptions, i.e. you can walk through the middle of somebody's pasture, unless there are animals you could disturb). Same thing applies for forests (as long as I am not logging, or driving off-road).
If somebody would want to escort me from forest while I am foraging berries, or hiking or something, I would (according to our civil code, should) feel like my rights were infringed upon.
Based on this experience, I would like, if there is similar right given for things in cities that appear as public spaces, even if they are a privately owned parcels.
I understand that if you i.e. live in the US, this might see m weird, because the right of owner to restrict access to their land seems to be stronger there.
When liberty attaches to ownership and all property including the rented space your bed is sitting in now belongs to someone else it is scary and oppressive you just haven't noticed.
Yes, it's unnerving that your security is bound up in your relationships with the people and groups around you, but this is the bedrock of every successful society. Anyway, my point isn't "why is private property scary?", it's "why are privately-owned parks uniquely scary?".
>Whenever I see a corporate campus with a huge manicured lawn, it raises my blood pressure.
Obviously, a better use of the land would be a socialist wasteland. Looks a bit ugly, there's trash everywhere, an abandoned rotting car carcass or two, but at least it's owned by the proletariat, right, comrade?
It's rhetoric, but it illustrates a point. All of the objection is purely an emotional response to the "corporations are evil" cue. There's no actual substance.
There is a similar trend in Urban Design called Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design [1] (CPTED) great acronym, hard to remember and meaningless.
The gist is that you make a place so exposed and inhospitable, so uncomfortable that no-one will want to be there, thus ZERO crime! It is how to build in a natural panopticon to parks and buildings to maximize sight lines and exposure.
Most parks that we consider wonderful would have never been built under CPTED. They use all of the thought-crime rhetoric in their writings, Feng-Shui, community, etc except they do the opposite.
This reminds me of something from "Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed"[1], about Brazil's new capital [2].
The new order was "visually appealing" to the bureaucrats, with housing in one section, work in one section, government in the middle etc. A lot of vast open space made it so spontaneous markets & trading did not occur (due to enforced zoning and excessive sunlight instead of using shade from buildings), leading to a lower quality of life for its inhabitants.
Spiked cones on sidewalks and uncomfortable benches with narrow sets of bars making them almost useless. It's a big, brutal "F U" to the people, communities and the commonwealth.
FWIW, Anil Dash had a great talk relating privately-owned public spaces/parks (e.g. NYC's Zucotti Park / Occupy) to the state of the web in "The Web We Lost" (2013): https://youtu.be/9KKMnoTTHJk?t=3m40s
I believe that in most cases, these privately owned public spaces (POPS) are built and made publicly accessible in exchange for zoning floor area increases for the attached development. Public access can not be restricted on a whim.
236 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 230 ms ] threadI think they're great, because they're free and the alternative is paying $4 to sit in a Starbucks.
Of course when the weather is nice out you can go to a park.
http://www.nyc.gov/pops
Here's a site that lists the ones in NYC https://apops.mas.org/
(I don't have any first hand experience with these since I don't live near NYC)
Owners of privately-owned public spaces (POPS) need not delineate their property boundaries, or provide any kind of indication when someone may be crossing from a truly public space into a POPS. Owners of POPS may establish rules of acceptable conduct for their space, but are not required to publish them. The only way to discover what those rules are is by breaking one, at which time they may be enforced without prior warning, and with no due process or appeal. The rules may be changed at any time, for any reason, with no notice.
That system is so arbitrary and capricious, and so broken, that I can only conclude that it is entirely incompatible with liberal democracy. It is the very soul of plutocratic, pseudo-libertarian oligarchy.
How do you feel when you enter public (government) property, but they make available for you thousands of pages of by-laws that govern your behaviour? Is it oppressive?
Malls have no entry fee, but they often post their rules on their websites. I don't feel very oppressed by them, because I don't frequent malls much. I didn't even visit often back when they were popular. Places like Universal City Walk or Disney Springs in Orlando are actually like Hell for me, crowded, noisy, and commercial, and I am pretty uncomfortable with how the Reedy Creek Improvement District is like an independent fiefdom, and the acme of all tourist traps. It sometimes feels like you could be black-bagged and whisked away just for showing too much stress on your face and not having enough money in your pockets.
Yes, that's oppressive. And creepy. I don't like it when people look at me like I'm either an overflowing bag of cash to be drained or an unpleasant insect to be shooed away.
Rules for public land use are frequently organized by intent, and one does not need to read every last rule on every last page to enjoy any particular use. If you are just day-hiking, you don't need to read the parts about hunting or overnight camping. If you also want to camp or hunt, you can read those sections and not also the parts about cell tower sites or water rights. You also have the knowledge that if any rule for use of public land conflicts with your rights, it is void from the start, and if someone attempts to enforce it against you, you will likely eventually get some compensation.
But I have also read some of those thousands of pages of rules, and in some municipalities, yes, they are oppressive. In others, they are mostly reasonable. That also depends in part on the strictness and uniformity of enforcement. Policing for profit can make reasonable rules oppressive, and oppressive rules, laxly enforced, don't seem quite so bad when there is no real penalty for breaking them. In either case, the locals usually have some means by which to change the rules that they may disagree with, including loud and well-attended protest demonstrations.
The danger of POPS is that they replace some of the functions of truly public spaces, while leaving out one or more vital functions (like protest and free expression), then those public spaces wither and die, leaving people effectively unable to exercise the vital functions.
Given that e.g. large parts of the pedestrian routes along the Thames for example are private, there substantial stretches where you can't even stand and take pictures of the river where no part of said private property features in the picture, because the property owners have instructed their security to just blanket refuse all permission to take pictures.
(Source: Working in Canary Wharf on and off for 8 years)
You don't have public bid rules for government sales / purchases?
The places mentioned in the article (Granary Square, More London, Canary Wharf, etc.) were never public spaces.
They were predominately disused or abandoned industrial areas that have been developed to become vibrant and attractive places to live and work, creating entirely new 'public' spaces in the process.
They can just shrug and say "it's private land."
(I'm talking about cases where the gov sold public land to a private entity, not where a private entity just opened up their property)
On the other end of the spectrum, though, you will find plenty of examples of cultures - and nation states - where there is a historic assumption that the public good and/or liberty requires substantial restrictions on property rights, on the basis that land is a scarce resource and that while some property rights are necessary, or even desirable for the economic benefits it may bring, other such rights severely restricts the liberty of everyone else by depriving them of access, or actively harms society (e.g. most places place restrictions on carrying out various dangerous activities on your property without appropriate permissions).
For my part, the shock of moving to London (from Norway) where many parks have gates that are locked at night, was something I have still not quite gotten over - 17 years later. It feels oppressive, after being used to open spaces - most parks in Oslo have no gates or fences, and most of those that do have large gaps and any fencing is largely to block specific routes. Part of this is more public lands, part of it is a culture where fencing in semi-public private spaces is largely still seen as offensive restrictions on others freedom, helped by extensive rights of access ("freedom to roam") outside urban areas that gets people used to expect to be free to access open spaces.
To me the idea of liberty in a society with strict property rights makes a total mockery of liberty.
I believe that only through strong property protections can we experience liberty: when one's ownership in property is secure, then one may plan for the future. Conversely, when one's control of property is subject to the arbitrary whims of the state, then one may not plan for the future, and economic growth is not possible.
Many poor nations, for instance, have terrible land title systems, and the land may be taken from you by the local magistrate if you are not the proper color / religion / race or have not paid the proper bribes. Such is not a good environment in which to experience liberty. Sure, your empty field will always be open for the public to play football, but there will never be a factory in that field providing jobs and improving the general prosperity.
I won't attempt to tackle "the public good" or "actively harms society" here.
(I'm assuming that when you mention property that you mean "outside, unenclosed spaces." Do you also extend your view to the buildings on property? Offices? Private homes?)
In the US approximately 60% of households owned their home however of those most are owned by the bank. Only a steadily decreasing fraction are actually owned free and clear by those who reside there.
Most of the US is in fact divided among those who will be kicked out next month if they don't make their rent and a higher class of renter who will be kicked out several months later if he doesn't catch up his mortgage payments.
Both classes have little savings and may easily be a lost job away from homelessness.
Compare to the Nordic countries where e.g. it is actively illegal to e.g. fence in a privately owned forest most places, and barring restrictions on disturbing farm animals or ruining crops you can walk almost anywhere in rural areas, freely pick berries (outside of planted fields), mushrooms etc. even on private land, and even camp without needing to ask permission (but custom is to ask where it is convenient if you want to do so e.g. near a farm).
Norway (the others might too, but it's Norway I know about) also have strict legal restrictions on building near the sea and blocking access to beaches etc. to protect public access.
There is not a single country in the world today that offers you absolute property rights, because it actively harms those around you.
You are conflating the lack of absolute property rights with the other extreme.
> I won't attempt to tackle "the public good" or "actively harms society" here.
So in other words you constructed a strawman and didn't address the actual issue at all. The actual issue is the public good and the active harm to society and your neighbours that allowing anything near absolute property rights bring.
I know this system is broken - I firmly believe that if voting were able to make a difference, it would immediately be made illegal. That is the fight we must fight - that is the root cause of the problem.
It's much more complex than that. Every homeless person I've every offered to help has already rejected the systems in place to help them. Maybe they should have for various reasons. Reform and innovation in this kind of social work is sorely needed. But the whole story isn't that "society" just wants to give dirty people the boot.
The few genuine charities that offer help with no strings attached, and with sensitivity to potential unintended consequences, are frequently underfunded and subjected to frequent attacks by the powerful. For instance, the city might pass an ordinance criminalizing the act of giving away food gratis, if it was not prepared by trained personnel in a commercial kitchen with a current health inspection certificate, just to shut down a group that gives away sandwiches that were prepared in a church kitchen.
I don't think that "society" hates the homeless, but its self-appointed lords and masters sure seem to hate how they don't play the grossly unfair games that seem to have been set up just for them to lose. And there's my tinfoil hat, creeping back onto my head.
There is a vein of Puritan/Calvinist/Prosperity sadism running through the US. Adherents believe that those people are in the gutters because God is punishing their poor character with unfavorable circumstances. So in order to solve their financial problems, they must first accept that it is all 100% their own fault, and that random chance has no role in success or failure. People become rich only through hard work and public virtue, therefore poor people are all lazy degenerates. This twisted logic poisons public policy, because some rich people like to believe all their money makes them better than other people, and they spend a significant fraction of it on politics.
Those who genuinely believe in charity and "as you treat the least of you, so you treat me" may have greater numbers, but they have lesser funding, and therefore smaller political influence in the US. They can't seem to pass any public program to help people without someone amending it to punish the poor in some way for the sins made obvious by their financial condition. This leads to homeless rejecting official help.
From the outside, it just looks like institutional cruelty. I just cannot fathom the type of thinking that would spend thousands of dollars installing unnecessary armrests on park benches, just so that poor people derive less benefit from them. It is embarrassing for a supposedly advanced and modern society to have the human detritus of its public policies on display for all to see. But instead of fixing the broken policies, or accepting responsibility for those that were hurt, the evidence of brokenness is swept under the rug.
> There is a vein of Puritan/Calvinist/Prosperity sadism [...]
Where are you seeing this?
This is because I have overheard with my own ears a serious suggestion that it would be acceptable to vanish homeless people in the darkness of night and turn them into dog food, to be sold at a premium. Some people are just evil, delude themselves into thinking they are good, and they have far more money than a just world would ever allow them to touch. Maybe you don't hear that kind of thing often in places where the rich folks are mostly hippy-dippy liberals, but hearing it from even one pair of lips, without an iota of shame, is unsettling--like seeing one cockroach in your kitchen. What is being said when I'm not around to overhear it?
I also detect signs of it in written legislation and political discourse, particularly with regard to amending welfare programs to include work requirements or blanket consent to arbitrary searches by state officials. It's as though the default assumption is that recipients are out to cheat the system for a free ride, and spend all their benefits on illegal drugs.
I can't imagine how anyone could become so rotten and yet live, but from the anecdotal evidence, they do exist, and for bizarre and unfathomable reasons, their opinions count more than mine, even when we have the same number of votes to cast.
In the case of the personal anecdote, they had just finished replacing one $100k pedigreed lap dog--that had been run over--with another, when the d-bag refused to help his own nonagenarian mother with some of her bills, actually suggesting that she go on food stamps if she's having so much trouble.
Rich trash indeed.
Ironically, the unmitigated social problems that result from lacking basic social safety nets increase expenses many other places, including in healthcare, possibly by more than the programs would have cost. Instead of getting rehabilitation, an addict has to steal to feed their addiction, prompting more spending on police forces, plus fear and mistrust of others, and the addict uses a series of emergency room visits when things inevitably go badly.
You surely aren't saying it's as simple as "people with stuff hate the poor people".
It's literally everything else that they don't have.
I grew up in an American suburb. There was basically zero commons. Most places you go to socialize (eg: the mall) are privately owned.
To quote the article: >it’s a very Atlanticist model, seen primarily in North America
Especially in terms of actual use. People might not even realize that some little set aside green space is semi public, whereas municipalities like to advertise their green spaces.
In this way, a park or two that you can't have a picnic in isn't all that alarming to me. Town squares used to be partially about places for bottom-up speech and marketing. In that world, silencing the riff-raff in squares had serious social consequences. These days, much of it seems digital.
The analogy is especially apt because if you think of web/net commons actually replaces free physical assembly (rather than augmenting it), then you can be convinced to give up your freedom of web/net assembly when whatever next new digital shift comes along. (E.g., not terribly concerned about my arms stuck in the tarpit because my head is connected directly to the VR meshnet...)
edit: clarification another edit: typo
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/15/100-best-nonfi...
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Quartz
Also, the council may not have the funds to properly maintain the open space if it was handed to them. It makes commercial sense for operators to do landscape work themselves if that is something that matters to them. People want retail, housing developments or high end office blocks to be attractive and well maintained.
It's explicitly transactional, in consideration for the property owner providing and maintaining the space, they get to build XYZ. And as the spaces are typically adjacent to their properties, they are motivated to keep them well maintained.
The alternative seems to be that the developer build smaller, or not build at all, and provide not public space.
There is the obvious concept of the potential for abuse encompassing all spaces so you could conceivably not ever be allowed to walk outside without potentially being discriminated against, or utilizing artwork to convey disturbing messages to try to influence public opinion, however, this can be the cases for government owned lands in all countries as well, and it is their private land, and I find the idea of not allowing people or organizations to own private land just because the public who is sitting in the park created to be used by them are noticing its not owned by the government, as an immediate abuse of government power to intervene on weather companies can buy land, and furthermore, choosing to take away their rights to do so because they are creating public spaces for everyone and making them nicer, and its annoys the public who benefits from it, as opposed to the perceived threat that one day it could be abused. Everything that is currently legal can be potentially abused, it just so happens in this case its not at all, and turning abandoned dumps and warehouses into public parks, green spaces, open musuems, and hosting events for the public on them.
in NYC, many of the parks when I worked there were previously total dumps and havens for crime, entire areas of manhattan have been turned around and they have the following effects
1. free urban green space the government cant afford 2. a clustering of small businesses around parks who pop up and do very well catering to lunches and outdoor cafes, 3. immense number of otherwise unrecognized groups being supported such as fashion shows, concerts and other events companies choose to support, public ice skate arenas 4. paying otherwise unrecognized artists millions to install their artwork in one of the most coveted places in Manhattan, etc 5. Making urban places desireable places to live and not just work, which is im pretty sure what the goals are for progressive humanity
Furthermore, I've never personally observed people being removed for looking scruffy, and I think in general you are removed for harrassing people, which police would do anyways.
In the current area I used to live in, there are 28 parks. 27 of them are complete dumps and noone takes care of them, particularly the young activists in town. There is one nice gated park own privately by a private community, who takes care of it, and you must live in the nieghborhood to have a key. Given the rest of the city is ridden with crime, its a safe spot for families to take their kids, or a women to read in the park without fear of beign a victim.
Regardless, despite the 27 other parks which the local government has asked hippie acitivists to come in and help clean etc, they are fixated on the idea of the one private park and trying to make it public, without understanding that the only reason its nice and noticeable is because its privately maintained, and the only reason people want to hang out there is because its safe, which is also because its privately maintained. Instead of taking the concepts that make the park desireable, and putting in the work to show that any of the other 27 complete dump parks could also become desireable and safe for gentrified communities to inhabit, and then use that as proof of concept that this park can be public and safe as well, and benefit more people, it turns out thats more effort than they are willing to put in. They only want to take the one nice park that is, without any plan on how to make the park not turn into the other 27 which are basically abandoned places people are sacred to go so, and as a female I would never go to alone. The government is too broke to maintain them.
We should promulgate a principle that until the left can demonstrate success with public assets, they should not get more of them.
For example, I've been disheartened by some of the parks I've visited in Baltimore. There's trash everywhere and sometimes I wonder if the city even knows the park exists.
They have trash cans in the dog park but no one was collecting them. I had to flag down the trashmen a few days ago and ask them what needed to happen for them to get it. They thought the dog park was a locked area.
A lot of the nicer streets in the more neglected areas are nice because residents go out and pick up the trash. I've given people shit who I've seen littering in my neighborhood, but at the same time, there aren't trash cans on every corner for them to use.
What especially irritates me are smokers throwing their rubbish everywhere. Why is practically every smoker a full on retard?
But at the end of the day, US citizen always seem to agree when asked if taxes are too high and the government is wasteful, and that opinion does not correlate with actual taxation or spending. The result is the decay of public property.
A nice comparison that I recently came across, illustrating the last point: The government spends just about half as much on IT per office worker compared to the private sector.
Drug dealing and use, drinking on the street, prostitues loitering, homeless people begging, women being catcalled and harassed, groups of youths congregating, littering, etc. are all commonplace in truly public spaces.
Many of these 'pseudo-public spaces' (think Granary Square, More London, Canary Wharf) are enormously popular with families and businesspeople precisely because they have security personnel who do a good job of tackling these things.
1. Reduce taxes / enforcement of taxes on large corporations
2. De-fund and generally decrease the quality of public service
3. Shift the burden of responsibility for providing said services onto said large corporations, who now provide a facsimile of the commons, minus inconvenient concepts like civil rights (right to assemble, speech, etc).
4. Use people's growing discontent with public services to argue for lower taxes. Go back to 1 and repeat.
This is then propped up by a "Broken Britain" narrative like your own, which is, forgive the bluntness, tabloid-fueled bullshit. Despite the the government's diligent efforts to undermine public services, London remains one of the cleanest and cities on the planet, and is certainly doing better than at any point in its history.
> Drug dealing and use
Literally every day. There's a man who sits on the next doorstep that I call 'Mr Subtle' as he is continuously 'reading' a newspaper. He has many friends who stop by for a quick chat. Then they smoke drugs that he has sold them.
> homeless people begging
Every day. Also stealing from Primark, sleeping in tents on the street, pretending to fall in front of traffic, pretending to read maps then asking for change, etc.
Certainly different parts of London have different homeless populations, but Camden and central London are not great.
I'm puzzled by what kind of psyche underlies a statement like this. I'm sorry to frame it in these terms, but honestly it seems... evil to me. Do you not understand that for many people, sleeping on the street is last remaining alternative to death? Take away the ability to sleep on the street, and you are killing people. If that is your intention, there are faster and more humane ways to do it.
Or do you believe that that were it not for the myriad comforts of the streets, the homeless would simply go back to paying off their mortgages or at least crashing on friends' sofas? Because if that's what you believe, you're simply wrong. Homelessness is a last resort. (And no, the government services which one ought to be able to avail oneself of are no longer always available. Particularly if you are a working-age male, it is often virtually impossible to prove to a social worker that you are not "voluntarily homeless", which then disqualifies you from receiving help.)
I'd like to believe that nobody participating in this discussion is that malicious or that ignorant. If you can show me a third way, I'd genuinely appreciate it.
That sounds like a horrible way to grow up, and yes people on the streets do die from exposure. Presumably they also get infections that can kill them, get beaten to death, get in to fights over who stole whose lighter, etc.
In the London that I live in, the homeless are there for all sorts of reasons - poverty, mental illness, addiction, running away from a bad situation, and so on - and not all of these people will die if they are not on the streets. They might be in all sorts of worse (to them) situations - low paid menial job, mental institute, rehab, back home with abusive parents.
Most of the time, they have little choice. Or the alternative choice is worse. Forcing them off the street would not just be morally wrong, it would be largely ineffective. Unless you privatise the whole world.
The main issue that I see with private spaces is that it shifts the responsibility of low-level policing of the space from the public to security guards. Obviously the first people to come up against this will be the homeless, as they are most likely to be breaking whatever hidden rules these spaces have.
Anyway, I don't have the time to discuss this. Good luck with the infrastructure software, it looks well made.
Yes, apologies for building too many assumptions; I guess this is a bit of a hot-trigger issue for me. I've seen people genuinely believe that if one makes life sufficiently difficult for the homeless, they'll just go away. In London this has lead to appalling incidents like [1]. I thought that was where you were coming; I see now that it wasn't. Sorry again!
In any case, I haven't got time to discuss this either -- gotta get back to work!
1: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/police-seize-poss...
I've lived in various areas, currently a bit further out in Zone 3, which means I should add rampant fly tipping and unlicensed/uninsured/abandoned cars to the list.
Eliminating these nuisances from an area is a costly business. It requires round the clock security, extensive CCTV monitoring, constant maintenance and adherence to the "broken windows" philosophy.
It is essentially a luxury, which private property owners bestow upon their 'pseudo-public' spaces. The public would be outraged if councils sought the funding, through taxes, to apply the same to truly public spaces.
Canary Wharf is busy in the week because it's full of skyscrapers. But I live just round the corner from it, and it's dead in the evenings or at weekends unless there's a special event going on, despite the relative safety. Other public areas in the surrounding neighbourhoods tend to be a lot busier. And actually, there's a large group of young drug dealers that regularly hang out in the west area of the Canary Wharf development.
That said, the private security forces do indeed do a good job of keeping these areas safe, and free of threatening homeless people and such. Still debatable whether or not that's a thing we should be solving by privatising public spaces...
On the whole it would probably be cheaper just to have kept the revenue and made a park.
For the price of developing that infamous fighter jet, how many parks could be upkept for how long?
Not a citizen, but paying taxes, and I think that maaaaybe some savings could be made by not having a military force that's five times bigger than the next three combined. Maybe 2x is enough?
That said, I do appreciate that pax americana has been very beneficial overall. So maybe it's not as wasteful as it sometimes sounds.
I'm not saying I prefer private, but I understand how they could gain popularity if the city isn't doing it's part to keep up it's own areas. Your IT stat doesn't surprise me, and is definitely a good point.
Round Falls, while not an official park, is an open area along the Jones Falls trail that runs through Baltimore that is in complete disarray (see http://thebaltimorechop.com/2012/06/26/round-falls/). Riverside Park was also pretty dirty when I visited, though it has good reviews online, so maybe I went on an off day.
https://nycopendata.socrata.com/Housing-Development/Privatel...
(it's a MDB file of around 275K, so I imagine it just holds point data as opposed to full shapefiles)
One of the most well-known debates over the use of privately-owned public spaces was in 2011 when the Occupy Wall Street movement took over Zuccotti Park:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/20/opinion/zuccotti-park-and-...
The relevant part which describes how these spaces come with benefits to the developer, even as the developer is left to come up with "reasonable" rules:
> Among the better spaces is Zuccotti Park. The developer never received a floor-area bonus for the 26,000-square-foot park, although it did receive other valuable zoning concessions. The current owner, Brookfield Office Properties, voluntarily installed trees, seating, lighting and art over the last decade. (It also changed the space’s name from Liberty to Zuccotti Park, after John E. Zuccotti, one of its co-chairmen, creating a personal interest in the park’s quality.)
> Nevertheless, the events at Zuccotti Park highlight the continued inadequacy of the laws regarding privately owned public spaces. Other than the requirement that this space remain open 24 hours a day, the owners were left to promulgate their own rules; the only limit is that they be “reasonable.”
> Until last month, Brookfield’s rules barred skateboarding, in-line skating and bicycling, but said nothing about long-term occupation by any group. New rules, announced Oct. 13, permit passive recreation only and prohibit things like camping and lying down on the ground or benches if it interferes with others. The rules remain unenforced; no one is sure what will happen next.
http://www.startribune.com/man-arrested-in-st-paul-skyway-su...
A father waiting to pick up his kids from day care sits in an ambiguously public-ish place. He refuses when an employee asks him to leave. Then the police arrive.
At that point he voluntarily gets up and starts walking away, but the cop follows him and continues pestering him to identify himself, etc.
It doesn't end well. I'm sure you can guess what he looks like.
It's an unpleasant story, but the ending seems OK.
Cops play the role of corporate lackey (like they do everywhere, in the USA and everywhere else), treat citizen badly, with probable significant racist component, and end up shooting him with a taser and arresting him. All bad so far.
But then he sues, and they settle for $100,000.00.
That's pretty much how that story should end.
Not really. The police decided to act like corporate lackeys and TAX PAYERS paid a $40,000 settlement to a person who was physically injured by their misconduct. There are several ways this story should end that are not that
1) the settlement should not cost the tax payers money
2) the cops, or at least the property owner, should pay the settlement
3) those officers should not be officers anymore AND they should be held to some level of personal responsibility for their actions
4) there should be consequences for the police brutally attacking someone who asserts their (legal in MN) right not to identify themselves to police officers
Second, if officers are forced to seek out indemnification on the open market these policies will be underwritten. Bad risks will be forced off the job through unaffordable policies. Whereas blanket indemnification by the taxpayer has no selection effect at all.
Maybe market magic would be more efficient, I doubt that in practice it would particularly show up.
I also wonder if cutting the above market clearing compensation would come for free, or if there are real reasons for it.
Edit to add: also, notice that you've addressed something different than what I said; you argue that it could cost less, not that the public would avoid paying.
Here's a law review article that reports the results of a national study on police officer indemnification: http://www.nyulawreview.org/sites/default/files/pdf/NYULawRe...
My study reveals that police officers are virtually always indemnified: During the study period, governments paid approximately 99.98% of the dollars that plaintiffs recovered in lawsuits alleging civil rights violations by law enforcement. Law enforcement officers in my study never satisfied a punitive damages award entered against them and almost never contributed anything to settlements or judgments—even when indemnification was prohibited by law or policy, and even when officers were disciplined, terminated, or prosecuted for their conduct.
In what percentage of cases would you guess that automobile insurance premiums rise where a driver is found liable for an incident and the insurance company is forced to pay out?
So sure, there's a good possibility that requiring police to carry individual liability insurance would lower costs. The public would still ultimately fund the premiums on that insurance.
What would happen if the cop responsible for the act could not cover the settlement money ?
The one affected by brutality would be doubly screwed.
The Police as a whole should be held accountable, and victims should be ensured compensation, they are by all accounts being brutalized by the state, and the state is run with taxpayers money.
Agreeing with the rest though.
Malpractice insurance?
This insures that the city who is guilty of hiring the miscreant ends up with the onerous duty of collection and the victim is compensated hastily.
What happens to normal mortals when they can't pay their debts. Are policemen really so much above the law that they don't have to pay their debts either?
Then you seize their property and sell it until there's enough to cover the settlement. Just like any other debtor. If they don't have enough property, you seize portions of their income.
Should a debt ordered by a court due to deliberately taking actions that harm another be treated differently than a debt occurred through a consensual transaction? If so, could the courts be given more power to seize resources (not just money) from the one owing the debt?
There are a lot of things that I would consider immoral to do to recover a debt that results from a consensual transactions that I wouldn't view as immoral to do to recover a debt incurred by criminal actions.
yes. that. that seems so obvious, but it also never seems to be the way things actually play out.
Officers Lori Hayne, Michael Johnson and Bruce Schmidt, who not only used excessive force but also perjured themselves in their official reports, paid not one penny of that settlement, faced no criminal charges, and didn't even have any adverse employment consequences.
So long as we refuse to hold police officers responsible for their actions they will continue to act as though they are above the law. Because they are.
But in a legitimate democracy, the citizenry cannot be "victimized" by "public servants that don't serve them".
If you hire some servants, and those servants don't serve you, and you don't get some new servants... whose fault is that?
But you're right on the essential point: the democratically elected government (== citizenry) involved here is paying an arguably reasonable price, but the individuals responsible probably are not.
so who's fault is that? usually not the victim. or at least the most direct victim, since obviously, society as a whole is hurt by this sort of thing (just not as much as the person who's wrongly harassed/injured/killed by the cops).
but maybe your point stands, because is that really a "legitimate democracy"?
Restitution, legally, covers monetary losses. It should not be taken to mean that all is well when the bills are paid. You can't pay away a black eye.
Maybe a better ending would move the needle at least slightly in favor of preventing this kind of thing in the future.
Among several things that ought to happen in an ideal world, perhaps we could give non-lawyers clarity on what is a public or private space: If a corporate tenant wants to regulate a private space this way, it has to clearly separate it from the public with some specification of doors, gates, etc. Otherwise, it will be considered public in a conflict like this one.
Homeless?
http://stmedia.stimg.co/08_473691_TASED082914_30709587.JPG?w...
'Guess' means not looking at the photo.
Until you said that I was picturing a white person. Maybe there is a natural tendency for people to picture themselves in the shoes of the story.
There is definitely a stereotype that police pick on African-americans more. But they also pick on a lot of all of people in general and there are way more white people in the USA, so I don't immediately assume that a person being picked on by police is black. There is also the stereotype that blacks are not attentive fathers, so the setting (picking a kid up at daycare), would have at least canceled out the police stereotype IMO. I'd be surprised if most people had the same assumption about skin color that you had.
Either way, I think calling attention to his skin color in the way you did is petty and rude.
But, why do you think it's rude?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/01/10/...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/10/27/polic...
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-cops-rac...
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/black-people-...
Non preset African american fathers also stems from reality, just like the police stereotype. The Washington post source you gave actually did not dispute the absent fatherhood statistics - the article was about explaining why.
in the USA, 18% of non-Hispanic white fathers do not live with their children compared to 30% of hispanics, and 42% of blacks.
Rephrased from here: "Non-Hispanic white men aged 15–44 had the largest difference between those with coresidential children (37%) and those with noncoresidential children (8.2%). The difference was smallest among non-Hispanic black men, with 33% having coresidential children and 24% having noncoresidential children. Among Hispanic men, more than twice as many had coresidential children (44%) than had noncoresidential children (18%)."
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr071.pdf
Now to the mythology of the black male dereliction as dads: While it is true that black parents are less likely to marry before a child is born, it is not true that black fathers suffer a pathology of neglect. In fact, a C.D.C. report issued in December 2013 found that black fathers were the most involved with their children daily, on a number of measures, of any other group of fathers — and in many cases, that was among fathers who didn’t live with their children, as well as those who did.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/08/opinion/charles-blow-blac...
The one statistic it gave that disputes for more daily activity was for children under age 5, for certain activities, and only for black fathers that live with their children - not on the whole.
Very bad cherry picking and bad reporting.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr071.pdf
This line was not in the reply I got by email (via HN Replies). I'm glad I caught it here because it illuminates a core problem with these conversations about policing and race.
I did not at all mean or knowingly suggest that the individual officers are bad people who thought bad things about this man because of his race -- i.e., these bad racist officers need to be removed and replaced with good non-racist officers, if any such unicorns exist.
But I understand why it might seem that way to family, friends and other defenders of police because so many critiques of policing do demonize them personally.
I wasn't trying to make this point, but good people acting in concert can easily end up behaving very badly, and even bring out the worst of human nature and its often false, reflexive assumptions about others. This ought to be particularly true for police, who confront the worst of humanity more than the rest of us.
You may disagree that black Americans are disproportionately victimized in this way by the police or that this played into what happened here, but that argument is not a personal one.
>free wi-fi and big screens showing summer sport, as well as activities like table tennis, climbing walls and outdoor gyms
I would even pay for a space like that, it sounds really nice.
The annual subscriptions generally aren't that high although they do tend to be linked to living in nearby properties (with some degree of flexibility).
The public library in my town sits on land that is part of a larger office park. The green space behind it is pseudo-public with walking/biking trails and ponds. I had to laugh at the rules posted opposite the library exit. Among them was a prohibition on the distribution of literature.
http://law.justia.com/constitution/us/amendment-01/54-quasi-...
This is a lot better than companies fencing off huge swathes of land so you need to meander around their properties.
I really like recent development in my hometown (Warsaw) where you can walk around new buildings, sit on a bench and watch a fountain. Usually the local government doesn't have a budget to stick those facilities everywhere.
"insidious creep" implies that land that was previously public has become pseudo-public. But the examples cited seem to be land that was previously private has become pseudo-public. That just doesn't seem so dystopian to me.
The entire system of private property is terrible and I hope it will be abolished within my lifetime.
Would you be okay with having random people just entering your house, sleeping in your bed, using your toothbrush and then taking your computer on the way out?
Obvious straw-man, but my point is: There's got to be _some portion_ of the system of private property that you agree with on some level. You might for instance disagree with the way private property is distributed, or how access to it is made difficult for some groups, or how we value it more than public property. You might be in favor of more taxation, or of “fairer” taxation (whatever that actually entails would be hard for everyone to agree with) or of revamped eminent domain laws, but I find it really hard to believe that you'd hope for the entire system of private property to be abolished within your lifetime.
It's private land, the police have no role. People are being harassed by private security companies.
Why is that such an issue though? In the worst case, someone tells you it's private property and asks you to leave. Only if you refuse to leave do you commit an offence under English law.
And even that's only a civil, not criminal, offence.
I'm not a fan of Livingstone, but this is pretty good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TuxOUGV6hE
Imagine someone who built a bunch of private parks all over a city that were open to the public, to the extent there was no demand for any public parks, but who decides to add a clause that no group activities related to sexual orientation (parades, protests, rallies, etc.) were allowed (of any orientation, so there was no discrimination issues).
Though, perhaps the blame still lies on the whole city for not keeping their public parks.
Theres two ways to solve it better - the first is to ensure that the public is the owner, in which case we need to accept increased government spending on maintenance (the even worse alternative is no new open spaces because neither the public or private sectors will accept the ongoing cost).
The second is to ensure that the publics rights in privately owned places are unfettered. In which case there are liability issues to overcome legally (e.g. is the owner to blame if someone gets assaulted?) - the owners duty of care is a big reason for pushing undesirables out, even if that means the problems just move to proper public domain nearby. And there are also general maintenance issues - e.g. what happens when someone is destroying the high quality landscape or threatening to.
Your classic 'kids on skateboards' are a risk to both of the above (may cause wear on materials and also risk of accident) even if as a society we would normally accept this in a public place its hard for private owners to do so
Occasionally theres some other private policing arrangement too (eg the city hall london example above where they are trying to stop MPs being harranged as they walk in and out).
Its gets complex when you get into these issues. We also should seriously consider the disparity in quality and upkeep between these new spaces which often 'sell' a development but need expensive upkeep in perpetuity (even if privately owned this liability is usually passed from the original developer to some other body) and the reality of most public parks which are usually neglected, poorly designed and with much more basic materials. And along with this what kinds of public spaces we actually want and need as modern humans in cities
This is confusing. Why is the Guardian trying to make private property sound scary and oppressive? Why should I expect that I can use someone else's property however I like and without permission from the owner?
> it also probably isn't a welfare-maximizing use of space.
Probably not, but that doesn't make the property any less private. Anyway, it hardly sounds like the corporations' terms are unreasonable, or significantly worse for "welfare" than those of a public park.
Often this is because the property would be owned by i.e. state/city, and that would provide citizens certain freedoms, such as freedom to gather on a public square.
If somebody would want to escort me from forest while I am foraging berries, or hiking or something, I would (according to our civil code, should) feel like my rights were infringed upon.
Based on this experience, I would like, if there is similar right given for things in cities that appear as public spaces, even if they are a privately owned parcels.
I understand that if you i.e. live in the US, this might see m weird, because the right of owner to restrict access to their land seems to be stronger there.
Obviously, a better use of the land would be a socialist wasteland. Looks a bit ugly, there's trash everywhere, an abandoned rotting car carcass or two, but at least it's owned by the proletariat, right, comrade?
There's nothing socialist implied here either. This is classic welfare economics.
The gist is that you make a place so exposed and inhospitable, so uncomfortable that no-one will want to be there, thus ZERO crime! It is how to build in a natural panopticon to parks and buildings to maximize sight lines and exposure.
Most parks that we consider wonderful would have never been built under CPTED. They use all of the thought-crime rhetoric in their writings, Feng-Shui, community, etc except they do the opposite.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_prevention_through_envir...
The new order was "visually appealing" to the bureaucrats, with housing in one section, work in one section, government in the middle etc. A lot of vast open space made it so spontaneous markets & trading did not occur (due to enforced zoning and excessive sunlight instead of using shade from buildings), leading to a lower quality of life for its inhabitants.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-like-State-Certain-Condition/d... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bras%C3%ADlia
https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_sub...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camden_bench
Although I can't come up with a clear bridge, I feel like the monobloc chair is also relevant to this discussion somehow:
https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/bn5e4m/white-plastic-chai...
You don't have to ask why.
An interesting map of regulations on actual public space in London: http://www.bannedinlondon.co.uk/map.html