Beyond public and private: business improvement districts don't fit our ordinary categories.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: Columns

WALK DOWN CHARLES Street, Howard Street, or Park Avenue in downtown Baltimore, and you'll see signs announcing that, "for your safety," the block is "a Video Recorded Area." Each sign bears the logo of the Video Patrol, and each is located just a few feet below an actual camera, diligently surveilling everything that passes. There are 48 such electronic observers in this army, and more will be added soon.

There are people who don't mind government cameras but object to such devices on private property, where the owners face fewer legal limits on what they can do with the images. There are people who don't mind private video surveillance but object to cameras in the hands of the government, which might be interested in stopping much more than vandalism and theft.

Yet these eyes don't fit neatly into either category. They are operated and substantially funded by a group called the Downtown Partnership, a nonprofit corporation that administers the Downtown Management District. The latter is a business improvement district, or BID, a relatively new form of social organization that is alternately praised as a form of decentralized self-help and damned as a miniature model of the unaccountable corporate state.

There are over 1,000 BIDs scattered throughout the United States. While some cities try to establish a business-friendly environment by cutting local taxes, BIDS invert the formula: Property owners pay extra taxes and in exchange receive extra services. The typical district pays to clean up trash, beef up security, renovate infrastructure, and advertise the district's amenities; in different places they have done everything from putting up Christmas lights to installing wireless Internet access to lobbying for stricter porn laws. In some states, it's theoretically possible for a city to create a BID without consulting the enterprises that exist there and then to micromanage everything the body does. In practice, though, one is created when a substantial number of property owners asks for it; once established, it generally enjoys a lot of leeway to do as it pleases.

In other words: BIDS aren't really voluntary, but they're a lot more consensual than most forms of public administration. And they aren't really governments, but they're a lot more autonomous than most civic associations.

Writing in the Columbia Law Review in 1999, Columbia law professor Richard Briffault observes that business improvement districts, frequently regarded as a form...