This article will be published in edited form in American Outlook(Hudson Institute,Winter 2001):

Making Compassionate Conservatism Concrete

by George W. Liebmann

The advent of a new administration and the creation of an
Office of Faith Based and Community Services has given hope to
those concerned with the withering of civil society and the
growth of ever-larger public and private bureaucracies. If this
initiative is to be effective, there is need for clear-
sightedness in its implementation.

The administration"s program appears centered on two devices:
expanded federal charitable tax credits and greater use of faith-
based organizations as government contractors. These are both
necessary and long-overdue measures. Their limitations, however,
must be understood.

Expanded charitable deductions will benefit, in an
indiscriminate way, widely varied existing nonprofits. Such
credits will not by themselves create new mechanisms of civic
cooperation.

Expanded contracting out to nonprofits is a retail rather
than wholesale form of activity, difficult to bring up to scale
in the life of a single administration unless concrete objectives
are defined.

Both initiatives run the risk of being caught up in the
'culture wars'. These seem new, and have certainly been
aggrevated in recent years by the Supreme Court's abortion
decisions, but in reality the conflict between cosmopolitans and
fundammentalists is as old as the Republic. Traditionally it was
accomodated by allowing the contending factions local
sovereignity in separate geographic spheres. The weakness of
French government, General de Gaulle recognized, was that
"threats from outside have induced {it} to centralize its
administration to the utmost, thus making it ipso facto the
target of every grievance."

If the new initiatives are to make a difference, they must
seek to generate new neighborhood secular institutions, as well
as explicitly faith-based ones. The fact of local control will go
a long way to insure that in their functioning the nonprofit
groupings will not outrage the sensibilities of religious
belivers. This essay is an effort to focus future efforts in
areas of greatest promise, where expansion of the voluntary
sector is most needed and feasible.

Robert H. Nelson has suggested that "If [residential
community associations] were to become the prevailing mode of
social organization for the local community, this development
could be as important as the adoption in the [nineteenth-century]
United States of the private corporate form for business
property." Even smaller entities than municipalities have a role
to play now, in providing or contracting out for labor-intensive
social services which collectively may account for a large part
of the national product in a service economy--police patrol, day
care, care of the elderly, elementary and much secondary
education, local street maintenance and governance, neighborhood
regulation of small shops and accessory apartments, and block
associations to cooperatively remove urban blight. This essay is
thus a call for re-creation of an earlier era of municipal and
submunicipal creativity; a re-creation that can combat the
dangers of centralization and the withering of civil society that
Tocqueville warned against.

As the Secretary of the British National Association of
Parish Councils observed: "Our towns are declining into a
characterless jumble of compromises with the traffic. Children
still play on the pavements while their mothers go to work. Old
people still live in lonely resignation. This multiplicity of
problems of happiness is terribly important."

Old age clubs
When the elderly are discussed in current American politics,
it is as passive recipients of government bounty, in the form of
social security, ERISA benefits, medicare, and medicaid. The
'progressive' position is entirely defensive in character:
variations on the theme "don't let them take it away."
But it is possible to do better than this, as other countries
have recognized. New neighborhood institutions hold the promise
of less impersonal as well as more economical services, and a
renewed concern with fraternity as well as equality with respect
to a sector of the population conspicuous in the United States
for its social isolation. The present writer has suggested
elsewhere that it is no longer appropriate, if it ever was, to
have land use regulations that zone the elderly into the next
county, and that the promotion of accessory apartments and
'granny flats' may give the forgotten 'babushka' a new social
function. It is here also worth emphasizing that the old should
have a role, not only in care of the young, but in care of each
other.
The elderly tend to be persons of limited mobility. This is
particularly true of the portion of the elderly most in need of
care. Because most old or infirm people are ill or immobile only
a portion of the time, and are in need of constructive activity,
considerable scope exists for organizing the delivery of many
types of social service by the use of mutual aid groups. Among
services that can be thus organized are meals on wheels ,
domestic cleaning and local transportation, and services designed
to periodically check on the health and welfare of the infirm and
to provide companionship. These can provide a means of avoiding,
or at least drastically postponing, the need for highly expensive
institutionalization.
The Japanese have carried this approach further than any
other country.
These changes were a response to felt need: an unusual
graying of the population resulting from Japan's low wartime and
postwar birth rate. Subsequent improvements in life expectancy
have caused some to estimate that the proportion of aged in Japan
may go as high as 24% by 2025.At the same time, Japan has been
beset by many of the same disintegrating influences on family
structure as the west, including greater mobility, a rising
divorce rate, and the large-scale entry of women into the labor
force.
The Japanese system has had two major components: use of
volunteer workers organized on a neighborhood basis and the
organization of Old Age Clubs for mutual assistance. Government
response to the projected problem also has included curtailments
in health care expenditures designed to increase the already high
savings rate and efforts to affirmatively promote the extended
family and neighborhood institutions. The elderly must now bear a
portion of the cost of hospitalization. Tax credits are allowed
to family members caring for the elderly. The government actively
promotes "a land policy aimed at pressing for three family
generations to live in the same place or for family members to
live within easy reach," and provides government loans for home
remodelling in order that an elderly person may join the
household. Similar policies have been pursued in the allocation
of public housing in Singapore, which gives "priority for nearby
flats for members of the same family, to preserve the extended
family structure, thereby ensuring care for the elderly."
The basic premise of Japanese policy toward the elderly is
that they "are expected to provide for themselves",with the aid
of family members. Government administrators have built upon two
preexisting institutions: the voluntary welfare worker, or
minsei-iin, who numbered about 15,000 by 1930, and old age clubs,
a development of the 1950's.

As late as 1988, a five-country study revealed that while
only 3% of Americans over the age of 60 wanted to live with their
children, 58% of the Japanese expected to do so. For this reason,
nursing home care, except for very short stays in acute cases for
people without relatives, is little developed in Japan and recent
government spending has focused on day care centers and home
health services. As of 1980, 70% of persons over the age of 60
lived with children, as against 28% in the U.S. and 42% in
Britain.
Under the Law Concerning Volunteer Workers, minsei-iin are
appointed for three-year terms, and are assigned to separate
districts, where their task is to identify those in need of
welfare services and to promote and foster community
organizations. The volunteers typically call on elderly people
and inquire of neighborhood organizations and storekeepers to
identify those who have problems, and remind the elderly of the
availability of free annual medical examinations and x-rays. They
arrange for attendance at day centres, and for home health care
and other benefits.
Old age clubs are organized by the minsei-iin to create
networks of friends who can visit each other when someone is
sick, call a doctor in time of need, and run errands. The
involvement of the elderly in club activities also provides
respites for younger caretakers. Minsei-iin receive no
compensation other than reimbursement of expenses, but they are
regarded as civic dignitaries and treated as such. Typically they
are women in their fifties.
The old age clubs, or roojinkai, have been fostered as a
matter of government policy. The percentage of persons over the
age of 60 participating in them is said to have increased from
12.8% in 1962 to 47.2% in 1973. Among their functions are the
organization of trips, social events, and hobby clubs, the
maintainance of community rooms, lobbying for local improvements
such as changes in bus routes, and organizing the receipt of
certain city health services, such as free medical massages,
quarterly health classes at which the elderly are instructed in
diet and exercise and taught to measure blood pressure, and above
all mutual aid, particularly to those who are ill. A similar
organization of mutual aid groups at block level using social
workers was carried out as a matter of government policy in Hong
Kong, the number of mutual aid committees increasing from 1214 to
3132 between 1973 and 1980.
Because the minsei-iin are volunteers and there are few
professional social workers and because the old age clubs are not
precluded from engaging in neighborhood advocacy, the system is
not one involving rigid top-down government control. Old age
clubs receive approximately 60% of their financial support from
membership dues and contributions, roughly 20% from neighborhood
associations, and roughly 20% from the city,the amounts provided
by government are exceedingly modest, perhaps $10 per member. Yet
the availability of this modest subsidy was a large inducement to
the expansion of old age clubs in the 1960's and 1970's. The quid
pro quo for the subsidies was the conversion of the clubs from
purely recreational entities to organizations providing health
and education classes.

It would be difficult, given present Western rates of female
labor force participation, to recruit a comparable cadre of
volunteers, or to give them meaningful authority and honorific
positions where they are being supervised by a large social work
profession. However, it could and should be government policy to
recruit part-time assistants through the use of modest stipends
and to foster the self-organization of old-age clubs. This might
be fostered in two ways 1) by widespread distribution, to
millions of elderly, of guides to organization of such
organizations, including samples of by-laws, lists of possible
activities, and listings of government and private organizations
in a position to provide further resources to interested clubs,
particularly those relating to health maintainance and home care
and 2) by providing a very small tax deduction or credit for the
first $50 or $100 in dues paid such organizations. The cost of
this would be extremely modest. Assuming 30 million elderly, 12
million of whom participated in clubs, a $50 deduction in the
United States would cost about $240 million, but would do much to
foster organizations of great social value.

Playgroups
Observers of a series of carefully orchestrated White House
conferences will have gained the impression that the only road to
progress for pre-school children is found in central or state
government provision of institutional day care, a cause that has
its partisans among feminists and public employee unions. Both
these interest groups contemplate with equanimity a condition in
which 55% of mothers--as against 31% in 1970--enter the work
force while their children are still under a year old. American
political rhetoric on this issue has been dominated by demands
for emulation of the French or Swedish systems of creches and day
care, although Professor Barbara Babcock, a promoter of the
Swedish system, has conceded that its costs are such that the
resulting taxation gives mothers no choice but to follow the
feminist agenda by entering the workforce: they must be 'forced
to be free.' Although promoters of this agenda express concern
for the quality of care of children of the poor, it is noteworthy
that the percentage of female labor force participation is
highest among the professional classes. A reaction against their
demands has set in, manifesting itself in the 1990 legislation
providing tax credits for caretakers of small children and the
more recent family tax credit, which the Bush administration
proposes to expand from $500 to $1000.

Even a $1000 credit, spread over all children up to the age
of 18, is insufficient to make much of a difference in the care
of pre-school children, though it does limit discrimination
against families where the mother remains in the home. Recent
Norwegian legislation, successfully sponsored by a minority
government led by Kjell Bondevik of the Christian Peoples' Party,
provided a greater child tax credit for children under the age of
five, of a size which makes it possible for mothers to leave the
work force or work part-time during what one child psychiatrist
has referred to as "The Magic Years."
Here also there is a middle way through neighborhood
organization between those demanding expanded government programs
and those trusting to undisturbed private ordering. Preschool
children are another local and immobile group. The use of small,
highly local entitities to deliver services to them is feasible.
In Britain, pre-school playgroups, voluntary agencies receiving
small amounts of central government or local assistance, provide
services to about 40% of 3 and 4 year-olds. Once again, we are
confronted with an ordinary market good in the rendition of which
neighborhood associations may have some competitive advantages:
preexisting means of communication among neighbors (newsletters,
mailing lists), control of physical facilities that are possible
meetingplaces, knowledge of their personnel and confidence in
their mode of governance. The alleged lack of supply of such
goods exists only because of an exceptionally rapid change in
demand, fueled by changing demography and mores, including an
explosion of single-parent families and new vocational
expectations on the part of women. The removal of regulatory and
information barriers to cooperative forms of provision is a more
appropriate role for government than efforts to provide monopoly
or near-monopoly state services either by alteration of the
compulsory education age or through increased taxation to supply
private day care for two-earner families.
In 1961, the British National Association of Pre-School
Playgroups (now the Pre-School Learning Alliance) was formed by
private initiative, a letter from an affected mother, Belle
Tutaev, to the Manchester Guardian soliciting the cooperation of
others similarly situated.

Impetus was given to the expansion of nursery education by
the Plowden Report, Children and Their Primary Schools in 1968.
This recommended replacement of the policy discouraging nursery
education which had prevailed since 1933 except in wartime with a
policy favoring the establishment of half day nursery groups:
"our evidence is that it is generally undesirable, except to
prevent a greater evil, to separate mother and child for a whole
day in the nursery." Under this principle, not more than 15% of
nursery places would be full-time in nature, and in their
allocation "mothers who cannot satisfy the authority that they
have exceptionally good reasons for working should have low
priority." Charges for nurseries were recommended by an eight -
member minority including the chairman to prevent "injustices
between parents who do not choose to make use of nursery schools
and those who do." The Report recommended that playgroups be
assisted as an interim measure and that the Department of
Education inspect them and approve their staff training. Lady
Plowden was President of the PPA in 1972, declaring: "it is time
for those who are planning... nursery expansion to look at the
achievments of the playgroup movement."
A lone dissent by Mrs. M. Bannister recommended the policy
which was ultimately adopted for reasons of cost. She criticized
nursery education as disrupting the mother,child and sibling
relationship" and urged that playgroups rather than nurseries be
encouraged except in "educational priority areas". The provision
of large numbers of nursery teachers would divert talent from the
nursing and teaching professions at a time when the pool of
available single women was declining. Concluding, she declared
that nursery education "does little to enable mothers to
participate in the early school experiences of their children.
The mothers' loneliness and boredom are also major social
problems which play centres and groups might help to solve".


Total playgroup enrollment exceeded 800,000 in 1994.
Approximately 230,000 of the children attending playgroups were
from families whose incomes derived from state benefits, a result
made possible by low playgroup fees. Only about one-third of
playgroups (but three-fourths of those in London) received
external funding, this funding amounting to about 10% of the
budgets of the groups receiving it, or less than five percent of
the national expenditure by the groups, which totalled
approximately L250 million. The PPA offered a
foundation course of 120 hours with approximately 8200 students
annually for playleaders stressing child development,educational
play, and group organization, and awarding an attendance
certificate but not giving examinations. Shorter couses of from
10 to 25 hours were given to approximately 30,000 parents
annually. More elaborate courses of from 40 to 240 hours,
followed by some local civil service examinations, were provided
to about 1200 group organizers.

The annual cost of ten sessions per week in a playgroup was
estimated at L420 per year in 1987, as against L1039 in a
nursery class and L1500 in nursery school.

The movement has spread to several other countries,
including The Netherlands, where playgroups for two and three
year olds in 1986 enrolled 132,520 children in 3,313 playgroups,
or 38% of the relevant population, and Ireland, where it is
estimated that playgroup participants number about 20,000 in
about 1,500 groups, 185 of them Gaelic-speaking, and enroll about
15% of the relevant cohort. The Dutch system, unlike the
British, is heavily subsidized by the government. The 1989 New
Zealand budget provided for vouchers for nursery care, usable at
playgroups.Similar mechnanisms for cooperative day care known
as anganwadi have been created as a matter of government policy
in India. Even in Sweden, where state nursery provision is
highly developed, recent years have seen the "emergence of
parental child care cooperatives which by the end of 1992
involved about 25,000 children or some 6% of all child care
amenities. This type of care emerged in response to a shortage of
child care amenities and also because parents wanted to have a
say in the organization of child care. Similar user cooperatives
mainly in caring services for the elderly and disabled are now
growing up in many municipalities."
Day care, and particularly cooperative day care, is a civic
amenity which lends itself to organization at the sub-local level
and which is likely to call forth the amount of resident energy
necessary to become effective It is significant that a recent
study negatively assessing the amount of civic energy generated
by covenant-created village boards in a 'new town' has identified
day care as the primary area in which such associations have been
active. Once again, this is a service which lends itself either
to voucher funding, or funding through a central government tax
credit, as already partially provided for in the United States
and more adequately provided for in Norway. The internal
governance of playgroups is provided for by model by-laws issued
by the PPA and its American analogues; there is no reason for the
groups to be attached to local or sub-local governments; they
probably function best as free-standing groups, with the
government role confined to vouchers and subsidies and publicity
to facilitate organization.

Probation
In today's America, supervision of probationers and parolees
is carried on by harried bureaucrats, employees of a state or
national government. Yet in underdeveloped countries, probation
services have sometimes placed offenders under the care of
traditional elders or village leaders.
In developed countries, extensive use has at times been made
of citizen volunteers as probation officers, who in earlier times
were frequently clergymen. In Britain, probation was originally
provided for by the Probation of First Offenders Act,1887 enacted
at the instance of police court missionaries. By 1922, there were
784 volunteer workers. A Departmental Committee reporting in that
year recommended that they be superseded by a professional
service, which was accomplished by the Criminal Justice Act,
1925. Later, a reaction set in against complete
bureaucratization of the service. The reintroduction of
volunteers followed the Reading report in 1967. By 1978,
volunteers were being more widely used; their expanded use was
promoted by the Home Office in 1984 and 1991. As of 1980,
volunteers were being used in all regions of the British
probation service and numbered more than 5,000. In 1985, a survey
indicated that there was approximately one volunteer for each
probation officer in the British service. About 56% of volunteers
were women. More recently, the Conservative Government, instead
of pursuing the devolution of probation to church and community
groups and parish councils, has entertained proposals for the
'contracting out' of probation to private sector managers.
The British and American use of probation volunteers is
limited compared to that in other countries, including Denmark
(194 officers, 1000 volunteers,supervising 45% of the
caseload); Austria (189 officers, 579 volunteers, supervising
25% of the caseload), Sweden, and Japan. "In Sweden, for
example, Becker and Hjellemo (1976) reported an average of 92
clients and 48 volunteers for each probation officer,; [another
study indicates that 9000 volunteers handle 75% of the
caseload] and Hess (1970) described the Japanese system where
the average field officer's main responsibilities surrounded
coordinating the work of approximately 65 volunteers each working
with about four clients!", there being in all more than 56,000
volunteers. In France, there is less use of volunteers (476
officers and 770 volunteers, but institutions may serve as
volunteers, and use is made of chapters of the Croix Bleue (anti-
alcohol league), the Red Cross, the Secours Catholique and the
Emmaus Community. At least in the former Soviet Union, it was
common to parole offenders to work units, such as factories or
collective farms. In the juvenile probation area, the only area
in which probation volunteers (in so-called 'Big Brother'
programs) have been extensively used in the United States,
suggestions have been made for parole of juvenile offenders to
inner-city church and community groups. Assumption of such
responsibilities by community organizations should require a
large supermajority, and their powers as probation officers
should be supervised either by a public probation officer, a
court or both. The association might be given the power to
petition a court to revoke probation, or to request a public
officer to do so. Because of the external benefits and the
concentration of the need in poorer neighborhoods, funding should
probably take the form of either a voucher for each probationer
or project grants from higher levels of government, the state in
the U.S. context. The federal government, with its more limited
number of probationers, is well equipped to conduct pilot
programs in this field, to design short courses for probation
volunteers, and churches and community groups, and to distribute
protocols and guidelines to state and local authorities


Block Reorganization


The federal government could usefully stimulate another
neighborhood cooperative device: the creation of block-size land
readjustment associations for purposes of urban renewal.
Americans are prone to assume that only two methods exist
for the assembly of land for purposes of urban renewal.
The first of these is eminent domain, which involves the
condemnation by public authority of large tracts of land, which
are then generally sold off to private developers. Since each
property-owners has a right to jury trial as to valuation, there
are long delays and unpredictable costs. While litigation
proceeds, 'planning blight' descends, and constructive endeavor
in the area ceases. Dissenters must be evicted and coerced before
construction begins, and few condemnees are enthusiastic about
their fate, since juries are drawn from taxpayers and are
frequently parsimonious. The public authority must pay for land
as values are determined and hold it through the construction
process, incurring substantial capital and carrying costs.
A second method is private land acquisition, such as that
carried out by the Rouse Company preparatory to the creation of
Columbia, Maryland. This, to be successful, requires great
stealth and the use of dummies and intermediaries, and the last
landowners to sell usually must be paid exorbitant prices. Once
again, land acquisition money must be fronted by the developer.
The combination of cost,coercion, and planning blight have
discredited American urban renewal, and private land assembly is
rarely attempted in large cities, where news of buyer interest
travels fast. It is far less costly for private developers to
acquire large tracts of exurban land rather than attempting urban
redevelopment.
There is, however, a third method of urban land
consolidation, popularly referred to as 'Land Readjustment' ,
that has been in active use in almost all major countries other
than the United States and England for about a century, and has
proven especially useful in reclaiming totally decayed slums and
repairing war damage. At a time when many American inner cities
literally resemble war zones, with vacant lots and vandalized
buildings, use of this technique deserves exploration.
Land readjustment is a scheme whereby a specified
supermajority of owners of contiguous land are permitted to
establish a redevelopment area by petition approved by public
authority. When its boundaries are established, dissenting owner-
occupiers have the right to be excluded from the area on request.
Other dissenters can insist that the petitioners immediately buy
them out at an impartially appraised value, a remedy like that
sometimes given dissenting shareholders in corporate
reorganizations. The need for even this mild coercion of
dissenters might be obviated by a mechanism which permitted
landowners to bindingly commit themselves to a land readjustment
scheme conditional upon a specified percentage of landowners
similarly committing themselves. The remaining petitioners then
have their properties impartially valued, and receive
proportionate shares in the common enterprise. A committee is
then elected to manage redevelopment, which either funds
construction by borrowing against land values or enters into
joint ventures with builders. When work is complete, each
petitioner receives either a building representing his pro rata
share of the new development,together with fractional cash
payments, or a pro rata share as owner in common of it.
This scheme makes it possible to redevelop with reasonable
speed, since the petitioners have a profit incentive to cooperate
rather than holding out. It also makes possible redevelopment
without the necessity of raising large sums of public or private
funds for land acquisition and carrying costs. So long as the
scheme is approved by public authority and provides adequate
compensation for dissenters, it presents no constitutional
difficulties in the American system. Similar mechanisms have
sometimes been used in America to reconsolidate lots in failed
developments of recreational land, and in connection with
'unitization' of oil fields; the legal precedents developed in
the latter context will be useful in sustaining the validity of
land readjustment schemes.

In Western nations, this land readjustment system received
its earliest use in Germany. Because of the lack of primogeniture
and resultant splintering of agricultural land, mechanisms were
provided to consolidate it. The Burgomaster of Frankfurt, Franz
Adickes, agitated for ten years for similar measures for urban
land. Under the Lex Adickes(1902), upon institution of a scheme,
prior owners received shares in the newly plotted land
proportionate to their shares in land as originally platted. Lots
with buildings were restored to the owners with appropriate
boundary modifications. Unavoidable differences in value were
settled in money. The Adickes plan was extensively utilized in
the reconstruction of postwar continental cities, including Kiel
and Rotterdam, and variants of it accounted for more than half of
reconstructed Japanese housing, in addition to much housing in
Korea and Taiwan. Its possible application in America has been
discussed, and prior to the creation of federal housing
programs during the New Deal several variant schemes were put
forward, which have left some residue in the Illinois land trust
system and the urban renewal laws of eight to ten states. A
summary of the principal foreign enactments follows
In 1950, the principles of the Lex Adickes were extended to land
containing structures; in 1960 a system of valuation boards was
introduced. The German Land Procurement Law of 1953 provided
for expropriation of vacant land, land with destroyed buildings,
and land that was minimally used in relation to surrounding land,
and allowed compensation to be provided in the form of substitute
land; the act was significant in that it allowed expropriation
proceedings to be begun by private entities as well as the state:

2. Japan
The first formal land readjustment enactment in Japan was the
City Planning Act of 1919. The 1919 act was folllowed by
enactment of the Special City Planning Law of 1923 following the
great earthquake of that year. A special Town Planning Act,
focussing on war reconstruction, was enacted in 1946, and was in
turn supplanted by a comprehensive land readjustment law in
1954.
3. Korea
Land readjustment on the Japanese pattern was introduced in Korea
during the Japanese occupation of 1905-45, the critical enactment
being the Korean Land Readjustment Act of 1934. In 1966, a Land
Readjustment Project Act was enacted, which, while permitting
readjustment by private initiative, placed greater emphasis on
readjustment initiated by local authorities. Korea is unique in
its effort to use land adjustment for the purpose of creating
low-income housing by provisions in the 1980 Korean Master Plan
for Public Housing Construction and National Urban Land
Development.

Land readjustment will be easier to organize in a period of
rising prosperity,like the present. "The costs of organizing
voluntary co-operative arrangements will not be so great in a
dynamic situation as they will be in a static one." It will have
little application in undeveloped exurban areas: "... it may be
quite rational for individuals in the older residential areas of
a city to choose collective action...and at the same time it may
be irrational for owners of undeveloped units to agree."
The principal necessary contribution of higher levels
of government to land adjustment would be the provision of an
appropriate mechanism for incorporation of associations, together
with impartial tax assessment and mediation facilities and, in
some circumstances, the deeding of streets. At a later stage,
some consideration might be given to cooperative credit
mechanisms for land readjustment groups, such as the municipal
bond banks or pools offered by some states to their smaller
municipalities. The internal governance of the associations
requires careful definition by statute of opt-out rights, and
some provision for public review of the organization decision to
guard against externalities and the oppression of dissenters.
Much work was done on this subject in the early 1930's in the
United States but was largely abated by the availability of
large-scale federal financing for urban renewal. The federal
government could usefully publicize model state laws and
ordinances; through this means, zoning, soil conservation
districts and residential community associations were intoduced
into American life.


Street Governance

The woonerf, or residential street-government regime, is a
Dutch innovation of the 1970's, although precursors of it can be
found in laws in England and New York allowing the closing of
playstreets. These earlier mechanisms involved transfer of street
uses from traffic to people. The Dutch innovation rested instead
on what Rodney Tolley has called the "startling and revolutionary
notion that in residential areas traffic and people should not be
segregated but instead should be integrated...admitted on the
residents' terms...slowly and without superior rights."
Woonerven in The Netherlands began in 1976, when a law
authorized elimination of curbs and the integration into one
surface of sidewalk and road areas, giving the visual impression
of a residential yard. "Pedestrians may use the full width of
the road within an area defined as a woonerf; playing on the
roadway is also permitted. Drivers within a woonerf may not drive
faster than [about 8 to 12 m.p.h.]. They must make allowance for
the possible presence of pedestrians, children at play, unmarked
objects...traffic approaching from the right at whatever speed
always has priority. Drivers may not impede pedestrians.
Pedestrians may not unreasonably hinder the progress of drivers."
This innovation offers important benefits to the upbringing
of children , to safety, and to the creation of a sense of
community in both suburban and city areas.
Traffic in woonerven is controlled by ramps, speed bumps,
narrowings, changes in axis, street furniture, planters and
trees. Parking is permitted only in specially designated spaces.
Woonerven in The Netherlands may be petitioned for by a 60% vote
at a meeting attended by a majority of neighborhood citizens.
Because they result from local initiative , woonerven have proven
highly popular. By 1983, 2700 woonerven had been created, leading
to a 50% reduction in injuries within them. In Germany, there
was a 20% reduction in accidents and a 50% reduction in severe
accidents.
Advocates maintain that children and the elderly "should not
have their links to the outside world severed by traffic flows
past their doors." The creation of these zones has become a major
environmental cause in Germany.

The mechanism has been highly popular in Denmark. This may
be due to the fact that many Danish streets in new developments
are in private ownership. "Residents, if they wish [calming],
must pay for it themselves", the cost approximating that of a new
refrigerator.

The popularity of woonerven on particular streets has led
to broader efforts to calm traffic in residential areas
generally, through the use of 30 k.p.h.speed limits, numerous
four-way stop signs, and street narrowings, speed bumps, and
other speed reducers, popularized in the United States by Oscar
Newman and others promoting concepts of "defensible space" to
protect neighborhoods; HUD has issued a pamphlet written by
Secretary Cisneros sounding similar themes.
If woonerven are to be used and accepted in a country with
the libertarian political traditions of the United States, they
must be perceived as being an expansion of the legal rights of
property owners. This result can be achieved through use of the
Dutch mechanism for creation on neighborhood application, or by
including their creation within the arsenal of powers of
residential community associations as defined by their deed
covenants, or by street privatization on the St. Louis model. In
the short run, the Dutch mechanism is simplest, and has been
found to result in "stronger social cohesiveness, much brought
about by the involvement of the residents themselves in a
sophisticated process of planning their own surroundings."
The developers of Seaside,Florida found that in order to
avoid street width and curb regulations, it was necessary to
characterize woonerven as 'parking areas'.

There is a large literature on traffic-calming beginning
with the pioneer work of the late Donald Appleyard, an
American, and including several books by Carmen Hass-
Klau,Annette Moudon, and Rodney Tolley. Useful surveys have
appeared.
The paradox is that a form of privatization is needed for
streets to fulfil the function of public property identified by
Carol Rose:
In the absence of the socializing activities that take place
on 'inherently public property', the public is a shapeless mob,
whose members neither trade nor converse nor play, but only
fight, in a setting where life is, in Hobbes' all too famous
phrase, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
The general rule in the United States is that street
closings require the assent of a majority of abutting owners, who
may be assessed for the cost of works only to the extent of
benefits conferred. Cities like Laredo, Texas engaging in
closings on a large scale accord owners the right to acquire the
adjacent street beds. The benefits from closings include
"Income from the sale, return of the property to the tax rolls;
employment generated both by the construction and the occupants;
elimination of the municipality's liability and reduction of
public maintenance responsibilities" as well as "opportunities
for additional parking [and]open space."
In St. Louis County, beds of streets were deeded to
residents abutting them, subject to assessments enforceable by
lien. The several hundred resulting associations provide repairs,
street lighting, traffic regulation, sweeping and tree trimming;
some provide a security patrol. Privatization is now permitted on
petition of 95% of residents. "Provision by subdivisions allows
for greater variation in service bundles among neighborhoods than
provision by overlying municipalities." It has been suggested
that local governments stimulate the voluntary formation of
additional such associations by offering one-time block grants or
priority in allocation of municipal services as well as transfer
of municipally-owned real estate and relief from a portion of
municipal taxes. A British commentator has urged that street
privatization and partial closing is complementary to the
effectiveness of neighborhood security patrols. Other
commentators, reviewing the literature on 'defensible space',
have noted that "for now, crime prevention efforts should focus
on street blocks rather than on neighborhoods. Block-level
theories have advanced substantially in recent years. Models
describing both the resident-based and the offender-based
processes linking design and crime have been specified and tested
in several cases"
A bolder suggestion is that "all property-owners along
streets would be considered required members of amenity
cooperatives... public subsidy could be granted depending on
detailed correlation and determination of improvements provided
by and perhaps required of the amenity cooperative...
Preferential treatment to capital expenditures for approved
street development, if properly rewarded, could lead to far-flung
private programs to improve street quality according to revised
concepts."
Some American jurisdictions, led by Montgomery County,
Maryland have provided tax abatements to residents of community
associations maintaining streets. Scandinavian neighborhood
councils in larger cities are accorded jurisdiction over street
closings and the location of telephone boxes and bus stops.
Thus far, residential traffic calming has made only limited
progress in the United States, notwithstanding Lewis Mumford's
observation of sixty years ago that "whatever traffic filters
into a neighborhood must be that which directly subserves it,
moving at a pace that respects the rights of a footwalker. Even
country villages today often lack this element of safety and
freedom from anxiety." The institutions needed to popularize it
are self-organized traffic-calming or street-ownership
associations at the block level, which require some form of state
or local authorizing legislation. The internal governance of
these associations should involve supermajorities to insure that
neighborhood consensus exists. Financial assistance from
government would appear not needed since traffic-calming works
are fundable by use of special benefit assessments; the sums
involved in any case are sufficiently modest that small subsidies
for poorer neighborhoods are within the limited redistributive
capacity of municipal governments. The deeding without
consideration of street-beds might be considered in many places,
since its effect may be to relieve municipalities of maintenance
expenses and restore property to the tax rolls. What is most
needed is model enabling legislation expanding the rights of
abutting property-owners, together with publicity relating to the
safety and social benefits and the less well-known techniques,
such as narrowing of roadways, use of planters, creation of
separated bicycle paths, and use of varying road surfaces.


Law enforcement
American discussions of law enforcement generally resolve
themselves into a dialogue in which one faction urges national
government social programs to combat the alleged causes of crime,
while the other seeks more police and harsher laws and sentences.
There is, however, a third tradition, seeking to revive past
localized institutions, that complements if it does not supplant
the other two.

Today nearly 30% of the American population lives in
residential community associations with elected officers, a large
percentage of which have assumed some security functions. The
systematic publicizing of crimes and wanted persons, once
confined to the halfhearted posting of wanted posters in post
offices, now extends to popular television programs, the sides of
shopping bags, and the regular publication of police blotters in
neighborhood and metropolitan newspapers. 'Neighborhood watch'
groups have appeared in many communities. The ever-more
widespread private ownership of firearms for purposes of
individual self-defense revives a militia, albeit not a 'well
regulated' one. Law enforcement might benefit, without peril to
liberty, from a more self-conscious organization and exploitation
of these tendancies.

The programs have their limits: "[w]e cannot rely too much on
voluntary citizen 'self-help', given the difficulty of
controlling citizen use of force and the virtual absence of
residents from many neighborhoods during working hours."
Moreover, "voluntary association cannot easily be initiated or
sustained in poorer, high-crime areas." The increased emphasis
on the social organization of housing projects, on concierge
systems and concepts of 'defensible space' indicates that the
relevance of this concept is not confined to the 12th century.
In its initial form, the hue and cry had as its object the
organization of what Jane Austen called "a neighborhood of
voluntary spies." and involved shouting, the blowing of horns,
and the ringing of church bells. With the advent of the press,
these primitive mechanisms for organizing the general chase of an
offender were replaced by printed warning and reward notices and
directories of wanted criminals of the type outlined in Sir John
Fielding's General Prevention Plan of 1772-73. The best-known
publications were John Fielding's own broadsheet the Hue and Cry
and Henry Fielding's Covent Garden Journal. Lord Mansfield
declared in 1783: "how are felons in general taken up ? From
descriptions of them circulated in handbills."
One of the critics of Peel's police bill observed in 1829,
in terms that have continuing resonance: "complete and speedy
publicity of all acts of delinquency would effect far more good
without a police than a police could effect without publicity."
It has been observed that "during the second half of the
nineteenth century, the circulation of information about criminal
offenders and offences increasingly became internalized within
the police--narrowcasting to an audience of officials... the
police have used the new technology of the telegraph, radio and
computer in pursuit of the mirage of instant apprehension of
criminals and at the expense of information-based activities
directed at prevention of crime or delayed apprehension."

A great deal has changed since Tocqueville's observation
that "the criminal police of the United States cannot be compared
with those of France; the magistrates and public agents are not
numerous. Yet... in no country does crime more rarely elude
punishment. The reason is that everyone conceives himself to be
interested in furnishing evidence of the crime and in seizing the
delinquent... in America he is looked upon as an enemy of the
human race, and the whole of mankind is against him."

The advent of new means of information transmission such as
the television set and the fax machine has not given rise to
significant expansion of use of wanted posters and publications
by the police. Yet the public hunger for this sort of
information is attested by the fact that virtually all
neighborhood newspapers now publish discouragingly long lists of
offenses, unaccompanied by any information that would assist in
solving them. The publication on shopping bags of pictures of
missing children and the advent of television programs depicting
wanted criminals is entirely a product of private enterprise.
"Privately funded reward policing is probably stronger now than
it has been since the nineteenth century." Critics of these
programs allege that they constitute private distortion of fears
about crime, but this comes about by reason of the failure of
public authorities to systematize similar measures.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that a revival of
Fielding's Hue and Cry would be a useful and beneficial
contribution to law enforcement, particularly in the inner-city
areas where clearance rates are lowest, the crime problem is
greatest, and policing cannot succeed without public
participation. Indeed, the mere existence of such a newspaper-
type collection of wanted notices might have a significant
deterrent effect.

Local transportation
The social isolation of the elderly and of many housewives
and young people has not been
a matter exciting great political interest in the United States:
lives of quiet desperation are just that. There have been
expensive federal programs aimed at providing public
transportation for the elderly and disabled; the problems of the
young are incautiously addressed by widespread ownership of
private automobiles and a low driving age, notwithstanding the
ensuing accident rates.
Here too neighborhood organizations have a role to play.
Although a number of American residential community
associations in communities made up of the elderly have begun
providing demand-response and other local transportation services
to their members, the use of amenity cooperatives or special
assessment districts for the purpose of providing such services
has been little tried. Jitney transport, by cab or bus operators
not operating on fixed routes, is in use in many foreign cities
but has been outlawed in most American cities since the 1920's,
with narrow exceptions relating to sharing of licensed
taxicabs. Several studies have found that substantial savings
can result from the privatization, and thus the devolution to
small units, of both public transportation and school bus
services. The economic problems of American central cities are
in substantial part ascribable to the lack of transportation
necessary to commute to available jobs.The organization and
provision of such transportation facilities is an appropriate
activity of sub-local governments and neighborhood community
associations, as well as of a more deregulated private sector;
their financing should appropriately come from user charges, or
modest special assessments on propertyowners. Some British
parishes have initiated ventures of this type, with government
support, and the 1997 Local Government and Rating Act confers
express authority on parish councils to do so.

Community Schools
Recent political dialogue about American education has
involved a contest between those advocating ever-greater national
government funding and control of the curriculum, on the one
hand, and those advocating vouchers and privatization, on the
other. The last prescription for privatization is in part a
counsel of despair, founded on the view that public schools are
so beset by union rules, grievance procedures, federal
interference with school discipline, busing orders, mandates
relating to special and bilingual education and legal
restrictions on the hiring of competent teachers that they are
beyond repair. Here also a case can be made for a measure short
of or at least complementary to vouchers and privatization:
radical decentralization of public school governance. In
the United States, schools have traditionally been governed on a
territorial basis by school district boards. These originally
encompassed only one or two schools. However, with the growth
of population and the fashionable movement for consolidation of
school districts, these political entities have become
progressively larger and more bureaucratic; the impersonality of
the systems, particularly since the Second World War, has
fostered the organization of teachers' unions, which have
generated problems of their own. The teachers' unions have
induced the states to employ an array of techniques to force
consolidation upon school districts, including fiscal incentives,
county-wide rather than district approval of consolidations,
prohibition of incorporation of new districts, aid formulas
discriminating against small districts, and direct mandating of
consolidations. The number of school districts decreased from
108,579 in 1942 to 34,678 in 1962,to approximately 15,000 in
1996. There is some evidence that the size of districts is
inversely related to student accomplishment. At the same time,
the governance of schools has increasingly become a professional
monopoly. Teachers are required by state law to have taken large
numbers of education courses, which characteristically involve
indoctrination in professional ideology rather than deepening of
knowledge about subject-matter. Principals in many places are
required to have doctorates from colleges of education. Union
contracts render it virtually impossible to remove or transfer
inadequate teachers and require that replacements be hired from
seniority lists rather than be 'handpicked' in accordance with
local needs.

In France, by contrast, there has been a more modest decline
in the number of primary schools because of consolidations ,
rural depopulation, and a decline between 1960 and 1982 of about
ten percent in the numbers of children in the age group in
question. However the proportion of single class schools to total
primary schools has remained constant. Of the 74,268 primary
schools in 1960,19,010 were single-class schools; of the 43,778
primary schools in 1982, 10,778 were single-class schools
"proof... of the realization by small rural communities that
their future depends upon the retention of the local school and
of their determination to resist its loss."

All major European countries, in contrast to the United
States, have in recent years significantly decentralized school
governance and have sought to end the professional monopoly over
it. Their varied efforts to extend the parental role in education
are expressly referenced in Article 126 of the Maastricht Treaty,
which calls for "cross-cultural cooperative research in the field
of parents in education."

As a result of reforms enacted by the Giscard government in
1975,which had been partly implemented in 1968 following the
student disturbances of that year, each French college(12-15
year old age group) and lycee(15-18) was given a School Council
. This committee votes the school budget and the various school
rules, and a committee of it reviews disciplinary recommendations
for expulsion, together with the school social worker and
guidance counsellor. The council also reviews the bursar's
accounts and may comment on the teaching. The rules relate to
such matters as safety, attendance, promptness, marking system,
school records, transport, dress,smoking, permission to leave the
premises, and library rules and those relating to student
activities and publications. "The Haby Reform ruled out any
formal parental influence on instruction, the form or content of
curriculum, grading, or homework. The classroom itself remained
untouched by the parent committees." It has been said of the
Catholic system, state-subsidized since 1959, that: "one of its
main attractions has been school autonomy: a Catholic head
differs crucially from his state counterpart in being able to
recruit his own staff and thus build up a team and a school
ethos."

German schools have elaborate provisions for parent
participation. 'these include class councils, school councils and
provincial councils as well as officially-recognized parents'
associations at all levels, culminating in a federal parents
organization."

Britain similarly vested control of its state-
maintained schools in large Local Education Authorities. However
the existence of separate boards for each school continued since
an act of 1870, and was carried forward by sections 17-22 of the
Education Act of 1944. "The general principle tends to be that
the L.E.A.settles 'the general educational character of the
school and its place in the local system' while the governors
have 'general direction of the conduct and curriculum of the
school." Finally, the Education Reform Act,1988,sec.40
provided for drastic decentralization of the control of
education. The boards of Local Authority schools are to be
composed of specified portions of parents, teachers, local
authority governors and co-opted governors . The governors now
receive an automatic budget share and authority "to spend any sum
as they think fit for the purposes of the school", and to appoint
and dismiss staff. They control some 87% of school budgets as
well as, to a limited degree, admissions policy. These
changes, though prompted by central government-local authority
conflict, are said to "have enfranchised parents and created a
quarter million army of school governors."

Similar legislation has been adopted in New Zealand and in
all Australian states.

The developments in Western Europe and Australasia (with the
possible exception of those in England, the work of the Thatcher
government) had their inception in the concerns for participatory
democracy characteristic of the late '60s student movements. This
is true even though the French reforms were sponsored by the
government of Charles de Gaulle; the disorders in Paris in 1968
were preceded, not followed, by his famous speech in March 1968
at Lyon declaring that the need for centralization in France had
ended. They had little influence in the United States where the
student movement, one of 'rebels without a program' in George
Kennan's words, was concerned with an end to the Vietnam War,
personal emancipation from social restraints, and centralization
in the cause of civil rights. Michael Walzer has observed that
"the civil rights and antiwar agitations...turned out to be
evanescent, leaving behind no organizational residue, no basis
for an ongoing participatory politics." The legacy of the
American civil rights and student movements, unlike their foreign
counterparts, was a centralization of power in the national
government and the federal courts. Even blacks now suffer from
this; in Walzer's words:"political power must always be twice
won. It must be won first with the help of the state or through
the creation of parallel bureaucracies against established local
or corporate elites. Then it must be won again by new popular
forces against the state."

The funding mechanism for self-governing schools is a
critical issue. In Britain, opt-out schools receive pro rata
portions of the block education grant to local authorities, which
in turn rests on an inverse-wealth formula, with some positive
discrimination in favor of inner-city schools. In the United
States, the funding mechanism used for Title I federal aid to
public schools might be used; this ties aid to particular schools
to the social composition of their student body rather than the
average-wealth characteristics of the subdivision and closely
approaches a voucher system. The federal contribution to American
primary and secondary education is sufficiently modest that it
could be completely voucherized and made available to both public
and private schools while still being earmarked for
noninstructional expenses, thus avoiding any possible church-
state problem. The use of vouchers allows aid to be focussed on
needy students rather than needy subdivisions, and is equivalent
to an income transfer which can only be spent on public goods.
The competence of boards in poorer neighborhoods might be
enhanced, as in England, by requiring the co-optation as well as
election of governors, by additionally requiring the presence of
governors with special skills in construction, accounting, and
higher education, and by providing for state assistance in the
recruitment and training of governors.

The benefits of local governance are manifold: the market
discipline imposed on teachers and the greater vocational choice
allowed them by the ability of schools to hire and fire freely;
the ability of school principals to assemble compatible teams;
greater parental and community support of public schools; the
ability of schools, at least at the secondary level, to
differentiate themselves and specialize and select students,
thereby creating centers of excellence; defusing of controversies
over social and moral issues which result when higher levels of
government are the source of rules governing student behavior and
discipline.

PROLIFERATING INITIATIVE: Circulars, Enabling Laws, Tax Credits,
Model Legislation

Circulars
In the unfashionable discussion of federalism in the last
chapter of his Essay on Liberty and also in chapter 15 of
Representative Government, Mill asserted the view that the
appropriate role of the national government generally should
involve education, not coercion. "The principal business of the
central authority should be to give instruction, of the local
authority to apply it. Power may be localized, but knowledge, to
be most useful, should be centralized.""The mischief begins when,
instead of calling forth the activities and powers of individuals
and bodies,[a government]substitutes its own activities for
theirs; when, instead of informing, advising, and upon occasion,
denouncing, it makes them work in fetters...A State that dwarfs
its men...will find that with small men no great thing can really
be accomplished." The value of such publicity may be
particularly great when directed at small-scale units of
provision and their prospective members: as noted by Dennis
Mueller: "voluntary compliance with behavioral sanctions or
provision of public goods is more likely in small communities
than in large...Small stable communities may elicit voluntary
compliance and contributions for collective decisions by merely
publicizing them."

The creation on a large scale of residential community
associations in the United States came about as a result of this
sort of activity: "The publication of Planned Unit Development
with a Homes Association was a watershed event in the history of
CID's... Forty to fifty thousand copies of the publication were
circulated, and it was a major factor in the PUD boom that
followed... the document was distributed at the NAHB [National
Association of Home Builders] meeting. Its impact was
enormous...'The industry grabbed the idea, and local government
accepted it, and FHA insured it, and the concept took off like
wildfire.'" Similarly, the Federal Housing Administration in
1961 distributed model condominium legislation, variants of which
had been adopted in all 50 states by 1967, even though previously
condominiums had been familiar only in Puerto Rico. The
Department of Commerce in the 1920's used a similar method to
propagate zoning ordinances; its publication including model
ordinances sold tens of thousands of copies.The creation by
state governments of thousands of soil conservation districts
with coercive powers in the 1930s was also ascribable to the
distribution of model state legislation by the Roosevelt
administration.

The constitutional permissibility of this sort of government
activity seems well established. As Laurence Tribe has written:
"if government expends public funds to subsidize flag production,
the fact that some people object to this expenditure of their tax
money to propagate the state's patriotic message is likely to be
deemed irrelevant, either in a challenge to the expenditure
itself or in a challenge to the payment of the full amount of the
tax." The federal government has made extensive, though
limited, use of 'public service' broadcasting. Typically,
broadcasters run government announcements "in blocks of time in
low demand by advertisers who pay for the opportunity to reach
mass audiences."About ten advertising campaigns a year are run
by government agencies in cooperation with the private
Advertising Council; the campaigns are supported with both
government funding and private contribtions and "White House
clearance is the sine qua non for a governmental agency hopeful
of becoming one of the major campaigns of the Council,"

Either the national government, or associations of state
governments, or private law reform organizations or foundations
might widely distribute, to both community organizations and
households, information, including suggested by-laws and lists of
resource sources, to facilitate the organization of pre-school
playgroups and old age clubs, adapting the available British and
Japanese materials respectively. Land readjustment and traffic
calming might be promoted in the same fashion.

Tax credits
Dues of American residential community associations are not
deductible for federal income tax purposes. It seems disingenuous
to equate expenditures for characteristic public goods such as
trash collection and roads with private luxury expenses.
Similarly, it may be in order to provide small federal tax
credits to facilitate the organization of old age clubs.

Devolution to BIDs and RCAs has proven popular because it
combines the benefits of political devolution (enhanced voice,
local responsiveness) with the economies and personal
independence resulting from reliance on competitive market
providers, avoiding the condition described by Tocqueville: "to
acquire a place a man no longer pays down his money, he goes one
better, he sells himself.".


Enabling laws and model legislation

Circulation, under either federal or private auspices, of
legislation authorizing and regulating land readjustment
organizations and private street associations and its enactment
in the states, or by cities with home rule powers, would seem
necessary if such organizations, with their reliance on public
land assessment and mild coercion of dissenters, are to be
organized. There is precedent for such legislation in laws
providing for reconsolidation of recreational lots and for oil
field unitization.

Likewise, state or local legislation is desirable to define
the rights of neighbors to request or require traffic calming,and
to provide for the organization of and possible assistance to old
age clubs (although this can be accomplished under existing
nonprofit corporation laws). Amendments to the Uniform Probation
Act to authorize participation of churches and community groups
as probation officers might likewise be disseminated to both
legislatures and appropriate voluntary associations. A similar
course might be followed with respect to legislation converting
all existing schools in a state to self-governing schools; here
models are available in the legislation of Great Britain,
Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland.

If sub-local entities are to be enabled to remedy local
transportation deficits in metropolitan areas, amendment of state
or local laws regulating and licensing bus and taxicab service
should take place.

Increasing the utility of RCAs and other sub-local general-
purpose entities in the zoning process would seem to require the
enactment of amendments to state zoning enabling laws allowing
them to waive restrictions against accessory apartments,
convenience stores,day care centers, demand response
transportation and other like uses.Federal tax credits for
accessory apartments would encoiurage localities to liberalize
zoning laws to permit them. The writer has elsewhere furnished
draft legislation to this end; circulation of some variant of
this as model legislation by the National Conference of
Commissioners on Uniform State Laws or the Department of Housing
and Community Development, or even a private organization like
the National Association of Home Builders would be useful.
Maryland legislation relating to day care centers in residential
areas furnishes another possible model.

All these promotional measures, however, like those in pre-
revolutionary France described by Tocqueville, are useless if
central government overly taxes and regulates the resultant
institutions: "it would have been more to the point to have
lightened the weight and to have lessened the inequality of the
burdens."


-------

The ideas in this essay are elaborated upon and documented in
Solving Problems Without Large Government: Devolution, Fairness
and Equality (Praeger,2000), available from internet,national and
independent booksellers.