Privatopia

...Recent newsletters and published articles by its current president have suggested that CID residents are paying a "double tax...

...a third offense means a $500 fine, and the car and driver are banned from the private streets for a month...

...The exterior look and feel of these developments often echo America's mythical idyllic past and attempt to project at least the illusion of community and town meeting government...

...However, we can safely anticipate that some aspiring politician will make this proposal the centerpiece of a campaign and, in the right area, ascend to statewide office and try to implement it...

...Consequently, if the large corporate developer can equip the development with a new highway off-ramp, a private sewer system, a park, and a school building—things many cities just can't afford on their own anyway—local government authorities are more easily mollified...

...The Community Associations Institute (CAI) is a nationwide organization of CIDs...

...These large-scale developers fell in love with the common-interest ownership concept because it enabled them to satisfy consumer preferences for amenities such as swimming pools, golf courses, parks, private beaches, recreation rooms, security gates and guards, and so forth, which would be prohibitively expensive for individual owners...

...America—A House Divided...

...The millions of Americans who live in these places, including—and perhaps especially—those who govern them, are undergoing a subtle indoctrination process, courtesy of the developers who wrote the rules they live by...

...In addition, this kind of logic turns social contract theory on its head...

...As Louis Mumford wrote, "The word UTOPIA stands in common usage for the ultimate in human folly or human hope...

...A clean, well-kept development with no signs of human wear-and-tear will attract buyers, who see property values being protected...

...These types of housing have one thing in common: Residents own or exclusively occupy their own units, but they share ownership of the "common areas" used by all...

...They have become known in the press as the "Condo Commandos," and former President Who Governs...

...Yet the residents who run for places on the board of directors—unpaid positions—are often controlling, autocratic types who see their role as enforcing their way of life on everybody else...

...Yet they defy definition...

...Paint your house a different color than everybody else's and see what happens...

...The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) estimates that by 1990 the annual income of CIDs will top $20 billion...

...Next, you receive a letter from the board of directors ordering you to repaint it...

...organized...

...Some forty million Americans now live in common-interest housing developments where the residents privately support—and exclusively enjoy — a variety of services, ranging from police protection to swimming pools to local self-government, that were once the province of cities...

...After all, everybody else obeys the rules...

...Although this seems an innocuous concept, CIDs may be taking urban and suburban America on a purposeful course toward a vision of utopia where the twin values of private property and private government reign—a sort of "privatopia," in which the residents are essentially citizens of a separate polity...

...Cities and counties are more likely to permit construction of a new development if it promises a level of self-sufficiency that will add property tax revenue without a concomitant burden on public services...

...Are they libertarian "private protective associations," as in Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia...

...Through the activities of CAI and other organizations, we are now seeing the emergence of a "CID vote...

...People are led without feeling led, for the most part, and they do not resent anything except the most overt examples of oppression...

...Indian Wells took the tax money, used it to build a luxury golf course and attract several resorts catering to the super-rich, and then went to the state legislature for special legislation exempting it from the housing requirement so it could build the low-income housing somewhere else, outside of Indian Wells...

...They consider this unfair, and they want a tax deduction for all or part of their homeowner dues...

...This led to smaller developments and promoted the takeover of housing construction by large corporations, including insurance companies, pension funds, large-scale joint ventures, and building corporations that went public and tapped the stock market for equity capital...

...That is, they pay property tax, which goes to support public services, but they also pay dues and assessments to maintain their own, sometimes duplicative, private services...

...The board collects monthly dues and special assessments from all owners to maintain the development and enforces rules designed to protect property values...

...The sponsors of these "instant cities," as Theodore Roszak called them in the Nation in 1967, included Gulf Oil, Humble Oil, Goodyear Tire and Rubber, Westinghouse, and General Electric...

...In Fairbanks Ranch, an affluent CID in southern California, behind six locked gates there are forty-five private streets patrolled by private security officers who enforce a private speed limit...

...Given their affluence, organization, connections, and potential for bloc voting, CIDs could advance their agenda quickly...

...She kept the dog anyway...

...Privatopia may be coming into its own as a political pressure group with a distinct agenda revolving around the enhancement of property values and a kind of residential isolationism...

...These elements—organization and self-government— distinguish CIDs from other housing developments...

...These first bourgeois utopias saw suburbia as a place where their most cherished values—the nuclear family, religious faith, private property, contact with nature—could be fully realized, free from the corrupting influence of the cities and the lower classes...

...Here are some examples of CID private government in action across America, all reported in the press: • In Ashland, Massachusetts, a Vietnam veteran was told that he could not fly the American flag on Flag Day...

...Do they amount to Locke's social contract reduced to writing, with community membership and voting based upon property ownership...

...Whatever the reason, there are signs that homeowner associations are beginning to extend their influence outward...

...All the lawns are mowed, all the cars are parked in the driveways after 8:00 p.m., all the houses are the same color, and all the dogs weigh less than thirty pounds Rational self-interest supports this sort of conformity...

...The judge sent her to jail for contempt of court...

...You ignore it...

...The board backed down only after he called the press and the story hit the front page...

...Should we look at them as communes...

...Or do they represent the corpora-Many of Florida's CID residents are politically tion of the home, with each family a shareholder...

...As a result, some odd political decisions emerge from privatopia...

...First-time speeders get a warning...

...The association won...

...Columbia, Maryland...

...In the words of Richard Louv, author of America II, "We have a generation of kids growing up in this country who don't know you should be able to paint your house any color you want...

...CID residents are in a box, but they don't see it that way...

...Three thousand miles away is Indian Wells, California, a desert community made up primarily of CIDs, whose residents enjoy the state's highest per capita income behind their walls and gates...

...Anyone who buys a unit is automatically subject to this regime, but it is considered a "voluntary association" by the law because nobody forced anyone to buy...

...First, one of your neighbors, a representative of the architectural committee, politely asks you to repaint it in accordance with the CC&Rs...

...These bastions of the white middle class are competing with cities for residents, offering homogeneous population, physical security, stable housing values, local control, and freedom from exposure to the social ills of the cities...

...Historian Robert Fishman, in Bourgeois Utopias, shows how modern suburbia was born in eighteenth-century England as a middle-class utopia and how it was exported to the United States in the nineteenth century...

...The city declared itself "blighted" in order to take advantage of a state law intended to permit truly afflicted communities to retain tax money for community redevelopment...

...A month later you receive legal documents informing you that the association is preparing to sell your house to pay the fine...

...If you ignore that, you may discover in short order that this is not just a neighborhood tiff—CIDs are suburbia with teeth...

...From Plato's Republic to Sir Thomas More's Utopia to B. F. Skinner's Walden Two and beyond, many social theorists have tried to design, even to build, an ideal human community...

...It is a prospect that many view with ambivalence...

...When the developer subdivides the property into individual lots, he sets up a system of restrictive covenants in all the deeds—colloquially called the "CC&Rs," short for covenants, conditions, and restrictions—that mutually bind all purchasers and require them to live by the dictates of the homeowners' association...

...The spread of CIDs could potentially accelerate the decline of cities, affect the political balance of power in urban and suburban America, and put more formerly public services into the private sector on a "pay-for-yourown" basis...

...Since annual CID revenues are approaching equivalency with total local government income, this could potentially bankrupt many cities and counties...

...With populations of up to six hundred thousand, they were heirs to the European "Garden City" concept espoused by Ebenezer Howard in the late nineteenth century...

...However, after the measure received bad press, the governor vetoed it...

...If these informal pressures fail, formal procedures will pick up the slack...

...It is hard to say—and maybe irrelevant, like all chicken-egg questions—whether this sort of internal behavior is the result of a particular kind of private political socialization or whether CIDs attract a large number of people who think a certain way...

...The framework for such campaigns is taking shape...

...The community structure combines direct rule enforcement, subtle conformist pressures, and the rational self-interest in preserving property values into a powerful formula that all but guarantees obedience...

...Common-interest housing had its genesis in the SPRING • 1989 • 257 Notebook transformation of housing into a mass-produced commodity—the development—after World War II...

...You refuse...

...Perhaps most important, they have enormous economic and political resources that they are only beginning to tap...

...You ignore that...

...In exchange for these material benefits, however, the residents subject themselves to government by their neighbors—a kind of government that is not restricted by the Constitution because it is private and, in the eyes of the law, no more capable of "state action" than the Kiwanis Club...

...The CID revolution itself began in about 1960, when the federally assisted "New Town" movement spawned such heavily planned, privately governed, and eerily self-contained communities as Reston, Virginia...

...Common property ownership requires organization, usually an incorporated "homeowners association," and a private residential government, usually in the form of a corporate board of directors...

...It could also accustom many Americans to a form of local government free from constitutional limitations...

...Instead of a group of individuals in a state of nature banding together and consenting to live by a set of rules of their choosing, we have the reverse: first the rules, then the houses, then the people...

...Or, with their shared property interests, do they represent socialism-by-contract for the affluent...

...However, in contrast to the European experience, the American national government pulled out of this planned housing partnership in the 1970s, which made city-sized developments too big and risky an undertaking for private industry...

...Is there a communalist strain under all 258 • DISSENT Notebook this privatization...

...The association won...

...260 • DISSENT...

...the second offense brings a hearing before the board and a reprimand...

...The judge ordered the sixty-year-old husband to sell, rent the unit, or live without his wife...

...This ignores the economic realities that force many people into this kind of housing against their will...

...Jimmy Carter tapped their support...

...The law required that 20 percent of the tax windfall be used to build low-income housing...

...While the nonprofit homeowners' association is ordinarily not allowed to get involved in partisan politics, there is nothing to prevent a CID from organizing or belonging to a political action committee, and such CID PACs already exist...

...Their power is very real and substantial and often dwarfs their ability to exercise it...

...CIDs include condominiums, community apartments, co-ops, and planned unit developments (PUDs) of detached, singlefamily housing...

...In Houston, Texas, a homeowners' association took a woman to court for keeping a dog in violation of her CID rules...

...The Rise of Privatopia Even suburbia started as a utopian vision...

...Then, you receive a notice that the association has assessed a fine of $50 per day until you repaint the house...

...The California legislature passed the bill, after receiving $400,000 in political campaign contributions from private developers who had more lucrative plans for the land...

...This might seem offensive enough, but there's more...

...Locke in a Condominium...

...There were only a few hundred CIDs in 1960...

...In Monroe, New Jersey, a homeowners' association took a married couple to court because the wife, at age forty-five, was three years younger than the association's age-forty-eight minimum for residency...

...Today there are over 125,000, and collectively they rival—and may soon surpass—the fewer than 50,000 elected local governments in numbers, income, and potential political power...

...Recently, a new form of urban and suburban housing known as the "common interest development" (CID) has risen to prominence in most rapidly growing areas of America...

...Unemployment, inequality, crime, drug abuse—these are all easily seen as city problems for which the CID resident has no responsibility — social, financial, political or otherwise—except the responsibility for escaping them...

...They are capable of regulating and restricting political, religious, and social activity...

...What about the cultlike isolation some CIDs cultivate...

...Yet these private governments do much more than organize backyard barbecues...

...CIDs, with their unique brand of internal SPRING • 1989 • 259 Notebook politics, have the potential to exacerbate the real conflict that is developing in many metropolitan areas between urban centers and their surrounding suburbs...

...and Irvine, California...

...This atrophied sense of social responsibility has led to a logical conclusion—the demand for special tax breaks...

...It seems inescapable that this development will have major impact on the shape of state and local politics...