You Know What a Community Wants by What It Does

The greater part of a Providence Business News article about the I-195 Redevelopment District Commission concerns burying electrical lines, which is generally a good idea.  (Although joint actions of governments and utility monopolies always merit close scrutiny.)  But then there’s this:

In other I-195 news, the Providence Redevelopment Agency has approached the commission about building a food market on a small parcel on Richmond Street near Brown University’s new Ship Street park, Commission Executive Director Jan Brodie said.

Brodie said the parcel is not large enough for much else to fit there. The tentative idea was to have the market run by students from Johnson & Wales University.

Nothing other than a student-run food market will fit on a piece of land?  What are they talking about, a roadside veggie stand?

Rhode Island (along with much of the country) is beginning to give government way too much authority to decide what sort of development goes where.  The entire I-195 redevelopment project falls into this problem.  Waving their hands for a little bit of that “government is the only thing that we all do together” magic, the officials involved in the process presume that the democratic flavor of our system (such as it is) means that they speak with the voice of the community.

That’s a presumption that Rhode Islanders don’t often enough challenge on principled grounds.  Rhode Island’s governor won with a very narrow plurality in an unusual four-way race.  The General Assembly is structured such that the leadership has overwhelming authority, although they are elected as regular representatives and senators in their own small districts within the state.  Low participation in the electoral process mean that all legislators are elected by small portions even of their small subsections of the state, often without any opposition whatsoever.

This collection of elected officials then creates the guidelines and appoints the unelected members of the development commission.  Consequently, the link between the will of Rhode Islanders and the authority of this group, if it can be said to exist at all, is thinly attenuated.  So, in approach number 1, people who profess to speak for the community pick and choose what they think would move the area toward the vision that they think the community ought to share.

The alternative approach would be for a regular sales process, in which the seller imposes the ordinary zoning restrictions that local government structures have determined and the buyers determine that (without government distortions) they can build businesses and thrive doing what they do in that particular location.  Where more than one entity predicts an ability to use the land profitably, they bid against each other, mainly as a test of who (by their own assessments) will use the asset for a greater gain.

Many folks have difficulty seeing this capitalist approach as an expression of the community’s vision.  The principle that’s lost may be that prices are essentially an expression of interest.  They are a measure of the value of things to people that take into account a range of factors that no person can consider comprehensively.

If a business’s customer base is local, then its success in a location will be a direct reflection of the interests of people locally, proved by their willingness to spend money.  If a business’s customer base is not local, then its success in a particular location will be a reflection of the community’s interest in accommodating its economic activity; the community will have set the broad environment to be conducive to business, and it will not bog the business down in contentious local disputes.

Viewed in the context of political theory, these approaches aren’t the community-focused government, on the one hand, and greedy corporations on the other.  The market-centered approach is actually the better reflection of what the community wants — regardless of what they may say to pollsters and in a way much more specific than the results when a whole slew of issues must be boiled down into a choice a single elected official.  The government-centered approach, by contrast, is vulnerable to the judgment of rulers not about what the community wants, but what people who are disconnected from the community think it needs.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in The Ocean State Current, including text, graphics, images, and information are solely those of the authors. They do not purport to reflect the views and opinions of The Current, the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity, or its members or staff. The Current cannot be held responsible for information posted or provided by third-party sources. Readers are encouraged to fact check any information on this web site with other sources.

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