(Im)mobile and (Un)successful? A policy mobilities approach to New Orleans’s residential security taxing districts

Abstract

Policy mobilities scholars critically analyze the processes of assemblage, mobilization, and mutation that shape policy circuits, but have been critiqued for an over-emphasis on successful and mobile cases. This paper adds to a growing effort to diversify the empirical scope of the field through an example that blurs the boundaries of mobility/immobility and success/failure. I examine residential security taxing districts, which are derived from the common business improvement district model but which in their specifics are unique to New Orleans. Security districts are quasi-public entities established within elite urban enclaves to collect taxes to fund neighborhood security patrols. First, I analyze the model’s rapid spread among the city’s neighborhoods, demonstrating the relevance of the policy mobilities framework in a case of intra-urban mobilization. Second, I explore why the model has not spread to other cities, particularly given New Orleans’s centrality as a site for neoliberal policy experimentation in the post-Katrina era. These post-disaster interventions applied preexisting policy prescriptions and were driven by outside experts, while the city’s own neoliberal experiments were ignored. Troubling the association of mobility and success, I conclude that this immobility should not be considered failure so much as anonymity.

Keywords

Policy mobilities immobility anonymity security districts New Orleans

Introduction

Across the US, the politics of urban public safety provision – police funding levels, resource allocation, acceptable tactics, questions of equity or bias – are addressed at the scale of the city. In New Orleans, on the other hand, a balkanized patchwork of neighborhood security districts has emerged, shifting the scale of public safety provision and reinforcing longstanding inequalities along lines of wealth and race. Residents of the city’s elite enclaves, finding the baseline public safety provision lacking (as do most city residents of all backgrounds and statuses), decided to take matters into their own hands. They sidestepped the difficult politics of citywide police reform or public safety improvement and turned inward to create an extra layer of security patrols as a private good. The added patrols have little impact on major crime, instead reinforcing the sense of safety for residents of already low crime enclaves (OIG, 2013). This paper examines the security district model that evolved in New Orleans and asks why the model has become widespread in the city but has not been adopted elsewhere.

Security districts in New Orleans evolved as a response to the perceived problems of security in elite urban enclaves. New Orleans is an old city (by American standards) where wealth and poverty exist in close proximity and racial discrimination and inequality are endemic. Reacting to their sense of insecurity and out of frustration with city politics, a few prominent neighborhoods established special taxing districts in the 1990s as a way to pay for localized security patrols. They copied the formal structure of the city’s longstanding business improvement district (BID), with neighborhood leaders drawing on their political and social capital to facilitate the novel adaptation of the BID model. The resulting residential security taxing districts (“security districts”) were high-profile and were considered successful according to the logics of their proponents. Within a few years, residents of wealthy and middle-class neighborhoods throughout the city were imitating the model, striving to create a sense of control and safety. However, despite rapid local replication the model has not spread beyond the city. Affluent enclaves are a common feature of many cities, but the model of creating official taxing districts to address security at the scale of the residential neighborhood remains unique to New Orleans.

The security district model from New Orleans forms the empirical base of the paper, within which I examine two key points: in Part I, how the model emerged and was mobilized within the city, and in Part II, the limits of its spread and why the model has not gained traction outside the city. Both parts allow me to engage with the growing literature in geography on policy mobilities. First, the security district example fits the classic policy mobilities framework, with elements of assemblage, mobilization, and mutation (McCann and Ward, 2013) – but plays out at the intra-urban scale, rather than the global inter-urban scale that is central in most work to date. This scalar shift demonstrates the applicability of policy mobilities thinking beyond the dominant scale of research, allowing me to engage empirically with questions about the scales of policy mobility (Temenos and Baker, 2015).

Second, the case is relevant to calls to consider what examples of failed or immobile policies can contribute to a literature that primarily focuses on highly mobile “best practices” (McCann and Ward, 2015; Temenos and Baker, 2015; Temenos and McCann, 2013). Here, I begin from the question, in a world of hyper-mobile fast policy, is immobility failure? Can a policy that is locally “successful” nonetheless be considered a failure because it has not moved beyond the city? The security district case is of particular relevance because it is a spin-off derived from the BID model that epitomizes mobile urban policy (Cook, 2008; Stein et al., 2017; Ward, 2007, 2010). Furthermore, the setting of New Orleans creates an added level of interest. Following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, the city took center stage as a petri dish where neoliberal policies could be implemented and tested (Katz, 2008; Peck, 2006). The city’s own experiments with security districts have clear neoliberal underpinnings, displacing traditional government roles in favor of semi-privatized provision available only to the wealthy, but did not capture the attention of the plethora of visiting experts in the post-disaster era. The model was replicated across the city but has not been recognized or mobilized at wider scales. This seeming disconnect is the focus of Part II, where I analyze the immobility of a policy that is a seemingly suitable candidate for mobilization. Returning to the question of (im)mobility and failure, I am left asking whether to accept Freeman’s (2012: 20) claim that “mobility is an inherent characteristic of policy”?

Empirically, this paper draws on research I conducted as an employee of the New Orleans city government’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) in 2012-2013 as well as follow-up work done independently in 2017. I collected written questionnaires from all 25 active security districts in 2012 asking about their histories, management, and activities, and collected public and administrative documents and data for each district, including budgets, financial filings, enabling legislation, and referendum voting records. I also conducted in-depth interviews with leaders of three prominent districts, interviewed police officials regarding the department’s interactions with security districts, and interviewed two state officials responsible for creation and oversight of special taxing districts. To bolster the policy mobilities angle, I also interviewed three academics and a journalist who have researched the model. Finally, to analyze the politics of security districts, I conducted exhaustive searches of local media coverage and coded the documents in NVivo. The work done as an OIG employee and the resulting report (OIG, 2013) inform this article, though the present analysis is entirely my own and does not reflect the views of the OIG. I submitted a public records request in 2016 to obtain copies of notes, data, and work papers from that project. My research on security districts and my time as a New Orleans resident leave me well aware of the model’s drawbacks, including problems with racial profiling, concerns about equity, and the potential to undermine public service provision; in analyzing the mobility of the model, I am in no way endorsing it.

Geographies of policy mobilities

The policy mobilities framework is a growing body of work within geography and related fields that applies a critical lens to the formation and movement of policy ideas in a globalizing world (Baker and Temenos, 2015). Key elements of this approach include a focus on assemblage, the contingent and embedded interactions of diverse policy elements, contexts, and circuits and flows that shape specific examples of policy (Anderson and McFarlane, 2011; Baker and McGuirk, 2016; McCann, 2011; McFarlane, 2009); mobilization, the actions and processes that cause policies to move, including the ways ideas are packaged and marketed and the networks of consultants and policy boosters who do the mobilizing (McCann and Ward, 2013; Peck and Theodore, 2010; Ward, 2007); and mutation or translation, the recognition that policies change as they move, emphasizing the context-specificity of packaging and re-grounding and the variable and incomplete ways policies move (Freeman, 2012; Peck, 2011; Peck and Theodore, 2015). Policy mobilities scholars scrutinize common sense notions of the rational transfer of “best practices” (Cook, 2015; McCann and Ward, 2012, 2013). They take a constructivist view, emphasizing the ways policymaking and mobilization play out across uneven terrains of power, knowledge, and meaning (Baker et al., 2016).

This paper works within the policy mobilities tradition and engages identified areas for refinement of the approach. First, the paper provides a case study of mobility at the local/intra-urban scale, which has heretofore been lacking (Temenos and Baker, 2015). Second, the security districts example provides an opening to further problematize the dualism between mobility and immobility that McCann and Ward (2015) identify in the literature. Third, it contributes to debates around policy failure and adds to the small-but-growing body of empirical work on failure (Chang, 2017; Lovell, 2017a; Wells, 2014). In the following paragraphs, I expand the framing for each point in turn.

First, questions of scale are particularly important for thinking about mobility. Most policy mobilities research pays careful attention to mobile policies’ interactions across scales, but less attention has been paid to the question of scale in defining and conceptualizing the mobility of policies. Temenos and Baker (2015) raise the question, what scale of movement is required to count as mobility? Effectively, policy mobilities research has been conceptualized as inter-urban or translocal interaction at various scales – regional, national, and especially global (Lovell, 2017b; McFarlane, 2009). Intra-urban transfer or other possible scales of mobility have been largely overlooked. I use the case study of residential security taxing districts to re-open this scalar foreclosure. The policy has been mobile at the intra-urban scale, spreading across neighborhoods within New Orleans, but has been immobile at inter-urban scales. I find the policy mobilities framework to be equally applicable as I analyze the local mobility of security districts and as I examine the policy’s immobility at wider scales.

Second, this analysis allows me to engage McCann and Ward’s (2015) discussion of the problematic dichotomization of mobility and immobility. Policy mobilities scholars emphasize the indeterminacy of mobility and immobility, noting the often incomplete and contingent nature of mobilization, treating mobility as a continuum rather than a dualism (McCann and Ward, 2015; Temenos and McCann, 2013). Despite the nuanced theoretical lens, policy mobilities scholars continue to focus empirical work on cases of mobility. Fast policy examples like the rapid spread of conditional cash transfer programs remain emblematic (Peck and Theodore, 2015). The focus on mobility is so complete that immobile policies have become a sort of excluded “other” in the literature (McCann and Ward, 2015). Tied to this, the predominant methodology has been one of “following the policy” (Peck and Theodore, 2012), an approach that has been criticized as inherently applicable only to mobile policies (Clarke, 2012; Jacobs, 2012; Lovell, 2017a). Research focusing specifically on immobile policies promises to contribute new perspectives to this body of work. The security districts example blurs the lines of mobility, enabling grounded discussion of (im)mobility.

Third, McCann and Ward (2015) also highlight the dichotomization of success and failure in policy thinking. Policy mobilities researchers have critically engaged this dualism, paying keen attention to the constructed nature of success. They have from the beginning identified and discussed the ways success is created, owing more to ideology, power, and politics than some objective tallying of results or efficacy (McCann and Ward, 2015; Peck and Theodore, 2010). They have also identified the ability of policies aligned with dominant ideologies to “fail forward,” especially in the context of a normative embrace of experimental or entrepreneurial urbanism (Lauermann, 2018; Peck, 2011). However, the theoretical troubling of success and failure has not been matched by empirical diversity. Despite nuanced treatment of the creation of success and failure in the policy mobilities literature, most empirical material has centered on “successful” policies (McCann and Ward, 2015; Temenos and Baker, 2015; Temenos and McCann, 2013), which creates a risk of “unintentionally reifying mobile (and often neoliberal) urban policies as successful” (Stein et al., 2017: 38). The empirical imbalance stands in contrast to the critical constructivist perspective and makes it all the more problematic that most attention has been paid to policies designated successful by policy actors, raising important questions about the types of lessons we could learn by applying the policy mobilities lens to failures and indeterminate or intermediate cases (Jacobs, 2012).

Recent papers have begun the work of extending the empirical scope of policy mobilities analysis to consider different types of failures. Wells (2014) chronicled abortive attempts to sell and redevelop a city-owned building in Washington D.C., using the concept of “policyfailing” to describe how this setback paradoxically strengthened the public property disposal apparatus in the city. Chang (2017) examined a Chinese eco-city pilot project that was never built, yet strongly influenced later eco-city projects through ideas, networks, and technologies that remained in circulation. Lovell (2017a, 2017b) showed how an Australian electric smart-metering experiment was designated a failure and mobilized as a negative model, a cautionary tale from which later smart-meter programs conspicuously distanced themselves. Stein et al. (2017) analyzed failed transfers of BID policy to Germany, pointing out that even hyper-mobile policies do not successfully take hold in every attempted replication (see also Baker et al., 2016). As expected, the empirical diversification created by these papers has sharpened the treatment of success and failure in a literature that was developed through research on successful and mobile cases. In the end, I temper the suggestion that the security district model is a failure because it has not been mobile beyond the city, but the paper nonetheless contributes to ongoing discussions around failure.

Part I: Mobile and successful?

Situating security districts

The policy model that forms the empirical focus of this paper is the residential security taxing district (“security district”). Security districts are entities that have been legally empowered to levy taxes to provide supplemental security services within the boundaries of a delimited residential area. The model is essentially a hybrid of the more common BID, homeowner association (HOA), and gated community models. It melds the legal form of the first, the residential neighborhood character of the second, and the security focus of the third. To situate the emergence and spread of the security district form in New Orleans, I briefly examine the model’s links with each model.

Business improvement districts

The legal framework for security districts is derivative of the BID model. BIDs are public–private partnerships through which businesses within a defined area, usually a downtown or commercial strip, agree to make mandatory contributions (taxes) to be used for extra services within the district – things like infrastructure repairs, beautification, security patrols, and place-marketing. Many trace the origins of the BID model to Canadian cities in the 1970s, but they have become a global urban phenomenon in recent decades, with their use in New York City during the 1990s serving as the hallmark example (Briffault, 1999; Ward, 2007). The model varies some from place to place, particularly between countries (Cook, 2008; Stein et al., 2017; Ward, 2010), but its mobilization has produced a clearly linked global model. Within the policy mobilities literature, BIDs have become an emblematic example of mobile neoliberal policy.

Interestingly, New Orleans was the site of the first American BID, establishing its Downtown Development District (DDD) in 1975 (Brooks and Young, 1993). This fact is often cited, but is generally treated as a one-off example that had little influence on the later spread of BIDs. However, the unheralded New Orleans BID played a key role in the emergence of the city’s security districts. The DDD was formed during the administration of Moon Landrieu, a former mayor and patriarch of an influential political family – his son Mitch was mayor and his daughter Mary was a US Senator. Another daughter, Shelley Landrieu, was part of the coalition that helped establish one of the first security districts in the Garden District neighborhood. “We took that model and tried to copy it,” she stated. “The DDD model came under my dad, and our model was based on the DDD” (Personal interview, 2017). The Garden District had voluntarily funded private patrols for years beforehand, but creating the security district allowed them to formalize and require participation. The security district model is directly derivative of the BID model and replicates its basic form and legal structure as a special taxing district. However, the location in residential neighborhoods is a clear departure from the BID model, as is the exclusive focus on security rather than a suite of business-friendly services. Security districts are a spin-off of the BID model, not a replication.

Homeowner associations and gated communities

The other key parallel models to security districts are the HOA and gated community. If BIDs provide the legal structure that security districts employ, the ends to which they employ it more closely mirror those of a gated community or suburban-style development with an HOA. In the second half of the 20th-century, residential construction in and around American cities has increasingly been achieved through complete-neighborhood developments (Low, 2003). With support and encouragement from the federal government and industry associations, these developments adopted the HOA as a standard feature (McKenzie, 1994). McKenzie emphasized that covenant restrictions and the structuring of HOAs create “mini-governments” that have substantial power to create legally binding rules. The standard justification is that HOAs allow people to select a neighborhood with their preferred level of services and that they prevent conflicts over standards of upkeep and appearance to maintain property values (Briffault, 1999; Tiebout, 1956). For better or worse, planned developments with HOAs have become a ubiquitous feature of suburban and urban life. Their premise – making neighborhood standards binding and forcing free riders to pay their share – is also the driving motivation for security districts.

The second example, the gated community, is a more extreme sub-set within the planned residential development trend. Gated communities share many of the characteristics of typical developments – an HOA and covenant restrictions designed to create and protect property value – but add an outsized focus on safety and security. They use gates and walls to restrict access to the neighborhood, following a logic of security through exclusion and control. In her ethnographic study of American gated communities, Setha Low (2003) highlighted the importance of fear as a primary motivation for gated community residents. The residents she interviewed were not swayed by data showing low crime rates, with or without gates, across the types of middle- and upper-class urban and suburban spaces they inhabited. They were driven by fear of urban crime and fear of a racialized other, and their quests for a nostalgia-tinged illusion of security led them to adopt a “fortress mentality” (see also Blakely and Snyder’s, 1997 Fortress America). Low’s ethnographic account closely parallels the perspectives I encountered in conversations with residents and leaders of New Orleans’s security districts.

Security districts

If HOAs and gated communities are more common national models for establishing binding neighborhood rules and providing extra security services, why has New Orleans seen the evolution of a distinctive residential security taxing district model? To begin, it is important to note that HOAs and gated communities both exist in New Orleans and the wider metro area, but as elsewhere they are found almost exclusively in new developments. Second, creating a neighborhood association in an established neighborhood is common, and might even bear the HOA name, but very rarely achieves the level of control and legal power that pre-established HOAs exert in new developments. This reality exacerbates a perceived free rider problem, from the perspective of residents who would prefer enforceable standards or extra services like those managed by HOAs. Establishing a special taxing district makes contributions mandatory and grants powerful collection and enforcement mechanisms. The manager of the iconic Garden District security district explained their thinking:

The Garden District had (voluntary-contribution patrols) for twenty years before the security district. Most neighborhoods started that way, but it was a lot of work getting people to pay and many never do pay, but they still get the services. The way to make this work and let people pay less is to make it mandatory. (Personal interview, 2017)

Mimicking the BID structure is a post hoc solution for older areas where legally binding HOAs or gated communities are not possible. Leaders of the Lakeview security district described its founding as the neighborhood “taking a stand” and saw it as a success, claiming “we’ve got a good thing going” (Personal interview, 2013). This hybrid model emerged in New Orleans as individuals and groups drew on locally available resources – in this case intimate knowledge of the BID structure and strong political connections – to produce a novel solution that reaches the same ends as the more common HOA model but via an alternative pathway that fits the contextual constraints.

New Orleans context and governance

As noted, the security district model is unique to New Orleans, so understanding its emergence requires a brief review of the city’s complex history. Historically, the city was a hub for the slave trade and a key port anchoring the Deep South’s plantation economy. Despite the popular notion of New Orleans as a diverse cultural “gumbo,” a highly unequal racial caste system was established early and in many senses persists to the present (Fussell, 2007). The Uptown area has long been (and remains) a primary residential zone for the traditional white elite. This elite enclave might seem a world unto itself, but it is spatially proximate to some of the city’s poorest (majority-black) neighborhoods – a proximity that the city’s elite find uncomfortable and often cite as a source of fear and a motivator for forming security districts.

Though the white elite remain entrenched in their Uptown enclaves and retain substantial power, the city has experienced major shifts in the past half-century. Residential segregation became more pronounced, driven by redlining and discrimination, construction of segregated public housing, and white flight motivated in part by school de-segregation (Fussell, 2007). Through demographic shifts and with voting rights gains, a new black political machine came to power in New Orleans in the 1970s. Though black politicians dominated City Hall and the small black elite and middle class saw substantial gains, many of the city’s residents of color remained impoverished and ignored (Schneider, 2018). At the same time, New Orleans faced devastating corporate departures by the oil industry in the 1980s and long-term population loss since the 1960s, tied to the decline of the port and shipbuilding workforces.

In recent decades, worsening municipal finances strained already weak local governance. The city’s longstanding divisions along lines of race and class contributed to a tradition of governance mired in clientelism, machine politics, and corruption. Mistrust and turf battles enabled the emergence of a parallel machinery of satellite governments, a balkanized system of mini-fiefdoms that shields a significant share of the budget from public scrutiny. These quasi-government entities control everything from the water system and the flood levees to the French Market and the Audubon Park and Zoo.¹ The satellite entities are layered like geologic strata, with successive political regimes carving out domains of influence and entrenching their control through the creation of satellites (Schneider, 2018).

The implications of this troubled local governance situation are perhaps best illustrated in the realm of public safety. Opinion surveys of residents reveal widespread fear of crime and low levels of satisfaction with the police (NOCC, 2009, 2016). Overall crime has declined since the 1990s, in line with national trends, but the city’s murder rate has consistently ranked at or near the nation’s highest (Wellford et al., 2011). Far from solving these problems, the city’s criminal justice systems have come under withering criticism for dysfunction, corruption, and racial bias. In response, the federal Department of Justice imposed consent decrees and mandatory reforms on both the police department and the sheriff’s jail operations in 2012. The flawed criminal justice system interacts with basic drivers of crime that are stark and multi-generational – poverty, violence, discrimination, and disinvestment – to create a city that residents widely perceive as unsafe.

Security districts emerged in New Orleans in response to these crime trends and perceptions of insecurity, with a backdrop of low confidence in city government in general. Neighborhoods with sufficient resources gave up on citywide action and turned to localized solutions. Schneider (2018) identifies this trend in his analysis of New Orleans’s quasi-government satellites and situates security districts within the context of the black urban regime that dominated the city from the late 1970s to 2000s. He describes security districts as an example of “ring fencing,” a sort of counter-component endemic to the political context but outside its mainstream – a way for wealthy and middle class white groups who had lost their hold on city government to create “club goods” for themselves and their neighborhoods. The black elite and middle class likewise embraced security districts and treated public safety as a club good, increasing patrols in their own neighborhoods while citywide safety improvements remained out of reach.

The security district landscape

In its specifics, the security district model is very rare outside New Orleans, but within the city it has become common. As of 2012, the city had twenty-five active districts that controlled combined annual revenues over $5 million and included an estimated 16% of city residents within their boundaries (OIG, 2013).^2,3 At present, if the surrounding suburbs are included, there are thirty-five active security districts in the New Orleans metro. Each district is independent, representing replications of a model rather than expansion of a singular program.

Security districts are disproportionately found in wealthy or middle-class areas, with the median household income in districts nearly 40% higher than for the city as a whole (OIG, 2013). Security districts also have a much higher proportion of white residents than the city overall, though when examined in detail it becomes clear that the more important trend is for security districts to form in racially homogeneous areas – including both white- and black-dominated enclaves (OIG, 2013). Nearly half of districts have populations that are more than 80% white residents, while nearly half have 80% or more black residents – though the black-dominated districts tend to be smaller, comprising individual subdivisions in New Orleans East (Figure 1). In terms of wealth, the only security district with lower income levels than the city average is found in Mid-City (OIG, 2013), though this distinction is unlikely to last. The district was established in 2008 covering a large, economically and racially diverse area that has recently been one of the city’s fastest gentrifying zones thanks to the construction of a massive new medical campus nearby. Interestingly, this makes Mid-City the exception rather than the rule in terms of gentrification – in most cases, security districts have been established in demographically-stable neighborhoods, while multiple security district proposals in gentrifying or rapidly changing areas have been rejected by community members, as discussed in Part II.

Figure 1.

Security districts and city racial demographics. Percent white by Census block groups, 2010, (Adapted from OIG 2013).

Establishing a security district is a complex task, so typically a preexisting neighborhood association will spearhead the effort. The districts are officially created as special taxing districts, requiring passage of enabling legislation at the state level, coordination with city officials to appear on the ballot, and finally requiring a majority of residents to vote in favor when a referendum is held.⁴ Thus established, a security district is officially a public entity and its fees are added to residents’ property tax bills. In 2013, fees ranged from $110 per year to more than $500, with an average of $325. On average, security district fees accounted for 10% of residents’ property tax bills (OIG, 2013). Given the difficulty and expense, what drives individuals and groups to form security districts?

Perceptions of crime and safety are central motivators to establish security districts, though the connections are not simple or direct. New Orleans has well publicized crime problems and a record-setting murder rate, but security districts are not well suited to address serious crime. The Inspector General’s report found security districts did not have a statistically significant effect on violent crime or murder rates, though they did decrease property crimes like burglary (OIG, 2013). Furthermore, the neighborhoods adopting security districts are not the ones most affected by crime. The wealthy and middle-class neighborhoods where security districts have formed would be expected to have low crime rates in general, and indeed the Inspector General’s report found that to be the case.

Interviews made it clear that residents’ motivations center on enhancing the sense of safety (Personal interviews, 2013, 2017), echoing Low’s (2003) finding that racially tinged fears perpetuate a fortress mentality that is disconnected from actual risk of victimization. Uptown residents felt their proximity to low income areas and public housing projects made them targets for property crime. Residents with more distance from “bad” parts of town emphasized the tenuousness of their localized tranquility and the need to protect it. One resident referred to his lakefront neighborhood as “the Mayberry of Sodom and Gomorrah” (quoted in Wise, 2013: 42), a distinction that he felt the security district helped maintain. According to these internal logics, security districts are widely viewed as successful – successful in protecting the privileged elite’s sense of security, while leaving citywide public safety dilemmas unaddressed. The high profile and perceived success of early security districts set the stage for the model’s mobilization.

Discussion (Part I)

Analyzed at the scale of the city, the security district model fits the classic framework of policy mobilities analysis. The first few districts that were established in the late 1990s were positioned as successes and provided a template for other neighborhoods to follow, and follow they did. Now twenty years out, there are thirty-five residential security taxing districts in the greater New Orleans area.

The Garden District security district, established in 1998, is the most prominent district and it quickly became the hallmark example – the policy “brand” (Temenos and McCann, 2013) that is held up as a template and justification. The Garden District’s extra security patrols are very visible and reinforce the perception of the neighborhood as a protected haven for the city’s elite. In parallel, the Garden District’s executive director Shelley Landrieu became the key agent in security district mobilization – the policy “guru” (Ward, 2011; see also McCann, 2013) who facilitates its spread. Most neighborhoods interested in replicating the model begin the process by contacting her and emulating the Garden District framework. Eventually, she established a consulting firm through which she manages the day-to-day operations of four Uptown security districts and dispenses advice to prospective startups (Personal interviews, 2013, 2017).

The security district example has all the hallmarks of a policy mobilities case study. The model assembles and reworks locally-familiar components – the BID model, satellite governance, private security patrols – to offer a novel and context-relevant solution to a perceived problem. The model addresses an issue of importance to a powerful sub-group and broadly fits within the dominant neoliberal framework and governing regime. Its designation as a success was solidified through reference to a visible early example that served as a policy brand and its diffusion was facilitated by the emergence of a well-known policy guru. It was packaged and mobilized, with small, context-dependent variations in each new re-grounding. At the local, intra-urban scale, the security district model seems just as much a classic policy mobilities case study as its famous relative, the BID. The question of success and mobilization then becomes one of scale – at what scale(s) must a policy travel to be considered mobile?

Part II: Immobile and unsuccessful?

The security district policy model was mobilized and replicated in neighborhoods across New Orleans, but has not garnered attention or been copied in other cities. Recent events have also revealed the model’s local limits – it has been broadly adopted in wealthy and middle-class, racially-homogenous areas, but has been rejected in gentrifying areas and is not considered viable in high-poverty neighborhoods (where public safety shortcomings are greatest). In Part II, I examine these limits to mobility to draw a more complete picture of security districts and use them to further engage debates around policy mobilities and questions of failure and success. I also examine the post-Katrina era as a seemingly prime window for inter-urban mobilization and contemplate why that mobilization did not occur.

Politics of security districts

Examining the politics of security districts in New Orleans will help contextualize their spread and identify their limits. Amidst the rapid diffusion of security districts across New Orleans’s neighborhoods, the model has generated surprisingly limited controversy. In one early case, with the establishment of the Garden District Security District, local representatives of the ACLU spoke out against the model as “racially polarizing” and balkanizing public safety in favor of the wealthy (Anderson, 1998). Around the same time, a local policy center detailed arguments for and against the model, but declined to support or oppose creation of new districts (BGR, 1998). In general, however, the model has seldom received more than passing coverage in the local press and is rarely publicly addressed by city or state politicians; debate is largely confined to the neighborhoods involved and usually centers on questions of cost.

As noted above, security districts are not the exclusive practice of one group – the city’s white and black elites have both embraced the model – but do tend to occur in racially homogenous neighborhoods. This homogeneity likely explains why questions of race and equity are muted in security district debates and why questions of cost, taxation, and property value dominate. Supporters present themselves as beleaguered citizens taking a stand to protect their families and property because city government has been incapable, a narrative that is often repeated by politicians to justify their support (or at least acceptance) of the model (e.g. Anderson and Weiss, 1998). Where opposition to districts exists, it most commonly takes the form of conservative resistance to “double taxation” – residents argue that they are already paying for police and public safety through their regular taxes and that they should not need to pay extra “voluntary” taxes to make up for the broader system’s failings (e.g. Kemp, 2010).

Security districts have drawn some more generalized and progressive criticism, framed around concerns of racial profiling or that privatized policing reinforces existing inequalities between neighborhoods and balkanizes urban governance, but the districts have not been a major focus for the city’s robust criminal justice reform movement. Given the magnitude of more fundamental problems, it seems security districts have been seen as a minor component of the larger problems of an ineffective and biased public safety apparatus. Even in a recent case in which a security district officer was accused of racially profiling two young black men, one of whom was fatally shot in the ensuing confrontation that also left two police officers wounded, the blowback fell into the broader conversation around police reform rather than emphasizing the security district role (e.g. Louisiana Weekly, 2015).

A notable exception to the generally uncontroversial reception has come in gentrifying areas, where multiple security district proposals or campaigns have failed. Proposed districts in gentrifying areas like the Marigny and Bywater have met fierce opposition and wide-ranging critiques. In these cases, debate has encompassed topics beyond cost, tying into the themes of justice and equality that motivate the broader public safety reform movement (e.g. Adelson, 2015; Morris, 2013). There are various possible explanations for the districts’ rejection in gentrifying areas, including tensions between longtime residents and newcomers, which intersect with questions of race and class. Plumbing the full depth of those debates and dynamics would require ethnographic work that is beyond the scope of this paper, but on a general level I conclude that the contentious politics of gentrification and the diversity of those areas have precluded the easy acceptance that security districts often find in established enclaves.

Post-Katrina New Orleans and the limits of security district mobilization

The security district model had brushes with failure as it was rejected in some gentrifying areas, but it also had another, more ambivalent failure – the failure to be mobilized and replicated beyond the city. With the only notable exception being a cluster of replicas just up the road in Baton Rouge, no other cities have followed the model of using special taxing districts to address neighborhood-scale policing in residential areas.⁵ At the inter-urban scale, the model has been immobile. Before returning to the question of whether this immobility is a type of failure, in the following paragraphs I examine a key moment when mobilization seemed possible, but did not materialize – the post-Katrina era, when New Orleans captured global attention.

Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in August 2005 and was a historic disaster for the city, necessitating more than a decade of rebuilding and revival efforts. The recovery has been notably uneven across socio-economic lines, reinforcing existing race- and class-based inequalities and creating new patterns of difference, including unleashing widespread displacement and gentrification (Campanella, 2013; Ehrenfeucht and Nelson, 2011; Gotham and Greenberg, 2014). The storm and recovery also catalyzed the city’s conversion into a policy petri dish, a living laboratory where an influx of recovery funds was channeled into a plethora of neoliberal policy experiments, beginning with the privatization of immediate relief operations and extending into nearly every facet of the city’s life and governance (Gotham, 2012; Gotham and Greenberg, 2014; Katz, 2008; Peck, 2006). This was the shock doctrine in practice (Klein, 2007) – the hurricane opened the door for long-pursued neoliberal “reforms” to be implemented, such as converting public schools to charters (Akers, 2012) and razing public housing projects for “redevelopment” (Colom, 2014). The post-Katrina era put New Orleans under the microscope of national media, think tanks, policy evaluators, academics, and politicians for an extended period. The so-called thought leaders of neoliberalism descended on the city both literally and metaphorically and centered it as a place where policy ideas could be demonstrated.

When this spotlight landed on the city, the security district model was already well established, and a steady stream of new neighborhoods continued to adopt the model in the recovery era. If the model were to be mobilized beyond the city, the post-Katrina era provided an ideal opening. Experts and newcomers descended on the city and it was integrated into urban policy circuits and discussions as never before. Why, then, did the model remain local, seemingly ignored and anonymous to the wider world?

Discussion (Part II)

The residential security taxing district model was labeled a success and mobilized in New Orleans but has remained mostly confined to the city. However, it is not a lack of relevance or some critical specificity of the New Orleans context that have limited the spread of the security district model. The BID model it is spun off from is found in numerous contexts, suggesting the security district legal form also would be broadly viable, and the HOA and gated community models with which it shares common goals are also ubiquitous. Furthermore, the model clearly is not constrained by incompatibility with the dominant neoliberal paradigm – the BID and HOA models of which it is a hybrid are classic examples of neoliberal urbanism and security districts comfortably fit the mold.

Furthermore, the niche that security districts fill exists in cities across the country and beyond – allowing wealthy and middle class urban enclaves to retrofit themselves with some of the extra services like security patrol that are routinely built into new-development neighborhoods through HOAs (Ellickson, 1998). Although a critical lens reveals how the model problematically reinforces inequality and sidesteps desperately needed debates around public safety and criminal justice reform, it does not necessarily undermine the model’s chances of mobilization. Indeed, many policing policies are subject to similar critiques – for example, broken windows or stop-and-frisk approaches – but have still been widely mobilized and adopted. In short, the security district model seems a “perfect fit” for this neoliberal era with rampant inequality and increasingly tribal politics.

The preconditions for mobility seem to be present, including a widespread niche and compatibility with the dominant paradigm, but the model has not been mobilized beyond New Orleans. In short, being a locally “successful” and much-replicated neoliberal policy experiment has not been sufficient to initiate inter-urban or larger-scale mobility. What explains this disconnect? First, beyond simply fitting the mold – satisfying some niche and being compatible with dominant paradigms – a policy must be known and appreciated to become mobile. “A policy ‘model,’ for example, can only exist as a model once it has enrolled an ‘audience’ of interlocutors and would-be emulators” (Peck and Theodore, 2015: xxiv). It must be visible, legible, and appreciated by individuals and organizations that inhabit the circuits and spaces of policy.

As established above, post-Katrina New Orleans had visibility in abundance. For a time, it was a center of national and international attention for urban thinkers, policy makers, scholars, and media. In the view of these experts, however, New Orleans was a basket-case in need of saving, a blank slate available for building something new, a petri dish fertile for experimentation (e.g. Peck, 2006). The experts did not come to observe and learn, but rather to experiment and teach. For example, Shelley Landrieu, the local guru for security districts, could not recall a single instance of visiting experts or emissaries from other cities inquiring about the model or asking to come see a district “in action” (Personal interview, 2017). With their focus on implementing and testing outside ideas, the experts did not seem to notice New Orleans’s own neoliberal experiment with security districts – it remained invisible and anonymous.

Additionally, in typical cases from the policy mobilities literature, policies are adapted and implemented by city governments or other official actors (e.g. Baker et al., 2016; Bok and Coe, 2017; Larner and Laurie, 2010; Ward, 2007; Wood, 2014). In contrast to these examples in which “middling technocrats” link the global circuits of consultants, experts, and institutions to territories where policies can be implemented (Roy, 2012), in the security district case there is no direct city role. Residents or neighborhood associations are the primary actors who play the linking role and do the actual work of establishing each district. These actors have fewer resources and shorter reach, are less organized, and are likely to be less connected to (inter-)urban policy networks. In short, the lack of a city government role complicates the mobilization and re-grounding of an urban policy model and highlights the centrality of city government actors in policy mobilities. In the security district example, rather than a central role for urban officials, the focus shifts to internal neighborhood dynamics and collective action questions.

Conclusion

Research on policy mobilities has yielded important advances for understanding urban policy by focusing on the complex, interconnected, and power-laden processes of assemblage, mobilization, and mutation at play. There has been a recent push to diversify the empirical focus of the literature, most notably incorporating examples of policy failure. This paper contributes to the diversification through an analysis of the residential security taxing district model from New Orleans. The paper addresses two primary objectives: first analyzing the successful mobilization of the model at the intra-urban scale, and second examining the absence of inter-urban mobilization beyond the city. The example highlights the importance of scale, as I showed that although the policy has not been mobilized at the broad inter-urban scales that are central in the literature, its mobilization at the intra-urban scale nonetheless exhibits many of the processes typically discussed in policy mobilities work. This reinforces the relevance of Temenos and Baker’s (2015) question, what scale of movement is required to count as mobility? From this case, I conclude that the concepts developed in the policy mobilities literature are perfectly valid for small scale, intra-urban mobility, particularly when a series of independent entities (neighborhoods) are mobilizing and re-grounding the policy.

The bigger question in this case centers on mobilization across scales, which returns me to the question of whether immobility is a type of failure (Freeman, 2012). Examined at the broad, inter-urban scales that dominate policy mobilities research, the security district model appears bounded and grounded – it is immobile. It has not transcended the New Orleans context, even with the sustained attention the city received. However, I hesitate to declare it a failure on these grounds. First, failure implies an unsuccessful attempt – at mobilization in this case – but there is no evidence anyone has tried to export the policy beyond the city. Second, as success and failure are relative and socially constructed, it is difficult to declare failure for a policy that within its milieu has been positioned as a success. Instead of failure, I propose anonymity as the appropriate concept. The policy has been invisible to potential emulators from elsewhere and has remained anonymous from the perspective of urban policy circuits. If, as Peck and Theodore (2015) argue, a policy “model” must have an audience, then perhaps security districts are merely a policy or practice, not a model – at least viewed from outside New Orleans. Not quite a model, yet not truly a failure. In the world of fast policy, broad mobilization could demarcate a division between practices, policies, and models, but I conclude it does not constitute a division between success and failure.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the anonymous reviewers for insightful comments that helped sharpen the paper. The paper also benefitted greatly from feedback received in a series of sessions at AAG 2017 on policy failure; thanks to Cristina Temenos and John Lauermann for organizing and to all the session participants. Last but not least, thank you to everyone at the New Orleans Office of Inspector General and to the interviewees and research participants. Any mistakes or omissions are my own.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Aaron Malone is a PhD candidate in the Geography Department at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

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