One political faction obtains a solid majority and uses it to push through a far-reaching initiative, only to have their dominance threatened in a subsequent election marked by newly-energized opposition and relatively low turnout. The 2010 mid-term victories of the Republican party? No, it’s the “Pioneers strike back” victories in the just-concluded elections for the Columbia Association Board of Directors.

Tom Coale has already done a good wrap-up, so I’ll confine myself to a couple of thoughts continuing the analogy above. First, what I’ll call the “anti-Arbor” faction faces a decision on strategy similar to that of the anti-Obamacare GOP post-2010: They apparently don’t have the votes to reverse the decision outright, so they face a choice between trying to shape the Inner Arbor plan more to their liking, making compromises where they can find them, or throwing sand in the gears of CA governance to try to delay things until they can re-take a board majority and kill the plan then.

I have no idea which strategy they’ll choose, and in one sense I don’t care—they’ll do what they want to do regardless of what I think. I’m more concerned about the strategy of those who favor the Inner Arbor plan and the accompanying 21st century redevelopment of Columbia. In a recent post unsuccessful candidate Julia McCready rues the “sliminess” in the electoral process. I understand her being upset, especially about untruths allegedly spread by the incumbent. Tom Coale also writes of “blatant and intentional lies” from Inner Arbor opponents. Going back to the GOP analogy, it sounds like someone’s been exercising their inner Karl Rove (or Lee Atwater, to use an example for an older generation). However I think the operative advice here is, “Don’t get mad, get even.”

How to do that? In another post Julia looks to the passing of the Pioneer generation: “… none of us are immortal. The time will come when those in power are gone.” Unfortunately I think this is like the Democratic party looking to demographic change for its salvation. Consider that even 70-ish Inner Arbor opponents can expect to live another 16 years or so if male, and almost 19 years if female, and they may attract younger proteges and supporters in the meantime. Waiting in and of itself is not going to win the day.

What will? I think Tom Coale has the right idea: “forward-thinking candidates” are going to have to build their own networks of dedicated supporters, people who will turn out reliably to testify at CA board meetings and vote in CA and village board elections. This will require not just online activism but old-fashioned offline relationship building and dues-paying, not just for a year or two leading up to the next CA elections but for the long term.

Which leaves me with a final question: Are there enough competent and energetic people who have the patience and stamina for that, especially in an era when Columbia is no longer the “new city upon a hill” but a suburb much like any other? The Columbia Pioneers have spent over thirty years promoting their vision of Columbia; is the next generation of Columbians prepared to spend the next thirty years promoting theirs?

I don’t usually comment on Maryland politics beyond Howard County, but this Washington Post story on Martin O’Malley’s approval rating reinforces an opinion I’ve held for a while: O’Malley seems to be frittering away his second term trying to make himself into a national figure, as opposed to actually doing the hard work of preparing Maryland for success in the 21st century. Maybe this is an unfair characterization; maybe (as with the college tuition and school funding issues mentioned in the article) he’s just had a problem “communicating his accomplishments”.

But it’s a simple fact that the public has a limited attention span, and they can be forgiven for thinking that O’Malley’s top priorities right now are things like gun control and repealing the death penalty, given that those have been most in the news with his name attached. I doubt that either of these issues is on the average voter’s top 10 list of critical problems facing Maryland, and so I’m not surprised that voters are lukewarm in their feelings about O’Malley.

The simple fact is that Maryland voters have no desire to see Martin O’Malley run for president in 2016, and nobody else does either. So why spend the next few years polishing his liberal credentials for the benefit of Democratic activists and primary voters? Why not spend the time building a reputation as someone willing to take on hard long-term issues, like growing Maryland’s economy in the coming age of Federal austerity, ensuring that Maryland’s health care system works well as implementation of the Affordable Care Act goes into high gear, and putting the state on a sound financial footing without resorting to excessive taxes or gimmicks like casino expansion?

Unlike Barack Obama, O’Malley doesn’t have the excuse of facing an implacable Republican opposition capable of blocking his political agenda. If a Democratic governor can’t be effective in Maryland, where can they be effective? And though as a registered Democrat it pains me to say this, right now I’d count both Robert McDonnell in Virginia and Chris Christie in New Jersey (plus Andrew Cuomo on the Democratic side in New York) as doing a better job of actually governing their states than Martin O’Malley.

Over at Columbia Compass Bill Santos has written a great post that brought into focus some of my thoughts around the proposed Inner Arbor project for Symphony Woods. I really like what I’ve heard and seen of the project and I hope it comes to fruition. But… I live in Ellicott City, not in Columbia, and when Ian Kennedy asked people to sign a petition in support of the project I was at first hesitant to do so. After all, I’m not a Columbia property owner, I don’t vote for the Columbia Association board of directors, and whatever money CA chooses to spend in support of the Inner Arbor project is not going to come out of my pocket. Should I just stay out of the controversy and leave Columbia-related matters to the “real Columbians”?

In the end I signed the petition (with the encouragement of Tom Coale), but I still had some residual concerns about doing so. However Bill’s post has dispelled all of those. In particular he demolishes the argument of two Columbia residents that CA is nothing more than a homeowners association and as such has “no business serving others with our monies” by “[putting] CA’s residents’ property (i.e. Symphony Woods) … to the regular service of patrons spanning a widespread geographic area, not just Columbians”. As Bill points out, CA is a tax-exempt organization whose exemption from taxation is specifically conditioned on its “promoting in some way the common good and general welfare of the people of the community” and making its “common areas or facilities” available “for the use and enjoyment of the general public”.

In other words, Columbia is not and cannot be the equivalent of a gated community operated for the sole benefit of Columbia lien payers. To put it bluntly, Columbians have no business telling me that the decisions of CA are none of my business. As a taxpayer I’m in my own small way having to make up for the lost tax revenues due to CA’s tax-exempt status—and of course I’ll also be helping to pay for any county-funded amenities (like a new library) that might be built to supplement the CA-funded Inner Arbor facilities.

Beyond the legalities, I can’t understand why right-thinking Columbians would want to put up a metaphorical wall around Columbia and Symphony Woods. Even leaving aside the original Columbia vision of diversity and inclusivity, the health and well-being of Columbia as a community, not to mention the value of Columbians’ properties, are ultimately dependent on the ability of Columbia to attract the custom and patronage not just of Columbians, but of residents of the rest of Howard County and central Maryland in general.

As I’ve written before, Symphony Woods is not a remote wilderness to be preserved in a pristine state of nature with minimal human presence, it is a park—and as Columbia’s downtown evolves, it will be very much an urban park—whose continued existence ultimately depends on the benefits it provides to members of the community within which it is situated. Declaring it off-limits to compatible uses like an arts district is a recipe for its long-term decline into irrelevance. As Symphony Woods is to Columbia, so is Columbia to the rest of Howard County. If Columbia can’t evolve to meet the challenges of a new time—or more correctly, if Columbians are unwilling to let it thus evolve—then that’s a recipe for Columbia’s own long-term decline into irrelevance. And as Bill points out, that’s a violation not only of the spirit of Columbia but also of the letter of the law under which Columbia and CA are organized.

For the most part I’ve stayed out of the debate over the “Inner Arbor” plan proposed for consideration by the Columbia Association Board of Directors. For the record, I think the idea of having an everyday “there there” in Symphony Woods (i.e., not just Merriweather Post Pavilion) is a good idea; I especially like the idea of building a new Central Branch library as part of an overall Symphony Woods cultural complex. Bottom line: I like the proposal, have signed the petition to support it, and encourage others to do so as well.

However I take partial exception to Wordbones’s declaration that this proposal is an example of the dictum “make no little plans”. At its heart the Inner Arbor plan basically involves constructing an office building, a couple of theaters, a parking garage, and some additional indoor and outdoor amenities. It’s big in comparison to what was previously proposed for Symphony Woods, namely a fountain and a small cafe, but it’s fairly small potatoes in the grand scheme of things.

For an example of truly gonzo development ideas we have to leave present-day Columbia and go elsewhere, in particular to Detroit, the symbol of American urban decay and now the proposed location of the Commonwealth of Belle Isle. Belle Isle is an island in the Detroit River currently used as an urban park; at 982 acres it is about 25 times the size of Symphony Woods and almost three times the size of the area covered by the Downtown Columbia plan. Like most of Detroit it’s fallen on hard times, and the city is trying to figure out what to do with it. A local real estate developer, Rodney Lockwood, has offered the city $1 billion to buy the island and develop it. And not just any old development either—Lockwood proposes to turn Belle Isle into a separate 35,000-person “commonwealth” within the United States, with its own independent (and relatively minimal) government, an almost total exemption from Federal taxes, separate citizenship requirements, and eventually its own currency, the Rand.¹

As the name of the currency might have told you, the Commonwealth of Belle Isle is another in a string of proposed schemes to establish a libertarian society free of government meddling and dedicated to the principles of liberty and free enterprise—the successor to (among others) space colonies, seasteading, and the Free State Project. It also has connections with the Charter Cities movement promoted by economist Paul Romer, which in turn was inspired by the real-life examples of city-states like Hong Kong and Singapore.² And of course—though Lockwood goes to some lengths to deny it—the Commonwealth of Belle Isle could also function as an on-shore tax haven, the chilly equivalent of those sunny Caribbean islands where wealthy people park their assets and U.S. corporations establish shell entities to limit their overall corporate tax burden.

An ambitious plan requires an ambitious approach to promote it. The Columbia Association has provided us with a typical slide presentation, while Lockwood has written a 158-page book set 30 years in the future, as a former resident of Detroit returns to marvel at the transformation of Belle Isle and the consequent revitalization of the regional economy. Admittedly it’s not high on drama or conflict; in one fairly typical conversation the two main characters discuss the fine points of Belle Isle’s real estate tax structure (a variant of 19th-century reformer Henry George’s “single tax”). I doubt that Belle Isle the book will achieve the best-seller status of the works of Lockwood’s hero Ayn Rand.³

Lockwood’s book reminds me not so much of Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead but rather Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, a 19th-century tract-disguised-as-fiction in which the protagonist goes to sleep in Boston in 1887 and wakes up in the year 2000 to find it transformed into a socialist paradise.⁴ Bellamy’s book was surprisingly popular; according to Wikipedia, “It was the third-largest bestseller of its time, after Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. … In the United States alone, over 162 ‘Bellamy Clubs’ sprang up to discuss and propagate the book’s ideas.”

All forgotten now, of course, but not written in vain: The ideas of Bellamy and others eventually were toned down, adapted, and transmuted into the welfare-state capitalism of the New Deal and the Great Society, the milieu from which an idealistic real estate developer named James Rouse emerged bearing the dream of a place that would be “not a perfect city or a utopia, but rather an effort to simply develop a better city”. I suspect the libertarian Belle Isle of 2043, like Bellamy’s socialist Boston of 2000, is a fantasy that is doomed to stay within the pages of a book. But although I’ve been a bit snarky about the concept (though not nearly as snarky as some) I’m loath to dismiss or denigrate the spirit behind it.

I think we could use more experiments in urban living and governance, even somewhat oddball ones. Columbia was a noble experiment, though I think ultimately a failed one: In an America in love with suburbia it inevitably assumed a fairly typical suburban character, and (as I’ve written elsewhere) its relative prosperity and socioeconomic equality is arguably less due to its founding ideals and more a function of its role as a bedroom community for an ever-growing Federal government presence in Maryland.

In a sense the Commonwealth of Belle Isle is a 21st century version of Columbia, projected through the lens of a free market ideology. If any part of the Belle Isle vision comes to fruition it’s possible it will simply become a gated community for the 1% and their domestic servants (or “home managers” as the book has it), a supersized and urbanized version of Gibson Island. But who knows? And if Belle Isle does turn out to be more than that perhaps it will hold lessons for the rest of us. At some point in the future Columbia, Howard County, and Maryland may find that Uncle Sam doesn’t come round with presents as often as he used to. In preparation for that day we need more and better ideas on how to promote private sector economic growth, and we shouldn’t be picky on where we look for them. If an idea is a good one then who cares where we steal it from?

1. According to the Commonwealth of Belle Isle FAQ, individuals seeking to move to Belle Isle “will have to post a citizenship fee, which will probably be in the $300,000 range, plus have a working command of English.” In comparison the total wealth of the median US household is around $60,000, with liquid assets much lower. Although it’s not mentioned in the FAQ, Lockwood has separately proposed reserving 20% of the citizenship slots for non-wealthy but deserving applicants.

2. I should note that Professor Romer’s main foray into real-world charter cities, a proposed venture in Honduras, didn’t go too well; see for example this blog post at Reason.com. However hope springs eternal.

3. It may however be of interest to at least some Columbians: Just as the Columbia Association has been characterized as an over-grown homeowners association, the fictional government of the Commonwealth of Belle Isle resembles nothing so much as a CA on steroids, with its own police force, judiciary, tax system, and currency, but still concerned about the fine details of urban planning, down to the building materials used. This can get a bit absurd sometimes: In the course of giving his friend a tour of Belle Isle one character remarks, “Concrete doesn’t meet our aesthetic test. So we don’t allow any use of it. … In the Soviet era the Russians built the ugliest buildings in the world using primarily concrete. So we figure communism and concrete are linked. Not here! In our free-market world, we go the other direction.”

4. I realize that some may think the real-life Boston of the year 2000 was a bastion of socialism (though no paradise). All I can say to those folks is that they should read the works of Bellamy and others of that time to see the sort of system actual American socialists wanted to establish.