There’s a crisis coming. Chicago is running a half-billion dollar deficit. New York City’s FY2011 deficit is nearly five billion dollars. Two months ago, Warren Buffett reduced his exposure to municipal bonds. According to the Pew Center on the States, there’s a trillion dollar gap between what states can pay for retirement benefits, and what those retirement benefits cost.
Municipal employee job losses are approaching 500,000 according to the National League of Cities and services are getting cut. Here’s the President of the National League of Cities and Mayor of Riverside, CA from last week:
“For local governments, unemployment and foreclosures resulting from the Great Recession translate into too few revenues making it increasingly difficult to fund or satisfactorily maintain many basic services—not only parks, libraries, and public works projects but also public safety, police and fire services.”
If cities aren’t already in a widespread crisis, they’re about to be. As Rahm likes to say, you never want a serious crisis to go to waste. So let’s prepare.
In this crisis, presently cities have two options— privitization and Chapter 9. I don’t want to be tried in a court run by a for-profit conglomerate that also owns the police and the prisons. Perhaps its the idealist in me, but I want this crisis mean more than privatization or bankruptcy. I want it to drive a need for people to connect locally, and I want it to further blur the line between people and the government they elect. I want it to usher in a new era of civic responsibility.
This past winter, the District of Columbia had its biggest snowstorm in 88 years. The entire city (and the federal government) was generally shut down for days, and Mayor Fenty was lambasted in the national news for being unprepared with his snow plows. As I was shoveling my sidewalk, I was listening to my able bodied neighbors complain about how the government hadn’t plowed the district 48 hours after the snow fell. The thing is — together, we had the people to plow the streets and the sidewalks ourselves. I count 60 households on my block of row houses. With a bit of organizing, we could build a small sno-litia to clear the street and sidewalks for the entire block. What we lacked was the connection to one another and the ability to organize. It was easier to complain in the warmth of our own homes.
Gov2 startup SeeClickFix makes public issues in a municipality public but it likely increases the cost of government services. By making it easier to submit service requests, more service requests government needs to do and that creates cost. Take a look at issue #47461 that complains the District of Columbia isn’t mowing the small park built with recovery funds. Here’s the park in Google Street View. If you turn the view around you’ll note that there are plenty of mowed lawns. These people are not without lawnmowers. Why not organize and take care of the park? That’s civic responsibility.
My bet is that with a bit of organizing that park could become a neighborhood’s responsibility. This may seem harsh. You pay taxes. That’s the government’s job, not yours. Remember, the assumption of this article is that we’ll soon be living in near bankrupt cities with minimal public services.
As a developer I think technology can play a role in this. I think things like the Neighborhood Watch can be revitalized with new technology. When my alarm system goes off, why does it not send an SMS to my neighbors? Why shouldn’t it turn on the flood lights of everyone in the neighborhood? Next to its “I want this fixed too” button, SeeClickFix should have an “I’ll help fix this, too” button. It could even keep track of how many people helped their neighborhood. Let’s have a ranking of who most helpful neighbors are. And heck, government should reward them with tax incentives.
Software alone won’t solve the complex problems of government spending. A network of techno-utopian vigilantes with private jails in their basements are just as terrifying as the aforementioned private Police/Court/Prison corporation. But what gets me excited about the pending municipal crisis is that we’ll be forced to rethink how cities can operate. Necessity breeds invention and the coming municipal crisis could usher in an era where the self-interest must become more aligned with the public interest. Intelligent, real-time civic responsibility is something that can be baked into the political model and rewarded.
The quote “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” has a different ring to it when you’re standing there looking at the park across the street wondering when it’s grass is going to get mowed.
If you’re interested in this stuff, you should consider applying to be a Code for America Fellow. Disclaimer: I am on their board of advisors.
