Association dues start the body politic down the slippery slope to
property ownership as a precondition for the franchise. This is
appropriate in a condo association but in an NRP setting such a
stipulation works to further distance structurally disadvantaged
potential participants in an ostensibly egalitarian process that in fact
is steered by propery ownership in neighborhood after neighborhood.
The structural disadvantage comes from status characteristics - tenants
are not stakeholders the way homeowners are stakeholders. When a
streetlight petition comes around that adds significantly to the
property tax, an individual homeowner may readily see the pocketbook
issue. A tenant on the twentieth floor of a public housing highrise -
that's me, folks - doesn't see the world through those glasses. A tenant
in an owner-occupied duplex might understand the connection between the
streetlight cost and the potential increment in his or her monthly rent,
but the ownership part still isn't there. A tenant who has lived for
many years in a 30-unit building may not have the same feelings about
ornamental streetlights that a tenant who just moved into the building
from somewhere in South Dakota and is starting a new job or a career as
a post-secondary student at one of the city's academic institutions.
Whatever the differing tenant opinions, the ownership part isn't there.
In some of the city's neighborhoods, tenants comprise a large majority
of the actual - not just the property-owning - population. 70% of the
actual voting population in Whitter are tenants, but very few tenants
participate consistently over time in the affairs of the NRP
organization. Owners do this. Especially business property owners.
Doesn't make them bad, they're just more intensely interested. This
commonplace reality conflicts with the egalitarian pretensions of the
NRP citizen participation model just as similar tensions existed in
earlier Minneapolis neighborhood organizations in the decades before NRP
was born. Anybody remember the fights in the Cedar-Riverside PAC in the
1970s? We avoided these class-based problems in and around Nicollet
Island because we had a 100% tenant-based PAC and a completely separate
business association and nobody pretended there was much institutional
commonality of interest between the commercial warehouse operators and
their workforces, for example, and the occupants of the rental
properties on the North Tip of the Island.
NRP attempts to gloss over these differences and the result is that
tenants generally come in a distant second in participation in
neighborhood decision-making. Adding a price for admission would make
that participation gap greater.
A similar argument can be generated about cultural minorities,
particularly first-generation households where English is an unfamiliar
language.
At Horn Terrace we go to great lengths and will probably go to even
greater lengths to develop inclusionary processes for all public housing
residents but I gotta tell you, folks, that good intentions do not
readily generate communitarian capacity across such a diverse group and
the NRP model does not and probably can not functionally match our zeal
in this regard. Adding a price for admission as a voting resident in the
neighborhood association - there are twenty-eight NRP neighborhoods with
public housing highrises within their borders - would make it much less
likely that more than a handful of such low-income residents would ever
take a hand in their immediate neighborhood's governance. This is normal
and predictable and simply means that the egalitarian pretensions of the
NRP program have yet another easily demonstrated limit at the
neighborhood level.
Fred Markus, Horn Terrace, Ward Ten
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