While watching this Ted Talk I kept thinking of the proposal to create a Business Improvement District in Northampton. Often actions speak as loudly as words so examining the current proposals for the downtown area is telling. There is the proposed solicitation ordinance (AKA the panhandling ordinance) and the BID. What these proposals speak to in my view is the apparent belief by some in the business community that the Higgins administration is not paying enough attention to the downtown area. Merchants argue that the streets are a mess and that the panhandlers are out of control which together result in blocked trades, that is, that there are transactions downtown that are not taking place. If there is verifiable evidence an economist might refer to these circumstances as the cause of market failures. When there are market failures the government is usually induced to act in some way in order to enhance the efficiency of the market and to create a better environment for those wishing to trade. The business community is forcing the action in this case, evidently believing that the solution, at least in part, is to institutionalize the problem as Shirky describes in his talk.
Unfortunately business owners are relying on hearsay (anecdotal) evidence to push through the panhandling ordinance rather than presenting hard (empirical) data. For example, how many transactions have been lost? What is the total number of transactions that have occurred? What is the dollar value of the supposed lost transactions? How does this compare with neighboring communities? How many calls has the police department responded to that are specifically related to panhandling in the past five years? How many of those calls have resulted in prosecutions? Regarding the BID proposal, how much has the Chamber spent on sprucing up the downtown area and on its promotion? Should that activity be its charge? And on and on.
Moreover, did you ever wonder what the Gross Domestic Product of the city is? Defined as the total market value of all final goods and services produced within the city in a given year, I don't believe that the GDP is tracked and if it is the numbers have not been widely disseminated to the public. Of course the GDP doesn't account for the hidden economy, that is, the value of the cash or bartered sales that transpire which are not reported, but nonetheless it would provide some measure of the growth or contraction of the local economy.
Until these types of quantifiable measures are enacted and examined I believe that it would be premature to enact new regulatory measures or to create new agencies based significantly on hearsay evidence.
