Chris Webster comments on NYT Article
One of the most knowledgeable and perceptive people studying the rise of private local government is Chris Webster, Professor of Urban Planning and Director of the Centre for Education in the Built Environment at Cardiff University in Wales. He has studied gated communities in China and is co-organizer of an international network of scholars studying the rise of private communities around the world, the next gathering of which is in Glasgow, September 18-19, 2003.

Chris has two websites that people interested in this subject should check out. One is
www.spontaneous-cities.com, and the other is www.gated-cities.com.

Chris has these reactions to the NYT article, and in my view he has framed the issues beautifully:
"I'm a self-confessed neutral in the private governance debate but find the kind
of behaviour documented in Evan's wonderful article as appalling as the
antagonists undoubtedly do. Some of the questions raised for me are: (a) Is this
just a step in an evolutionary process by which society works out an acceptable
institutional framework for governing neighbourhoods effectively. There is
evidence of a process at work, with laws appearing to curtail HOA powers,
requiring them to hold minimum sink funds etc. Such laws are appearing thick and
fast in countries all around the world. Their purpose - to constrain the
competition for shared resources within privately governed neighbourhoods - a
competition that appears to be frequently stacked unacceptably in favour of
powerful members of committees, developers etc. One could assume that in twenty
years time some of the worst excesses of the emerging market in private
neighbourhoods will have been ironed out. (b) Alternatively, will private
neighbourhoods burn themselves out with litigation. In which case, we are
witnessing a market-led social experiment that might end up proving, after all,
that traditional municipal government is in fact a rather efficient
institution. One should ask the question - if municipal bureacracies are such an
inefficient way of managing cities at the fine grained scale (as alleged by HOA
protagonists), why did they emerge in the way they did in the first place? They
must be good at something. c) Related to this - are the transactions governed by
neighbourhood governments (traditional of proprietary) what James Wilson has
called 'Sovereign Transactions' - transactions where the integrity of the state
is at risk. Also, are they charactersed by strong asset specificity? On both
accounts, there may be apriori reason to govern them by bureacracies. (d)
Conversely, have municipal governments over-reached themselves during the past
100 years by accreting neighbourhood level governance functions to their other
bureacratic functions? (e) Is the scenario depicted in Evan's piece a peculiarly
North American phenomenon? Does proprietary n'hood government have to evolve
that way or might it follow a different path in societies with different
cultural values? It is widely accepted in some Asian countries without strong
traditions of modern municipal government."