Business Improvement Districts - New York Style
Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) are transforming New York and the rest of urban America. TEAM tourism and regeneration specialist, Philip Cooke, travels to New York to find out why voluntarily paying more business taxes is becoming so popular.
 My first contact with Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) was a presentation given by American Dan Beiderman to the Urban Regeneration Conference in Liverpool in which he described how BIDs were completely transforming New York and the rest of urban America.
I was inspired to go and find out more and spent a few days emailing Dan, researching BIDs on the internet and setting up appointments with the Presidents or the Marketing Executives of several very different BIDs as well as the man responsible for BID development across the whole of New York City.
 In New York, a BID is formed when a group of property owners and their surrounding community elect for additional self-taxation. This sounds unlikely but it happens all over the city because BIDs improve the commercial viability of their neighbourhood and this, in turn, uplifts property values. The key business rational for BIDs in New York is the uplift in long-term property values within the BID area - the gold standard of the development industry.
I was immediately surprised by the smallness of each BID and how different they all were, despite often being side by side. Even the largest BIDs cover no more than 10 city blocks (about a mile) in any direction and each BID District has its own very strong and distinctive identity.
 The first and most important task for a BID is to make the district clean and safe - all BID streets are spotless and secure, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, without fail. After a BID has done 'clean and safe', it addresses 'identity and beautification'. You always know when you are in a BID zone and which one it is as there will be a whole range of street hardware announcing its presence, including litter bins, floral decorations, flags, banners and signs.
You will also know when you leave a BID area suddenly, the streets are dirty, the area dingy and you sense that it's no longer quite so safe. Consequently, Manhattan is made up of neighbourhoods that are either strikingly well managed, or strikingly unmanaged.
The Times Square Alliance
 You can't get mugged in Times Square today if you tried, said David Billotti, Director of Public Relations for the Times Square Alliance. "Crime is at an all-time low, but people have forgotten that, ten years ago, Times Square was a virtual no-go area for New Yorkers."
Today, it is so popular that our biggest problem is pedestrian congestion, continued David. So many tourists and visitors are on the streets all day long that it now makes life difficult and dangerous, and so we are working with City Hall to widen pavements, create overflow routes and even change traffic flows."
I was told that the first thing the Times Square BID had to do was to work with the NYPD to blitz crime out of the area through a zero tolerance strategy. Once this was achieved it deployed a massive clean - up campaign and set about marketing the area to grow visitor numbers and create retail and hospitality demand. This demand then attracted investment in the shape of new shops, restaurants and hotels and the Times Square Visitor Centre.
The annual budget of the Times Square BID is $6m and it re-invented itself as a marketing organisation in 2003 when it renamed itself the Times Square Alliance, to emphasise its new role as a destination marketing organisation.
Having virtually eliminated fear of crime, the Alliance is now focusing on the fear of terrorism. New Yorkers aren't worried about being robbed any more", says David. "But they are scared of being blown up. So we now deploy anti-terrorism police, instead of petty crime police. We use highly visible sniffer dog patrols, which the public absolutely love. The dogs are great- they are specifically trained to be nice to people, as well as detect explosives."
The Fashion District BID
 Just half a mile south of Times Square is the Fashion District, which is made up entirely of the old 'sweatshop' clothing factories that were built in the 20s and 30s, half of which now stand empty. There is no 24/7 economy here, this is an unattractive neighbourhood with a single struggling industry base - fashion and clothing.
Thirty years ago there were 200,000 sewing jobs in New York, today there are just 4,000, most of which are in the Fashion District, which is now the only remaining manufacturing zone in the whole of Manhattan Island!
Consequently, the Fashion District BID is essentially an economic development organisation, set up to revitalise this neighbourhood and to reposition it as the fashion manufacturing centre of New York, to develop the businesses that are located within it and to help market the fashion products that are made there.
The Fashion District BID is unlike any other in Manhattan, because its mission is to rescue the area's industrial heritage. It has its own Trader Education Programmes established to teach its small business members how to export their products, grow their company, use new technology and train their staff. It also works with real estate and property brokers to promote new uses for the old factories, primarily by turning them into fashionable design studios.
 But the BID has had to clean up the streets and make them safe. It has also decorated the area with brightly coloured banners and street decorations and installed a visually striking Information Centre on 8th Avenue which, mysteriously, didn't contain a single brochure or map!
I found out why the next day when I interviewed Barbara Randall, the Director of the Fashion District's BID, who explained that it was not a tourist information centre at all. In fact it was a Fashion Industry Information Centre and contained a computerised database of every fashion company in the District and every product made there.
The Lincoln Centre BID
At the other end of Times Square, Broadway runs up alongside Central Park and into Columbus Square and the Lincoln Centre for the Performing Arts, and another different BID zone.
The Lincoln Square BID is relatively small, with a budget of about $1.3m, and it concentrates on the cleanliness, safety and beautification of a high arts area which contains the Lincoln Centre, several theatres and cinemas, the Time Warner Centre and the Trump Tower Hotel.
This BID zone is only about 1000m long and about 500m wide, but every day it will have eight people cleaning the streets and painting and repairing street furniture, removing fly posting, cleaning garbage bins, and shovelling snow in the winter.
Despite the fact that it contains the Lincoln Centre, which is the largest performing arts centre in world, the Lincoln Square BID is not yet a strong marketing organisation.
Monica Blum, President of the Lincoln Square BID, commented: My problem is that Lincoln Square is much more than the Lincoln Centre, containing some very big players, such as the Trump Tower and the Time Warner Centre. They also want and deserve a presence in the marketplace and we have real problems presenting a united front.
The City of New York Department of Small Business Services
My final appointment was with George Glatter, Assistant Commissioner for the Department of Small Business Services for New York and responsible for BIDs across the whole city. The key difference between UK and New York BIDs is - who pays? George told me from his office near Ground Zero. In New York it's the property owners who pay the assessment (tax). They can pass it on to tenants if they want, but they are happy either way because a good BID will increase property values, sometimes massively.
There are nearly fifty BIDs in New York City, explained George. In many cases they have become the local authority by default. I think your London Boroughs might feel very threatened by BIDs and see them as muscling in on their territory. Also, the traders might not want to pay extra tax, if they do not enjoy the long term benefits ofsecure tenancies.
Time will tell if BIDs are right for the UK in their proposed form, but I know that they are radically transforming New York, ensuring that it stays one of the world's most exciting cities.
Philip Cooke can be contacted at philipcooke@team-tourism.com
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