Nanny Nanny, Boo
Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues.
It wasn’t easy to keep up with the business flooding through the Council as the latest session neared its end. Amid the bills dealing with Greater Southeast Community Hospital, authorizing development bonds, addressing land deals in the West End and over the Center Leg Freeway, and placing moratoria on new Adams Morgan taverns, an interesting pattern nonetheless emerged. In just this past week, the Council agreed to halt single sales of alcohol on H Street for three years, introduced legislation clamping down on fireworks sales and use, and gave preliminary approval to a measure capping payday loan interest at a 24 percent annual rate of interest.
The vibe given off by the Council cast them squarely in the role of public nanny. It’s also clear that the Council’s actions were not exactly a temporary departure from form. During last year’s crime outbreak, the Council quickly signed on to Mayor Williams’ crime prevention measures, which included expansions of video surveillance and a contentious 10 p.m. curfew for people under the age of 18. In the past year as well, Council members, and particularly Ward 1 representative Jim Graham, have acted swiftly to close down District businesses connected with crimes, even when it appears that there was little the business could have done to stop the criminal act. Increasingly, it seems that the Council’s first inclination when faced with a problem is to restrict choice.
It isn’t difficult to understand why. As the District’s population has grown, patience with lawlessness and the city’s neglect of quality of life issues has grown thin, and demands upon public officials to improve order in the city have increased. In many ways, the new lack of patience is a welcome and healthy thing; it’s right that public officials see how frustrated residents are with lagging public services and feel pressure to fix things.
At the same time, the Council seems all too willing to reach for the easiest and most facile conclusions available to them. Ward 6 Council Member Tommy Wells, in pushing for the H Street singles moratorium, directed constituents toward numbers showing drastic drops in police calls in Mount Pleasant since a similar ban was passed there four years ago, blindly assuming, it seems, that absolutely no other trends have been at work since 2003. Of course, during that same time period homicides across the city have fallen by a third; should we likewise attribute that decline to the Mount Pleasant singles ban?
Picture taken by the The Skipping Hippy.
The payday-lending bill is a more peculiar example. The notion of usurious companies trapping innocents in a negative spiral of growing debt tugs at the heartstrings. On the other hand, the price of a loan to high-risk borrowers is high interest; without adequate compensation for the assumption of such risk, such loans will not be made. Is a 400 percent “annual” rate too high? Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t, but if capping payday lending rates at 5 percent of that level drives the industry out of the District, the Council will have succeeding in eliminating a large source of credit for the city’s poor. Perhaps Mary Cheh, Ward 3 Council member and sponsor of the bill, should go to the customers of these businesses and tell them why she believes they are not responsible enough to handle borrowing money like the rest of us.
Which isn’t to say that her motives are bad in this case. Rather, she displays a tendency, along with much of the rest of the Council, to eliminate choice—the easiest route—instead of tackling the difficult underlying issues that lead to those choices in the first place. The problem on H Street manifestly is not single sales of beer. It is the presence of a large number of underemployed, under-skilled, and poor individuals, whose problems are not easily solved. So rather than solve them, the Council chooses to place a nice stalking horse of a band-aid over them in the form of the singles ban, to assuage the concerns of those who want order and to make life more difficult for the vagrants in the hope that they’ll then behave or move to someplace else, all because they can no longer buy one can of beer.
And this seems to be the way we do things now. It’s hard for us to see how to improve the earning status of low-income individuals enough to free them from the need to use payday lenders; since we can’t tackle that issue, we eliminate the lenders. We don’t know what to do about children suffering from too much time and too little supervision, so we ban them from the streets at night and take away their fireworks and hope they don’t find some other trouble to get themselves into. Despite a long-term drop in crime in this city, we still face high and stubborn levels of violence, and because the police can’t make it go away quickly, we shut down any business unlucky enough to find itself in close proximity to some argument gone wrong.
There are times when restrictive policy is justified. From my perspective (and I know this isn’t necessarily a perspective others share), the benefits to banning smoking in public places and the benefits to curtailing gun ownership outweigh the costs. In those cases, it’s also clear that the problem being addressed is actually the problem being addressed. The smoking ban isn’t a lame effort to target some more stubborn and sensitive issue, and gun restrictions aren’t attempting to mask some more delicate and intractable problem. Agree with those positions or disagree, there is at least clarity as to the issue and the goal.
But not so for the Council’s new nannying. Under pressure from those fed up by a lack of order in the District and unsure how to solve the deep divides between the haves and have nots, the Council has taken the easy route, striking quickly and determinedly at the most superficial of things. And that’s disappointing. It’s disappointing that we so gladly accept these new curtailments of choice, and it’s disappointing that we don’t call the Council on the game it’s playing.