Harvard Square by Catherine J. Turco

Author:Catherine J. Turco
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BUS067000, Business & Economics/Urban & Regional, SOC026030, Social Science/Sociology/Urban
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2023-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

Whose Square Is It?

DiGiovanni had a point when he criticized the Defense Fund for wanting to preserve the Square in their “own image and likeness.” The Defense Fund’s first fund-raising call in 1979 asked for donations to help “Save Our Square,” the “our” implying perhaps not just a sense of communal ownership but also a particular definition of community. This was a tricky issue to get around.48 How can you organize around a collective interest without having at least some collective in mind? (And, in defense of the Defense Fund, the Business Association had been grappling with this very same issue ever since its founding, as we’ve seen.) Nevertheless, once the Defense Fund began to execute its mission of protecting the Square for a common interest, its members could not escape the uncomfortable question of just whose common interests they really represented, whose Square they were protecting.

For a landlord such as DiGiovanni, the question of whether the Defense Fund should be able to interfere in his business was, on the one hand, a straightforward question of private property rights. However, it was also an issue of market logic—and by that logic, the Defense Fund was defining community too narrowly. The theory of “highest and best use” in real estate says that a property should be put to whatever use will result in the highest feasible value for it.49 The idea comes out of neoclassical economics’ focus on maximum productivity of assets, and by the 1980s it had become the dominant way of thinking about leasing in real estate circles. If a property could yield more in income from a chain store than a local operator, then that was the best use for it. A key assumption held by many landlords was that a chain’s ability to pay higher rent reflected, at least in part, its greater appeal to customers, and, so, this approach to leasing necessarily incorporated people’s preferences and interests. That is to say, the market was already responsive to the community—the community comprising all the citizen shoppers who were, or might be, drawn to shop there.

From this perspective, the community had plenty of say in what happened in the market. People exercised their voices and revealed their preferences every time they bought a new pair of jeans at the Gap.50 Interference from the Defense Fund was not just unnecessary; it was distortionary. The self-regulating and democratic market would get things right if left alone. If some people did not like the direction in which the market was going, that was simply because their preferences had grown out of step with those of the prevailing culture.

From 1988 to 2001 the Business Association president was a real estate agent and property manager named Tod Beaty, who embraced this perspective. As he put it in 1993, “developers are really on everyone’s side” because he felt they would never make decisions that made the Square less attractive for consumers.51 Lou DiGiovanni’s son, John, who was becoming a more active participant in the family real estate business as his father grew older, agreed.

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