White Settlement, Ave Maria, Sex Offenders, and Exclusionary Vibes

The blogosphere has been abuzz with critical commentary on plans to develop a conservative Catholic neighborhood surrounding Ave Maria University's new campus in Florida. (See, e.g., this post, this one over here with lots of comments, and this one with an avalanche of comments.)  By and large, bloggers have been incredibly hostile, dubbing the community a "Catholic Jonestown."  There's been less reaction so far to an interesting New York Times story (registration required) on "White Settlement, Texas" and the controversy generated by a mayor who wanted the town's name changed to something less polarizing. His constituents overwhelmingly voted to keep the name unchanged, and some are now trying to remove him from office. Finally, I've blogged before about sex offender-free subdivisions and posed the question of why so much energy has been expended on excluding sex offenders, as opposed to say murderers or burglars, from neighborhoods.

In a forthcoming Michigan Law Review article that I've just posted on SSRN (you can download it for free here), I connect all of these issues. In that paper, I present a partial defense of Ave Maria's efforts to promote residential Catholic homogeneity; I argue that community names like "White Settlement" can be just as bad as blatant, overt, racial exclusion from neighborhoods; and I suggest that information asymmetries explain the rush to ban sex offenders, but not other felons, from new neighborhoods.   

Below is an abstract for the article.  The abstract focuses on the theoretical aspects of the paper, but pages 9-22 and 48-55 of the article discuss the Ave Maria and sex offender controversies, as well as the legal and public policy issues surrounding community names like "White Settlement."

This article addresses a central question in property theory: In a world where an owner can exercise the right to exclude third parties from his resource in any of several ways, what causes him to adopt a particular exclusionary strategy?

Orthodox property scholarship has focused a great deal of attention on those exclusion rights that arise under trespass law. This paper suggests that much can be gained from thinking about exclusion with a bigger tent approach, one that is sensitive to the ways in which non-trespass-based exclusion rights substitute for in rem, trespass-based rights. Non-trespass-based exclusion rights include exclusionary vibes, which are communicative signals that make undesirable third parties feel unwelcome, as well as exclusionary amenities, which impose a disproportionate tax on the undesirable by bundling permission to use a resource with an obligation to pay for a separate, polarizing resource.

It turns out that information asymmetries often drive owners' decisions about what exclusion strategies to adopt. Where third parties seeking to use property possess private information about their own preferences, behaviors, and intentions, and the owner cannot discover this private information at a low cost, the owner is likely to delegate the exclusion function to the would-be entrants by employing non-trespass based exclusion strategies. By contrast, where there is little private information involved, or private information can be discovered by the owner at a low cost, the owner is more likely to employ trespass-based exclusion rights.

This relationship between information asymmetries and the choice of exclusion strategies suggests new possibilities for creative government intervention in those settings where particular exclusion strategies conflict with public policy interests. It is well understood that the government can impose outright prohibitions, proscribing some forms of exclusion and permitting other forms. This is the strategy the government has adopted in the housing discrimination arena. Alternatively, the government can adopt subtler but equally effective strategies that regulate access to private information as a means of altering owners' incentives to exclude. Megan's Law is the most prominent and far-reaching example of the subtle approach, although many aspects of information privacy law affect owners' incentives in much the same way. In short, by rendering private information public or public information private, the state can alter, sometimes radically, the mix of exclusion strategies that resource owners employ.

Comments

[Kimballcorson]

One aspect of the Catholicism noted in regard to "Ave Maria," or the putative "Catholic Jonestown," and of religions or religious thinking more generally, is to shun or ostracize at some level or another those who think differently or hold different views. The motivation to do so is I believe to reinforce faith-based beliefs and to avoid their dilution or challenge, in the absence of verifiability. The core problem with this very common approach, however, is the concurrent veneration of truth by those doing the ostracizing or shunning, which is the Achilles heel of most religions or religious thinking, as Nietzsche well noted. Lies become lived, layered and compounded. We see this substantially now on a national political scale in the United States among those in power. Too few seem to recognize the central problem identified here or much care.

Ensenada, BC, Mexico

[farshid rahmani]

salam hawariyou

[Kimballcorson]

Actually, my comment above is more generalizable than I indicated, reaching to any belief set perceived to be important, which is not readily verifiable, whether religious or not -- all as Lior Strahilevitz' article makes clear.

[Roach]

Why should every town be equally diverse. A coherent community cannot be formed without some sense of majority control, whether that town is majority of one or another ethnicity, religion, or whatever. We're a big country; not every town needs to resemble every other town, complete with the Applebee's.

If we're all diverse, there is no diversity.

[Roach]

The article also disappointed in its typical journalistic laziness because it suggests the racial issues in the town from the name have to do with African-Americans. In fact, the history of race in America is quite complicated, in constrast to the mythology of American racism peddled by the Times. All of the surrounding towns were mixed settlements of friendly indians and whites; White Settlement was not.

[Lior]

Roach - I think the N.Y. Times article (which I took you to be criticizing) made it clear that the name arose in the context of Caucasian-Native American race relations, but it now has a different meaning. Whatever its origins, the town name in 2005 has effects on the ways in which Caucasians and African Americans think about the community.

As for your "Why should every town be equally diverse?" question, I'm not sure why that question is relevant, since no one I know takes the position that every town should be equally diverse. If you actually read my article, you'll see that I make out a case for some forms of religious homogeneity in neighborhoods, particularly when the religion in question is marginalized in broader society. But I also take the position that 100% Caucasian communities are undesirable on social welfare grounds.

[Roach]

While I can't say I'd want to live in a 100% caucasian community, I don't see why it's a problem on social welfare grounds. For starters, it may surprise you to learn, some parts of this country are nearly all white, such as Nebraska and West Virginia. More important, is it so obvious in the rest of the country that the benefit to the group that wants to live in a racial covenent community exceeds the harm to those excluded? The usual presumption behind contracts and a free society is that in most cases voluntary associations (and disassociations) are wealth maximizing as they show "revealed preferences." All male and all female clubs, for instance, persist over time because both groups want it that way, so long as each group has a vital single sex club to join, e.g., college fraternities.

One dirty little secret of the white middle class in this country is that they don't really believe in multiculturalism, at least if that means sending their kids to schools where whites will be a minority and there will be significant numbers of black kids, not least because most whites suspect that large numbers of black kids mean higher rates of violence and disorder in their schools. Why else do white liberals talk a big game about the subject, but move out of neighborhoods in droves if blacks move in and send their kids to elite private schools if they live in big cities--Chelsea at Sidwell Firends--when the only thing wrong with the "bad schools" of the city they live in is that there are lots of black people in them? So this suggests that people's "revealed preferences" even in a world without formal race covenenat communities do not accord with your hypothesis.

It's not so obvious forced integration is wealth maximizing, if by wealth maximizing, you mean aggregate welfare based on individual utility. I'd be interested to see a sketch of your case.