(Im)mobile and (Un)successful? A policy mobilities approach to New Orleans’s residential security taxing districts

Abstract

Policy mobilities scholars critically analyze the processes of assemblage, mobilization, and mutation that shape policy circuits, but have been critiqued for an over-emphasis on successful and mobile cases. This paper adds to a growing effort to diversify the empirical scope of the field through an example that blurs the boundaries of mobility/immobility and success/failure. I examine residential security taxing districts, which are derived from the common business improvement district model but which in their specifics are unique to New Orleans. Security districts are quasi-public entities established within elite urban enclaves to collect taxes to fund neighborhood security patrols. First, I analyze the model’s rapid spread among the city’s neighborhoods, demonstrating the relevance of the policy mobilities framework in a case of intra-urban mobilization. Second, I explore why the model has not spread to other cities, particularly given New Orleans’s centrality as a site for neoliberal policy experimentation in the post-Katrina era. These post-disaster interventions applied preexisting policy prescriptions and were driven by outside experts, while the city’s own neoliberal experiments were ignored. Troubling the association of mobility and success, I conclude that this immobility should not be considered failure so much as anonymity.