Creative Resistance to BID Placemaking in Rochester,NY

Abstract

In Rochester, New York opposition by arts organizations, creative professionals and allies coalesced into a No BID ROC campaign to stay a downtown BID project. Based on content analysis of plans, campaign materials and news media, this case study juxtaposes pro- and anti-BID perspectives and, focusing on the narrative and visual strategies including humor and political cartoons, examines the campaign’s “creative resistance” strategies. No BID ROC, focusing on urban democratic governance principles, broke open received BID policy justifications by decoding and reframing the “constitutive storytelling” that policy entrepreneurs have deployed to establish BIDs across the United States.

Keywords

business improvements districts creative placemaking activism urban governance humor

Introduction

In several US cities, residents, artists, and small business owners have begun to question and organize against the establishment of Business Improvement Districts (BIDs).¹ This article examines creative resistance to a downtown BID proposal in Rochester, New York advanced by the Rochester Downtown Development Corporation (RDDC). In the words of one of the artist-activists leading opposition to the proposal, RDDC’s narrative to justify a BID produced “dissonance” between their prior “100% bullish and positive” assessment of downtown and RDDC’s newer claim that the “art sector” was not “creating vitality” downtown. When RDDC commissioned art to enliven downtown as a step toward a BID process, the perception among some artists was “that the real intention was to use the arts to give the community a taste of what a BID can provide.” The way that RDDC linked arts-based activation to a BID proposal created “skepticism of their use of the arts” and sparked organizing efforts that ultimately questioned the BID model itself.

BIDs are generally defined as geographically delimited, assessment-based funding districts with a corresponding management organization (Briffault 2010; Hoyt 2005). While BIDs have existed in other legal organizational frameworks, since the 1990s they most commonly have been nonprofit organizations with majority vote reserved for property owners (Morçöl and Karagoz 2020). New York State uses this model.² BIDs also come in different sizes and are established for particular district types (Mitchell 1999), such as downtowns, redevelopment areas or smaller neighborhood retail corridors.

BIDs are placemaking organizations. To pursue local “livability, diversity, and economic revitalization” objectives (Daniel and Kim 2020, 97), BIDs focus on “clean and safe” campaigns, coordinate services to rebrand and profile their areas, and redesign and activate the public realm, including by harnessing the contributions of the arts and culture (Howe 2024; Schaller et al. 2024; Zukin 1995). The goal is to enhance a given district’s atmosphere and sense of place.

If planning and institution-building processes can be understood as “constitutive story telling” (Throgmorton 2003, 130), then the work of policy advocates, including planners, includes the development and transmission of strategic narratives in order to “emplot (or arrange and shape . . .) the flow of future action” (Throgmorton 2003, 127) across urban geographies. The dissemination of BIDs as placemaking institutions has been built on this kind of constitutive storytelling. In the case of BIDs, Public Choice governance principles based on values like localism, self-sufficiency and jurisdictional fragmentation (Lewis 2010; Morçöl and Zimmermann 2006; Schaller 2019; Schaller et al. 2024) underpin a coherent policy paradigm (Throgmorton 2003; see Hom 2025) to support a district-focused self-taxing mechanism on the sub-municipal level (Lewis 2010; Tiebout 1956). Moreover, the BID governance concept has been widely diffused as consultants sell the paradigm across space and time (McCann and Ward 2012). The resulting constitutive pro-BID storytelling addresses globally networked interests, such as developers and affiliated industry actors, to harness investment (Anderson and Arms 2023). It is also deployed to persuade local stakeholders, including public officials, that there is no alternative to this public-private governance and placemaking regime, or “BID urbanism” (Schaller 2019), to manage the renaissance of their urban centers.

Following the 2008 financial crisis, urban placemaking took on added salience with the urgency also to address storefront vacancies, and many cities turned to arts-focused placemaking to territorially anchor economic recovery. Washington DC’s Temporium program “[s]howcasing the arts” to activate storefronts (Driggins and Snowden 2012, 2) is one such example. Hughes (2020, 27–28) notes that “[c]reative placemaking was born out of a response to the Great Recession” because it “offered a fresh approach for elected officials and local leaders to drive economic development by capitalizing on the unique assets of their place.” Insofar as this approach to economic development dovetailed with ongoing “creative class” (Florida 2002) agendas to attract higher income individuals in creative industries to urban centers (Driggins and Snowden 2012; Frenette 2017; Ponzini and Rossi 2010), it has tied creative placemaking directly to economic growth strategies (Schupbach 2015). Pritchard (2018, 140) further argues “that creative placemaking is a state- and local-authority inspired policy that is wedded, via corporate partnerships, to neoliberalism.” This interpretation can be found in the BID-counter narrative that emerged in Rochester.

Creative placemaking first emerged as a federal government, specifically NEA (National Endowment of the Arts)-supported, place-based inclusive economic development strategy with the additional aim of strengthening cultural producers. The influential Creative Placemaking white paper (Markusen and Gadwa 2010) centered “partnership building” as a way to bring together key people “across sectors (for-profit, non-profit, government, and community) . . . and levels of government (local, state, and federal)” (6). Early on, businesses were seen as key stakeholders, and BIDs were among the grantees to help translate this approach into practice locally (Nicodemus 2013, 215). But relying on organizations like BIDs, especially large downtown or redevelopment BIDs, to implement creative placemaking strategies introduces the potential for mission contradictions (Mushtari 2025; Frenette 2017; Zitcer 2020, 284) as the primary interests of BID stakeholders may not necessarily coalesce with those of local artists and arts organizations or small businesses (Schaller 2019). Consequently, initiatives like the Rochester BID proposal that become locally associated with creative placemaking can produce a narrative “dissonance” during the policy advocacy and planning processes. This became apparent as actors like the Rochester artists began to question widely received and accepted BID policy narratives (Throgmorton 2003), opening up fissures in what seemed like a stable policy consensus. This kind of dissonance can become generative of alternative stories if they are artfully reframed.

Our research presents an “atypical” case study (Flyvbjerg 2006) of a campaign to stop a downtown BID. Since planning for downtown Rochester has entailed the step-by-step layering of new plans onto older ones to reshape its economic trajectory, scrutinizing the various interests involved in these planning and policy conversations required a documentary excavation. We probed the discourses and counter discourses of pro- and anti-BID groups and individuals by analyzing webinars, websites, documents, blogs, press releases, and local news media. Data collection and analysis took place in 2023 and the first half of 2024. Content analysis of these materials and a group interview in May 2023 with three BID opponents led us to organizations, agencies and individuals that had expressed views for or against the BID. We systematically searched their websites and in particular saved BID-related communications of the Rochester Downtown Development Corporation (RDDC), the Partnership for Downtown Rochester (PDR), No BID ROC and the BID Education Committee, and local and state government. We coded 149 documents, websites, and news articles, including 73 with a clear anti-BID perspective, 44 with a pro-BID perspective, and 32 news articles. Open coding helped us to identify themes used in both sides of the debate.

In this article we illustrate how Rochester’s anti-BID campaign focused their message to break out of the discursive frame that establishes BIDs as effective local, democratic governance arrangements to rescue or reinvent urban centers like Downtown Rochester. To do this, we ask the following questions: 1) What key discursive elements of the constitutive story supporting the dissemination of BIDs became the target of creative resistance? and 2) how did the anti-BID campaign in Rochester develop its counter-narrative?

A perspective generally obfuscated by BID policy advocates but deliberately highlighted by Rochester activists is “that BIDs are a form of publicly sanctioned private power” and “not public-private partnerships” (Frug 2010, 12). As the Rochester BID proposal became conjoined with what local artists saw as creative placemaking efforts, they assembled their No BID Roc campaign around an oppositional narrative that used research and visual satire as organizing tools to unmask the private power embedded in the BID model. And this creative resistance produced a storyline that itself became constitutive over time.

Business Improvement Districts and the Neoliberalization of Urban Governance

BIDs are a governance approach in line with Public Choice Theory (Buchanan 1965; Morçöl and Zimmermann 2006; Schaller 2019; Tiebout 1956) whereby “municipalities are granting local clubs of property and business owners the power to manage public spaces” (Hoyt 2005, 26). Public Choice concerns about the friction between universal voting rights and private property rights (MacLean 2017) have been embedded in enabling legislation in states like New York. Indeed, policy advocates have framed property-based voting requirements enshrined in these legislations as a mechanism to democratize local governance, urban place management and service delivery (Schaller 2019). For example, a 2012 Philadelphia report notes, “BIDs are democratic in that the same people who benefit from what BIDs offer are the ones who plan, manage, and finance the BID” (City of Philadelphia 2012, 7). In fact, the underlying institutional models, special purpose and special assessment districts, require that those who pay the assessment must directly benefit (Briffault 2010). In actuality, often business owners (renters) pay while property owners retain majority vote on the boards and reap the benefits of increasing lease and property values (Schaller 2019), thus undermining the one-person, one-vote principle in the governance of selected urban districts (Mallet 1994).

By reifying a nexus between property ownership, taxation and democratic participation, BIDs have supported the neoliberalization of urban governance. Slobodian (2018) notes that “the neoliberal project focused on designing institutions—not to liberate markets but to encase them, to inoculate capitalism against the threat of democracy” (2). In this process of encasing, boundaries “fulfill a necessary function” (2). BIDs fit with this schema, “enhancing demand within a geographically-bounded (and, thus, property limited) commercial space among potential consumers” (Anderson and Arms 2023, 244). As sub-municipal special taxation districts, they provide tangible benefits by redesigning, managing and activating the public realm. BIDs also take on leadership roles in urban planning, including in land use, zoning and transportation policies (Schaller 2019). At the same time, Anderson and Arms (2023) argue that as BIDs work to reposition urban property markets, they facilitate “a form of CMR [class monopoly rent] that, far from rare and exceptional, is now global, a constitutive feature of neoliberal globalisation” (244).

While the BID idea emerged as early as the 1950s (Feehan, Gomez, and Andreski 2005), BID policy advocacy really began to coalesce into a constitutive policy narrative in the 1970s (Morçöl and Zimmermann 2006). Its key tenet, localism, mirrored demands for local problem solving and control made by community activists organizing against state-led, top-down urban renewal planning (Cummings 2001). These demands gave birth to advocacy planning (Davidoff 1965), an alternative planning approach “to redress . . . the imbalance of power” in the existing urban planning regime (Grooms and Frimpong Boamah 2017, 219). Community activists were calling for the design of local institutions, like neighborhood advisory councils, that would have expanded citizen participation and decision-making in land use planning processes (Schaller et al. 2024; U.S. Congress 1974). Paradoxically these activist demands for greater local control echoed key governance premises embedded in the ascending neoliberal discourse that also extolled the primacy of private property rights, urban entrepreneurialism and corporate stewardship (Hackworth 2007; Maskovsky and Brash 2014).

Additionally, with deepening urban crises in the 1970s, policies focused on mitigating economic inequities became increasingly displaced by a political localism that reframed neighborhoods and urban districts as “economic unit[s]” (Cummings 2001, 442), a framing consistent with the BID approach. By the 1970s, The International Downtown [Executives] Association, which had for decades worked on strategies to prevent the further decline of central city business districts, strategically inserted itself into the national conversation. With federal support, it advanced a governance model that afforded key private sector stakeholders greater control over urban districts (Feehan, Gomez and Andreski 2005). Moreover, it parlayed critiques of the public sector and broad-based taxation, both central tenets of Public Choice theory (MacLean 2017), into the institutionalization of BID districts. Through targeted “policy mobility” strategies (McCann and Ward 2012), BID professionals and executives, IDA officials, placemaking and management consultants and public officials spread this governance mechanism from city to city, including Rochester. As a result, BIDs have become a nearly unquestioned go-to institutional paradigm (Frug 2010) to manage urban growth.

Territorially-Focused Creative Resistance

In Rochester, artist-activists did question the institutional rationale undergirding the BID model. In contrast to the privatized notion of local control over urban districts including public and open spaces that inheres in the BID model (Lofland 1998), the anti-BID campaign reconfirmed public space as a site for political mobilization where values associated with democratic life are negotiated. Struggles over the “right not to be excluded” from pursuing a dignified life in the city (Blomley 2020) take place in public space because it functions as a space of “visibility,” drawing the “passersby” into important discussions about democratic governance (Hou 2020, 339). Creativity, including humor, can heighten this visibility, especially if messages are carried across virtual space (for example through the production of memes) into the urban public realm (performative actions that mimic the memes), and back. Through this interactive, reinforcing feedback loop, activists enact their “urban citizenship” (Youkhana 2014, 173) and amplify their concerns.

Creative resistance, or “culture jamming,” is characterized by “creative acts of popular intervention performed by people seeking change” whereby “activists have appropriated, reworked, and disseminated cultural symbols in order to contest meanings and challenge dominant forms of power” (DeLaure and Fink 2017, 6). Cultural forms like memes and humor both “critique” and persuade in order to “invite external audiences across symbolic boundaries, recruiting participants from the ‘other side’ in ways that may undermine the legitimacy of authority figures” (McDonnell and Everhart 2024, 60). One tactic is to infuse “ads, newscasts, and other media artifacts with subversive meanings,” which also helps to “decrypt them, rendering their seductions impotent” (Dery 2017b, 47). Cartoons in particular can serve as “vehicles for education, awareness and debate” (Manzo 2012, 493). As noted, creative resistance intentionally connects the virtual world to “things directly lived, harnessing our online social networks to activist ends” (Dery 2017a, xv) to effect a shift in perspective and to encourage action.

More specifically, a shared focus on territory can serve as the fulcrum for articulating a “common ground” understanding of development dynamics and facilitate an agreed upon “action repertoire,” potentially awakening the concerns of various groups whose interests are intertwined with a given place but have not necessarily overlapped (Briata, Colomb, and Meyer 2020, 456; Youkhana 2014). Creative activism helps to spark debate; it stimulates “emotional affect for the purposes of social effect” (Duncombe and Harrebye 2022, 743). And compelling framing can situate seemingly local issues in a broader systemic context (Miller and Nicholls 2013) to interrogate the neoliberalization of urban governance (Theodore 2020).

The Rochester case illustrates this type of creative resistance. In order to untangle the various organizational actors and funding mechanisms supporting successive BID-like proposals and to present key Pro-BID storytelling elements, the next section first highlights the origins of the 2021 BID proposal. It then describes the emergence of the anti-BID campaign and its effective targeting of the City Council to win a stay. The section that follows interprets the No BID ROC campaign, analyzing how it drew back the curtain on and creatively disrupted the pro-BID actors’ constitutive storytelling blueprint.

Rochester New York: The Case of a Business Improvement District Suspended

Rochester, known as the home of Eastman Kodak, Bausch & Lomb, and Xerox, is a medium-sized city that had a population of 207,274 in 2023, a median household income of $44,156 and a non-white population of 56.8 percent (U.S. Census Bureau 2023). Downtown has concentrated pockets of poverty and a diverse residential base. From 2011 to 2021, Rochester experienced a significant comparative increase in its artist population; it was profiled in 2023 “as one of the country’s top 20 most vibrant arts communities” (Amandolare et al. 2023, 21). A Center for an Urban Future report credits artists with supporting economic growth downtown (Amandolare et al. 2023, 7). Yet arts funding has been characterized by “scarcity” (Frenette 2017, 335). Creative placemaking emerged both to address this “scarcity” and to include artists and cultural institutions in economic development initiatives. This paradigm should not be conflated with Florida’s (2002) “creative class” approach to urban economic growth, which also includes the explicit incorporation of place-based and propertied business interests to pay for and manage arts-focused placemaking initiatives as part of economic development trends “establishing arts districts” (Frenette 2017, 338). However, in practice, not making visible the incompatible interests at work in specific place-based economic development regimes can undermine the creative placemaking paradigm (Bedoya 2013; Frenette 2017).

In Rochester, repeated efforts to establish a downtown BID are embedded in a history of collaboration between business-oriented public and private actors and entities at different scales. These governance networks produced and disseminated planning documents focused on the “enhancement,” “revitalization,” and reactivation of downtown and the waterfront. In keeping with the postindustrial trend to reclaim urban waterfronts (Desfor et al. 2011), the City Council adopted a Local Waterfront Revitalization Program (LWRP) in 1990 (City of Rochester 1990), which was amended in 2011 and 2018 to extend the boundaries through downtown Rochester. RDDC’s draft BID proposal issued in 2014 indicated a “process to explore a BID” had begun in 2011, and a 2013 presentation by RDDC’s director cited already existing smaller enhancement and service districts, which would have been subsumed by the proposed BID.

Crucial to this history is the ROC the Riverway initiative, a public-private partnership (PPP) established in 2018 that benefited from $50 million in state government funding. It has been described as a “concept-level visualization of select” LWRP projects and a “bold and progressive plan to revitalize the severely underutilized” waterfront (New York State and City of Rochester 2018, I-2). The more recent BID effort is portrayed as a natural outgrowth of this PPP, whose Vision Plan drew from an Urban Land Institute and National League of Cities funded Rose Fellowship program to create “an independent downtown/riverfront management entity that would spearhead programming, marketing, business attraction, public space enhancements, and beautification” (New York State and City of Rochester 2018, I-4). The “total project” cost for this “entity” ($10 million) included city, state, private and non-profit support to establish “a long-term funding strategy” (III 76–77). To advance the BID process, the Rochester Downtown Partnership (now called the Partnership for Downtown Rochester or PDR) was established in 2021 as a PPP “between New York State, Empire State Development, the City of Rochester, RDDC, and ROC2025 (PDR, n.d.).” Documents like the proposal for “BID Development Services” submitted by a consulting consortium to RDDC’s President (Civitas and Urban Partners 2022) demonstrate that nationally and internationally recognized BID professionals’ voices, including that of a former IDA president, were prominently represented in the process.³

Pro-BID Storytelling

Proponents frame BIDs as a self-help, even altruistic, democratic mechanism through which business and, by extension, community interests can create urban vitality (Grossman 2010). In advancing this persuasive narrative, BID advocates “tend to have the upper hand because they are usually well financed and well organized” (Mitchell 1999, 59). Consequently, a constitutive policy story has since the 1990s framed BIDs as the only solution to counter urban decline (Frug 2010).

A narrative consistency materializes among Rochester pro-BID entities, their allies in government, and policy advocacy networks including outside consultants. This coherence becomes evident through how they define BIDs over the years.

In their 2014 proposal, RDDC defined BIDs as

. . . a defined district with a self-imposed “common area maintenance fee,” which underwrites enhanced services that property owners and businesses want and that city government is unable to provide. . . By pooling funds, property owners get more and better services . . . and they guarantee consistent levels of services over time and across changes in city administration (RDDC 2014, 5).

A 2022 PDR document offered this definition in the format of an FAQ:

BIDs operate within defined geographic areas (districts) and are formed when the majority of property owners in a given area choose to pitch in and pool resources to fund new programs and services that stakeholders want—and that cash-strapped cities are often unable to fund. . . (PDR 2022).

Collective self-help and business altruism are constitutive principles of this narrative, which praises the property owners who “pitch in” and collaborate to pay for crucial services (RDDC 2014; PDR 2022; Civitas and Urban Partners 2022) and at the same time blurs power imbalances between businesses as landlords and tenants.

This notion of shared responsibility transcends local discourses, as illustrated in the Civitas/Urban Partners (2022) explanation that BIDs function as “a formal entity that allows property and business owners to come together to make a collective contribution to the improvement of their commercial district” (20). During a “Community Meeting” webinar, a consultant from the firm BDS Planning and Urban Design described the attribute that a BIDs is “not a big government entity, but it’s managed by the people who have the most to gain . . . the most vested interest in the area where they’re created” as their “strongest feature” (PDR 2023a, 14:41-14:59). Local media picked up on these formulations: an article in the Democrat and Chronicle noted that BIDs use “their own funding that does not come from city coffers, but instead from the businesses that can directly benefit from its efforts” (Miller 2022). This pro-BID constitutive storytelling reinforces neoliberal and public choice governance tenets: hyper local self-taxation and voluntary self-sufficiency (Tiebout 1956).

Another key narrative element draws forward the 1970s urban crisis discourse (Theodore 2020) to legitimate BIDs as necessary to regenerate urban centers perennially plagued by disorder and scarcity (Elstein 2016); this found echoes in pro-BID advocacy phrasing that BIDs “reduce the incidents of crime” and fund “consistent services over time” (RDDC 2014) in “cash-strapped cities” (PDR 2022). Additionally, in 2022, the new leader at the helm of RDDC, a BID professional from Washington, DC, described BIDs as “tried-and-true tools that help facilitate recovery for downtowns that have experienced challenges” (Jacob 2022). Beyond “recovery,” BIDs were said to “[i]ncrease property values and occupancy rates, grow customers, attract visitors,” so that “Downtown becomes [a] more powerful asset for talent attraction and regional growth” (RDDC 2022, 4).

It follows that stability to ensure growth is a recurring theme. RDDC (2014) offers a “guarantee” that property owners interests will be secured over time, once government authorization for a BID is attained. The draft 2023 plan also justifies this concern: “BIDs are often used as a tool to address capacity challenges and foster vibrancy and activity . . . to ensure a consistent level of service and responsiveness to downtowns’ unique needs” (PDR 4). Proponents see BIDs as flexible, presumably in contrast to sclerotic city government. A 2020 report by a BID consultant hired by the city of Rochester and New York State asserted that a management entity for downtown and the Riverway should be “‘nimble’ with an entrepreneurial spirit” and should “operate ‘outside of,’ but in close cooperation with, City Hall” (Cloar 2020, 8). This expanded understanding appeals to BID policy entrepreneurs across cities. A “Guide for Establishing BIDs” in Massachusetts notes that “BIDs can insulate a district during times of political change . . . and they will transcend administrations” (Massachusetts Department of Housing and Community Development (MDHCD) 2020, 9). Thus, local and national pro-BID narratives normalize the fact that BIDs bypass democratically elected decision makers as a positive aspect of their institutionalization (Schaller 2019).

Emphasizing a unique momentum, BID advocates also offered a celebratory vision of the city’s future: “For the first time, there is public and private sector alignment in support of a BID . . . a moment of opportunity now to reignite the magnetic and bustling heart of Rochester” (RDDC 2022, 2). And “local voices” videos on PDR’s website, which include elected officials and business and property owners, offered persuasive rhetoric to convince the public to act: the City Council President noted “I think it’s critically important to support the vision,” while a downtown real estate developer urged, “Now is the opportunity to shape and find what the future becomes by nature of what downtown becomes.”

The layered character of these public-private governance arrangements coupled with a persuasive and heretofore constitutive policy narrative makes it difficult for the public to link pre-existing districts to new BID proposals and hampers understanding of their purpose, function and funding streams. No BID Roc took on the challenge to uncover and make public some of this history to reveal the continuities shaping the most recent BID efforts. In the Rochester case, these negotiations included interrogating the values embedded in these institutions.

Moreover, No BID ROC activists situated the re-emergence of the BID proposal at this particular time in broader dynamics, locating it in “the kind of neoliberal school of thought where, you know, if you just keep these ideas around long enough, when there’s a moment of crisis, they’ll be ready.” In Rochester, multiple crises converged at this time: COVID, nationwide demonstrations against police brutality and the resignation of the incumbent Mayor.

An Anti-BID Campaign Emerges

Although arts activists initially organized the No BID ROC campaign when arts programming and funding became associated with the BID-establishment conversation, the evolution of the campaign fits into the kind of mobilization Briata, Colomb, and Meyer (2020) associate with territorially focused contestations over power dynamics in planning urban redevelopment. A 2022 spring meeting during which RDDC unsuccessfully tried to persuade local artists of the benefits of a BID and called for “artists to paint storefront windows to ‘enhance the vibrancy’ of the neighborhood” (Andreatta and Sharp 2022; No BID ROC 2022b) is cited by one artist-activist as sparking “alarm.” Thus, concerns that cultural funding might be channeled through business and real estate focused organizations like RDDC and a future BID, instead of organizations governed for and by artists, led to a deeper examination of the proposal (Andreatta and Sharp 2022) and its accompanying constitutive storytelling.

As momentum to establish a BID accelerated, a group of individuals, particularly artists with connections to downtown, formed the “Rochester BID Education Committee” as “an ad hoc group . . . dedicated . . . to researching and promoting critical conversations around Business Improvement Districts and economic development more generally” (No BID ROC 2023a), and a newly formed “Roc Arts United City Committee and an extended coalition of working artists” launched an educational campaign and a petition called “Support the Rochester, NY Art Community, Stand up Against #ArtWashing” (No BID ROC 2022b):

Rochester Downtown Development Corporation recently put out a call for artists to create window displays that must be “positive in nature.” . . .

Putting up positive window decorations to “show what the BID can do” is a cynical attempt to distract from what a Business Improvement District would actually do: Hand decision making powers for downtown Rochester to a secretive entity. . .

Creative placemaking has taken on increasing salience in downtown economic development initiatives (Schaller 2019; Schaller et al. 2024), including in Rochester. Despite best practices established by thought leaders (Frenette 2017; Zitcer 2020), creative placemaking, as in this case, may be redefined through implementation (Driggins and Snowden 2012), and local artists may not always be adequately included in planning processes. The City article articulated this discrepancy: “It may seem odd to anyone unfamiliar with civic battles over BIDs that artists are the frontline of opposition. But artists occupy a unique role in the BID landscape” (Andreatta and Sharp 2022). The petition language, which described BIDs as “a secretive entity,” contests RDDC’s call to engage artists in prescribed ways as part of their effort to provide proof of concept for a BID. In a follow-up newsletter, No BID ROC (2022d) referred back to this, noting: “Using artists to cover up bad policies and empty storefronts is a tactic called artwashing.” The No BID ROC campaign addressed how the creative placemaking paradigm is undermined when business interests try to (re)define and co-opt art for narrow placemaking goals.

Mobilizing Opposition, Targeting City Council

City Council, as the first sign off for drafting a BID plan, became a strategic focus. While a group of fifty-one artists initially signed the “#ArtWashing” petition, by August the campaigners delivered it to City Council with over 800 signatures, demanding a “thumbs down” on a BID and asking for “an accountable and transparent organization” by and for the “arts community.” Even so, Council approved legislation authorizing PDR to prepare a BID plan (Rochester First 2022).

By March 2023, No BID ROC circulated a second petition broadening the campaign’s appeal. This petition, which gained 1,207 supporters, called on City Council to stop the BID and to “invest instead in community-led, democratically-accountable initiatives for downtown that prioritize equity and the needs of the many, instead of the desires of the few” (No BID ROC 2023b). Nearly all of the thirty-two “organizational cosigners” are also listed as members of the No BID coalition. They include a diversity of actors: local businesses such as a cafe, bakery, book shop, and photography studio; advocacy or social justice organizations ranging from the more established, such as Vocal New York and Citizen Action, to more localized groups such as Metro Justice and neighborhood and housing-focused organizations; artists organizations; a union chapter (the Federation of Social Workers) and three independent political organizations or political party chapters (Working Families Party, Green Party, and ROC DSA).

The No BID ROC campaign entered an important political struggle with a “Split the Bill” campaign and rally in September 2023, which homed in on a Mayoral proposal to intermingle funds from an opioid outreach program with “undistributed funding” for a “downtown ambassador” program. The proposal named RDDC as a recipient of these funds, and in voicing her support, RDDC’s president had called it “a demonstration of a program a BID could run” (Schermerhorn 2023c). Consequently, No BID ROC argued that the bill would serve as a “stepping stone for RDDC’s takeover of downtown Rochester” and presented a dilemma for Councilmembers who supported opioid outreach but might question BID proposals (No BID ROC 2023e). At this “Split the Bill” rally, City Councilwoman Stanley Martin, recognized the broader anti-BID coalition in thanking “workers who are actively fighting against the BID, because this fight is about race; it’s about class; it’s about who has access to resources and who doesn’t.” Soon afterwards, No BID ROC (2023f) announced that funding for the ambassador program had been “quietly shelved.”

Nevertheless, the draft BID plan was released November 2023 (PDR 2023c). No BID ROC continued its work. Reframing PDR’s 2022 “local voices” videos featuring powerful pro-BID figures, the BID Education Committee launched a “Community Insights Campaign” including “local voices” in January 2024. Along with the petition and videos from a July 2023 rally, these indicate the multi-organizational, multiracial and cross-class support No BID ROC attracted. By February 2024, the anti-BID campaign reached a turning point. At a Council hearing for which No BID ROC had mobilized participation (No BID ROC 2024b), over 150 people signed up to speak, and Council began to shift. Submitting an anti-BID letter signed by small businesses and property owners into the record (Jacob 2024), Councilmember Lightfoot joined a group of Members already concerned about the BID. Shortly afterwards, PDR and RDDC announced “there is not presently the political will and majority support needed from Rochester City Council to establish a Business Improvement District” (PDR 2024). The campaign announced: “We can make our community stronger, together. AND WE HAVE! HOLY SMOKES FOLKS! WE STOPPED THE BID (for now).”

Creatively Resisting BIDs

The Anti-BID campaign in Rochester systematically demystified the constitutive storytelling that proponents deployed in their push for a BID. It strategically emulated pro-BID tactics, creating FAQs to explain BIDs, conducting a survey, offering webinars, and developing the “local voices” campaign. This strategy of mirroring concepts underpinning the BID case served to decenter standard BID definitions. The campaign’s BID Education Committee emphasized citation-based research and participation in this process, thereby legitimizing their own work and empowering others to critically assess the BID proposal. Using humor, No BID ROC materials debunk the dominant planning narrative to develop a counter-understanding and to reveal the “democratic deficit” (Hodos 2010, 201) built into the institutional framework set by state enabling legislation. In doing so, No BID ROC narratively and visually challenged both the establishment process and the BID institution itself.

Community Engagement Versus Community Entrapment

Creating satiric messaging to question established premises, No BID ROC highlighted pro-BID public participation activities as disingenuous and controlling. PDR’s “Community Engagement Plan,” announced in a release well-covered by local press (Schermerhorn 2023a), aimed to “[d]eepen community understanding of the basics, potential, and possibilities” of a BID and included activities and materials to explore “local priorities, preferences, and needs” related to a “strategic vision” for downtown. A summary of events held from August 2022 to December 2023 details these activities. They included “pop-ups” and “tabling” events to share information with the public as well as RDCC-guided “Walkshops” through the area to elicit affective, experienced-based reactions. In addition, PDR held community meetings, “open houses,” and focus groups facilitated by hired planning consultants.

While the draft BID plan described such events as part of the “BID planning process” and publicized their “extensive community engagement initiative . . . [as] engaging over a 1000+ individuals” (PDR 2023c, 7), they were perceived by some as manipulative. A review of the first Open House summary shows that PDR consultants gave standard presentations, showcasing typical BID services and mapping their successful implementation in cities nationwide (see also PDR 2023c). Discussing his frustration with the scripted nature of the process, a small business owner said at an anti-BID rally:

We’re locking arms with the small business owners to have a voice, not a voice that will only be heard in meetings with note takers from the BID controlling the conversation and putting out a public perception about who we are. . . . I don’t label myself as an activist; we just want them to practice good business (No BID ROC 2023c).

This business owner, disavowing an activist identity, demanded to have a real “voice” in deliberations over the BID proposal.

The No BID campaign argued such engagement activities were performative, giving the appearance of consultation “without gaining consent from the community” (Schermerhorn 2023b). To encourage people to have their voices heard at a second “Open House,” No BID ROC (2023h) circulated an image to illustrate that the first was dominated by BID proponents. This photo offered no explanation other than superimposed identifiers of attendees such as “facilitator,” “PDR Chair,” “City Council and PDR Board Member,” “Developer,” “Staffer of . . . BID Formation Committee Co-Chair”; fewer were labeled “Artist” or “Community Member.” Accompanying text in the same newsletter under the heading “Engagement or Entrapment” noted that many events had been canceled; discussions were swayed and leading questions were posed, and consultant input was recorded as “general feedback.” Summary notes reveal that while some concerns about a BID structure were raised in the first Open House (PDR 2023b), these became more prominent in the second as illustrated by this comment: “The fact that the board members are all appointed is concerning . . . Why do property owners who don’t live here get more of a say than those that do?” (PDR 2023d). This sharp critique of the governance model indicates that No BID ROC’s strategy raised awareness and likely inserted critical voices into the official conversation.

No BID ROC contrasted RDDC/PDR’s “engagement” with a “grassroots community feedback tour” to identify concerns about the BID; their “local voices” campaign in early 2024 aimed to “elevat[e] voices that were overlooked or excluded during the official feedback process” (No BID ROC 2024a). No BID ROC not only called out the official engagement process as undemocratic, but also sought to reframe democratic participation in planning decisions in the spirit of advocacy planning (Grooms and Frimpong Boamah 2017; Lauria and Slotterback 2021). “Democracy thrives when the community is at the heart of planning and decision-making, not as an afterthought, but as the foundation” (No BID ROC 2024d), they noted.

Unpacking “Democratic” Governance

No BID ROC identified the undemocratic institutional nature of BIDs. To do so, the campaign mimicked the FAQ format proponents used to explain BIDs and deconstructed these standard definitions. The campaign inverted the view of BIDs as altruistic property owners acting collaboratively on behalf of the city, instead describing BIDs governance on their webpage “Bad for Democracy” as follows: “Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) centralize decision-making power in the hands of property owners and large corporations, overshadowing the concerns and needs of everyday citizens and small business owners.” This website page opens with dramatically visualized and tongue-and-cheek explanations of the BID governance structure to illustrate how legal requirements skew decision-making voice toward property owners, including corporate and absentee owners. Repeating this message in their FAQ and via shared emailed news briefs, the website, and social media, the campaign re-framed the BID definition to underscore problems of voice (No BID ROC n.d.-a, n.d.-b).

Additionally, No BID ROC took back and redefined language around stakeholder and community control. In 2021 RDDC’s president explained the BID establishment process to City Council as a “group of people” that “defines a geography” and deliberates about services “needed in that particular community.” While she referred to “a law in New York State” with “very specific governance requirements,” this presentation initially obscured the formal definition, which names property owners outright, by collapsing stakeholders into an undefined “community” and “group of people.” She extolled BIDs as “popular” because “they’re both flexible and democratic.” Democratic flexibility, however, here refers to stakeholder control, as indicated by the assertion that BIDs can be dissolved if “payers. . . don’t want it anymore”; moreover, stakeholders, framed as “payers,” in her words “can change” key aspects of BID governance and operations (RDDC 2021b). The value of a BID, then, is that property owners ultimately control assessment amounts and budgetary decisions; “a BID district plan,” she noted, “first goes to property owners. . . ” before it “ultimately goes to Council,” placing them “first’ in line to plan the district’s character and future. This benefit had been proclaimed in 2013 to an RDDC audience: “formed outside of City Hall, property owners create BIDs to gain more control over their environment” (RDDC 2013). No BID ROC’s response, “We must keep our downtown under community control and stop this unjust power grab,” echoed through its campaign. A 2022 blog post asked “Who does a city belong to? Does it belong to the people who live, work and play there? Or does it only belong to the people who own property?” Their webpage “Bad for Democracy,” proclaiming “We already have an organization in place to manage taxation and land use, it’s called City Council,” referred back to already existing democratic institutions. In doing so, No BID ROC countered Public Choice principles informing BID policy discourses to reinstate values embedded in representative, one-person, one-vote-based democratic institutions.

Additionally, a member of the Education Committee noted “that the definition of a BID . . . makes it sound like this is an option for small businesses to choose to participate in . . . That’s totally misleading.” Speaking at a rally, a small business owner highlighted this disparity: “Those ‘self-imposed taxes,’ those are going to be paid by guess who? Those small business owners who are renting [in] downtown Rochester” (No BID ROC 2023c). Another Public Choice premise that taxation payments should be tied directly to the accrual of benefits (Buchanan 1965) was thus called into question. Once again, the campaign participants pointed out “misleading” obfuscations in the proponents’ narrative.

Creative Education, Juxtaposing Serious Research with Humor

No BID ROC presented facts about pro-BID organizing efforts in provocatively simple and humorous ways and urged people to inform themselves. From the beginning, the Rochester BID Education Committee sought out scholarly and professional literature and networked with individuals and groups across cities to understand how BIDs operated. “The BID, The Bad and The Ugly Webinar” (No BID ROC 2023a) featured academic and activist speakers who discussed BID research and experiences elsewhere. The campaign shone a light on the logic of this public private partnership regime and situated the local proposal in the broader BID movement, which, fueled by numerous consulting firms and intermediaries like the IDA, replicates the model through a phenomenon called “policy mobility” (McCann and Ward 2012). Sharing information from and with other BID-critical groups, No BID ROC effectively brought the policy diffusion strategy to the organizing realm,⁴ urging their audience to seek out, correct and share citations. One newsletter made this appeal:

The community deserves to have access to information about how they are governed, taxed and how their tax dollars are spent. This is our current understanding of BID structure and formation. NGL [not gonna lie], it’s pretty dry, and full of acronyms. We tried to simplify it as much as possible. If you have a correction for information listed below, please contact us with the update and citation (No BID ROC 2022a).

No BID ROC also focused on how to obtain documents through the Freedom of Information Law (FOIL). One newsbrief, visualizing how to interrogate reports and budgets, included a line graph charting proposed funding streams over time gleaned from a consultant report: initial public arts funding would disappear by the first year of BID operation and over half of BID revenues would eventually go toward “overhead” or staff costs. In addition, the newsbrief text noted that an amorphous “events” line item would increase over time and called this “#artwashing.” The newsbrief both highlighted the bureaucratization embedded in these district-based management initiatives and encouraged readers to submit their own FOILs (No BID ROC 2022c).

From campaign branding to education initiatives, No BID ROC employed cartoonish humor to drive home their message and “recruit” bystanders (McDonnell and Everhart 2024). An activist described this approach as “vacillati[ng] between being scholarly and irreverent, which I think is probably the best way to do things.” For example, the campaign transformed the proposed BID District boundaries into a No BID thumbs down logo,⁵ and their “Downtown Dubiously” Instagram handle riffed on RRDC’s “Downtown Definitely” catchphrase and website image. Another example used “I Heart Roc,” an iconic, oft photographed, downtown sculpture with blue letters and a red heart that had featured in a 2021 creative anti-eviction demonstration (Walker 2021), to create a cartoon. The cartoon, circulated in a 2023 newsletter titled “What’s a BID anyway?,” showed a caricatured business man sitting on the statue’s base, staring smugly at the viewer while proclaiming, “Me and a few pals of mine own all these buildings, why shouldn’t we control all the public space around them?” (No BID ROC 2023d).

Drawing on social media iconography, the campaign also took its irreverent humor to downtown streets. An emoji introduced with a jingle on Downtown Dubiously proclaimed “The BID is c.r.a.p.” (Corporate Redlining and Privatization); it also appeared as a costumed activist photographed downtown with community members holding professional-quality signs. These printable posters available on the campaign’s website featured messages that the “B.I.D. was BAD for” the community, renters, small business, or other groups. Humor in the form of irony and satire, as McDonnell and Everhart (2024) note, can be highly effective when it draws on “shared cultural knowledge and references” (63), and No BID ROC practiced this consistently.

Satirical images also served as entry buttons to each webpage of a “Community Education Series,” “Riverway Ruse.” Part I, featuring RDDC and Roc the Riverway pulling a Trojan horse inhabited by “gentrification” and “privatizing public spaces” through the city gates, provided background on the emergence of the BID proposal (No BID ROC 2023g). In Part II, a comic strip literally unmasked and simplified the confusing and overlapping identities of organizations behind the BID effort: the first frame titled “Partnership for Downtown Rochester” shows a man who, in each successive frame, removes a mask to reveal the name of another entity such as RDDC, until the last frame labeled “literally 4 real estate developers” emerges (No BID ROC 2023f). Part II outlined inequities in Rochester and developed the argument that the BID initiative amounted to “21st Century Redlining.” In a “Local Voices” video from a rally, City Council candidate Chiara “Kee Kee” Smith, framed by “21st Century Redlining” ribbons, spoke against the BID on the streets of downtown. Through narrative texts, historical allusions and cartoon graphics that produced stinging political humor linked to verifiable information, No BID ROC created a repertoire combining “satire and social commentary” (Manzo 2012, 482) to x-ray the BID-PPP regime and build a successful anti-BID campaign.

Conclusion

No BID ROC pulled back the curtain on the Public Choice-informed constitutive storytelling that has normalized a neoliberal urban governance strategy: business improvement districts. Rooted in notions of self-sufficiency and localism, BIDs empower property owners at the sub-municipal scale to make decisions regarding the governance of urban districts and the programming of their public realm. Homing in on the received notion that BIDs are local democracy at work (Schaller 2019), the No BID ROC campaign broke open the pro-BID discourse to encourage critical debate and propagate an alternative and constitutive storyline. It deployed direct language, biting humor, and cartoonish visual strategies, like political cartoons, to link the virtual to the real world. In doing so, the campaign challenged “BID urbanism” (Schaller 2019) and a governance model rendered ordinary over time by identifying the network of pro-BID policy entrepreneurs composed of BID professionals and consultants, real estate industry stakeholders, planners, and state and local officials who effectively work across scales to advance and embed the BID institution locally.

No BID ROC built a coalition effective enough to move PDR and RDDC to withdraw the BID proposal, for now. Its creative repertoire decoded the pro-BID policy discourse, including the messaging frames policy advocates have developed to carry the model from city to city, thereby “rendering their seductions impotent” (Dery 2017b, 47). Through a political education strategy that included the production and dissemination of evidence-based, creative visualizations, specifically opposing property ownership as the basis of political voice and decision-making power, the campaign interrogated the “democratic” character of this governance model and successfully created cracks in the received BID policy constitutive storytelling. Moreover, this case illustrates how artists, through creative production, political education and savvy multimedia outreach, can mobilize civil society and communities more broadly to engage in public debates about the values embedded in our institutions and reframe policy narratives. This kind of creative “resistance” also holds lessons for how to proactively design public planning processes that move from perfunctory or symbolic participation to an empowerment educational model (Lauria and Slotterback 2021).

No BID ROC did not advocate for an alternative form of a BID or a public-private partnership, but expressed faith in existing democratic institutions, reminding the public that city councils are democratically elected bodies that can address land use, zoning, and public space funding, design and management. Additionally, many cities already have submunicipal entities like appointed community boards (New York City) and elected neighborhood advisory commissions (Washington, DC) that could be further democratized and publicly funded to support local policy deliberation and decision-making. In fact, this was a key activist demand in the 1970s. Crucially, cities also could fund arts organizations directly without an additional structure such as a BID.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank No BID ROC for generously sharing access to the artistic and key resource materials as well as their insights with us. Support was also provided by a PSC-CUNY Research Award from The City University of New York that funded our work on BIDs and placemaking.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Susanna F. Schaller

Elizabeth Nisbet

Notes

Author Biographies

Susanna Schaller, AICP, is Associate Professor for Urban Studies, Administration and Planning in the Division of Interdisciplinary Studies at The City College of New York, CUNY. Her research focuses on the intersection of urban planning, economic development and placemaking with governance.

Elizabeth Nisbet is Associate Professor of Public Policy in the Department of Public Management at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY. Her research focuses on the boundaries between the public and private sectors and how public policy shapes inequality and inequities in public services and labor markets.

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