the tragedy of south oakland's sidewalks
breaking down the commons problem in the crusty thoroughfares of my old college neighborhood.
Dear friend—
We are nearing the dog days of summer, and despite some on-and-off blessedly balmy days in Pittsburgh, that means more ghastly-hot days to come. I don't have a car. Sometimes I am too impatient or anxious to be bothered with public transit. So walking becomes my main mode of transit.
These days, I will extend a trip by 10 minutes zig-zagging across the street to remain under the generous shade of trees. They make the walk so much more bearable.
One of my favorite streets to walk down in this city is the stretch of Ellsworth Avenue that winds from the Oakland neighborhood into Shadyside. It's lined on either side with huge houses of stone and brick and columns. The road is wide but less busy than other nearby main streets like Centre, Forbes, and Fifth. The properties there are covered in greenery. Neatly maintained bushes, green lawns and gardens, and the street trees, which can stand two or three stories tall at their best.
Street trees are a privilege in Pittsburgh, as they are in many other cities. The leafy Pittsburgh I know, in Shadyside and Squirrel Hill and Friendship, is not a universal Pittsburgh experience.
Two years ago, I compared poverty levels at the neighborhood level in Pittsburgh with street tree cover. Trees per capita tended higher for richer neighborhoods than impoverished neighborhoods.
This is, to put it mildly, Not Cute. Street trees cool down the street by providing shade—an actually live-saving service thanks to climate-change-induced warming. They can be life-changing in low-income communities that are already at higher risk for heat-related illnesses.
They're also really good for the environment. They're good for stormwater management. They sequester carbon and purify the air. They can even reduce the energy bills of nearby homes thanks to their cooling effects.
Street trees seem like a no-brainer. They have all these benefits and are relatively inexpensive to plant and maintain. So why don't we plant more?
One important reason: their roots can really mess up the sidewalk. In some cities, StateImpact PA reports, homeowners are not happy with city programs to plant more street trees because, by some whacky twist of law, they're on the hook for repairing sidewalks.
.
Pittsburgh sidewalks are already an oft-lamented feature of the city as is. Take South Oakland, the neighborhood-turned-collegiate playground for the thousands of students who live-off campus during their time at the University of Pittsburgh.
For those unfamiliar with South O, the sidewalks suck.
Bordered by Pitt's campus to the north and Schenley park to the east, South Oakland is home to (on top of a cadre of old families and small businesses) 19- to 22-year-olds who are most likely living in a house on their own for the first time.
The bad sidewalks are a symptom of this. They are often disgusting and littered, cracked and damaged. Red solo cups and takeaway boxes skitter around in the wind like wildlife—or are smushed flat into the pavement like trodden gum. Huge crevices are hastily filled with gravel or stones. Some edges of concrete rise three, four, five inches higher than its neighbors.
It is a miracle that all my bones remain intact after wandering those streets with friends in the dark, intoxicated (sorry mom), for dozens of weekends across my college career.
The sidewalks of South Oakland, or any neighborhood, city, or town, are the result of a commons problem. The commons problem is, as many economists and other social scientists would tell you, the root of many of our greatest crises of environment and governance today. It's behind climate change, pollution, deforestation, overfishing, extinction events, etc., ad nauseam, ad infinitum.
The "tragedy of the commons" was popularized by economist (and eugenicist) Garrett Hardin. Hardin wrote that when a resource is held in common (by a public or a large group) and its users have unlimited access to it, the users will deplete the resource.
He gives the example of a town commons, the kind that a medieval village might have for several herders to graze their cows. In his depiction, the commons are lawless—no one has more power than another or more rights to it than another. Anyone can graze as many cows and take up as much grass as they want.
Under such a system, folks have two options: They can let their cows overgraze, or they can take only what they need and watch as their fellow townsfolk let their cows overgraze. The townsperson will most likely let their cows overgraze. And soon enough, the pasture is depleted. There is no more grass.
The problem can only be solved with, Hardin claimed, government ownership or ownership by private citizens. For example, let's say the town commons was split into equal parcels for each townsperson. In that parcel, a townsperson would be responsible for what happens there. They would reap all the rewards of that little parcel, as well as its risks.
Thus, the townsperson has an incentive to use the parcel and its grass sustainably. They allows their cows to graze just as much as they need to, saving the rest for a rainy day or for future cows, allowing the grazed grass to grow back.
The idea of the tragedy of the commons is so important because it has lorded over economic and natural resources research and policy for decades.
But Hardin's assumptions are problematic and not as widely applicable as he believed, and his policy prescriptions have proved economically disastrous, politically fraught, and colonialist-imperialist (among other things) in many instances. Ironclad government ownership and ironclad private property rights are only two options for governance out of many.
For example, Nobel Prize-Winner Elinor Ostrom (rest in peace) is now the reigning monarch of natural resource governance research. Her takeaway: Everything is context-dependent. Finding the best governance tools and strategies depends on dozens of factors, like the type of resource that needs governed and the social and political dynamics among the users.
.
Tragedies of the commons often occur when the governance system is unclear, not enforced, or doesn't actually incentivize people to take care of the resource.
(Enforcement doesn't need to be through coercion by a state power, Ostrom makes clear. Boundaries and rules can be set by agreements backed by tradition, social norms, a sense of shared identity or responsibility, etc. etc.)
For example, air pollution is a commons problem because until very recently (and arguably very much right now), industries could pollute all they want and not face any consequences. The execs making the decisions did not suffer the consequences of a polluting plant. The surrounding communities (usually poor or otherwise marginalized) and the workers did. And there were no laws that allowed governments to compel companies to stop polluting.
And so, companies pollute the air, ruining the resource faster and faster, because they get a lot out of it (profit from making chemicals or goods or what have you), yet suffer no consequences. Instead, everyday people suffer the consequences.
Climate change is also a commons problem. No one owns or governs the climate. There are few systems for compelling people to stop emitting. And like the townsperson who can either overgraze their cows or watch their neighbors' cows eat up all the grass, so it is with climate action. A country can do the responsible thing—stop emitting carbon—but that means losing out on the economic race by throttling its own growth.
Alternatively, it can just keep emitting and emitting, with few consequences in sight (until recently. Now we are staring the consequences in the face).
.
Let's zoom back in on the disgusting sidewalks of South Oakland.
Sidewalks are a commons. They are used by everyone. No one has complete responsibility and ownership for them.
They are governed by a few rules, a patchwork governance system that results in their sorry state.
According to Pittsburgh law, the City has the right to manage what can go on a sidewalk. It can forbid folks from leaving hazardous trash on the sidewalk. It can require residents to get a permit from the Department of Public Works to make changes to the pavement.
But Pennsylvania law says that sidewalks are the responsibility of whoever owns the property next to them. That adjacent owner is on the hook for maintaining the sidewalks to ensure the safety of passerby, as well as snow and ice removal. They're on the hook for paying for the damage street tree roots inflict.
And, because of this, property owners may be held liable for any injuries resulting from poor sidewalks next to their property.
This is the main ingredient in the recipe for South O's terrible sidewalks—and the terrible sidewalks in any part of Pittsburgh or any where, for that matter.
While all the risks of the sidewalk belong to the property owner, the owner has little control over who uses the sidewalk and for what purposes. The sidewalk is a public right of way, so any array of animals, non-motorized vehicles, and people can pass through the sidewalk and leave very quickly. Those effects build up over the years.
So while property owners can chase people off their property, they can't do the same with the sidewalks. Yet, they’re responsible for fixing whatever damage accumulates.
City law does regulate some uses of the sidewalk. For example, you’re not supposed to bike on sidewalks, you’re not allowed to park your car halfway on sidewalks, you’re not allowed to drive motorcycles on sidewalks. But these are enforced with varying effectiveness.
Seeing someone drive a motorcycle on sidewalks is very unlikely because of social norms and accepted safety standards that don’t need to be enforced by government. Biking on sidewalks is somewhat managed by social norms, but people still do it often and can expect bystanders not to call the police on them.
It's unrealistic for an owner to report to the City every single infraction of sidewalk use outside their property. In South O, that's not only because of the frequency of the infractions, but because the owners of property in South O probably don't live there. The renters live there, and they have even less power over the sidewalks and less incentive to regulate them.
The temporary tenants (students staying just for a year or two) don’t have any long-term incentive to contribute to the care of the sidewalks besides pure altruism. Even if someone did injure themselves on the sidewalk, tenants would not have responsibility to the injured person—their landlord would.
Finally, owners may not have strong incentives to take care of the sidewalk because of the makeup of the neighborhood. The residents of South O are mostly students, mostly broke college kids who wouldn’t be able to take on the costs of litigation in the event of an injury.
One could even argue that they're also less likely to get injured, as they’re (compared to the more elderly general population) more fit and less likely to have a disability that makes smooth, clutter-free sidewalks vital to their mobility.
There is a mismatch of rights and responsibilities. The sidewalk is a public resource open to all. It's in some ways regulated by law and government. But it’s maintained by a custodian that has few rights to control what happens to it, yet that custodian is on the hook for fixing any problems.
Hard proponents of private property regimes would argue that the problem could be solved if sidewalks were owned totally by the owner of the adjacent property. That would help the owner account for both the costs and benefits.
But this won't pan out (hopefully, my God) because no one wants private sidewalks. It’s almost entirely agreed upon that all people should have the right to use the sidewalk.
Perhaps City government should step in and encourage landlords to account for the costs and benefits by exacting harsher penalties on those who don’t comply, while also offering subsidies for sidewalk repair, perhaps with revenue from a small tax. With a tax, the public would help pay for the costs of using the sidewalk.
However, this change would incur much higher enforcement costs on the part of City government, which would have to constantly sweep the streets for dangerous sidewalks, manage work orders, deal with government workers or contractors, etc. etc. …
Would Pittsburghers trade another tax for what is a cosmetic problem for most and a real hazard for a small minority of already underserved residents? Would we be willing to take on the costs of gnarly street tree roots and more careful planting when those most able to pay the taxes—well-off East-enders—already have their forested sidewalks?
Remains to be seen. In the mean time—side walks baking in the sun, not a tree in sight. Unequal heat distribution. Climate change. Lung-racking pollution. Planetary collapse. And, you know, the crusty sidewalks of South O.
Thanks for reading, catch you next time,
—mia xx