Remarkable story about a city/county that essentially ceded its downtown shopping district to a private developer (in exchange for the developer investing massive amounts to revitalize the space). The developer now considers the downtown to be the same as a shopping mall — private property, subject to whatever restrictions they want, including banning photography, restricting political activism, etc. The “corner soapbox” isn’t an automatic right when it’s owned by a soap company.
But Elrich says Peterson insists on treating downtown Silver Spring as if it were an indoor mall. They set and enforce rules that would never pass legal muster on a public street. Political candidates have been stopped from handing out fliers. And photographers such as Py are regularly stopped and told to move along.
That is Peterson’s right, says Gary Stith, director of the county government’s office in Silver Spring. “It’s like any other shopping center,” he says. “The street was vacated by the county and is leased to the developer. We wanted them to maintain and manage the area.” County law does require the developer to give the public access to the downtown, “but access and management are two different things,” Stith says.
[…] Public access to semipublic places is one of the most volatile issues in the law. While the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the right to free expression does not extend to a privately owned shopping center, the court also decided that company towns may not restrict the distribution of religious literature. And in a decision allowing union members to picket in a shopping center, the court said that right would be unquestionable “if the shopping-center premises were not privately owned but instead constituted the business area of a municipality.”
Of course, that’s the case on Ellsworth Drive, which appears to casual visitors as a public street.
Something to consider whenever folks talk about the advantages of “privatizing” stuff.
(via BoingBoing)