Business Improvement Districts and Inner City Revitalization: The Case Of Philadelphia's Frankford Special Services District.

The discourse of urban redevelopment and revitalization has changed remarkably over the past decade. With a decade of national economic growth leading to success in the professional services, tourism and convention markets, new life has been breathed into many city centers. This has led to a new theoretical focus on whether these gains could also be realized in city neighborhoods. A history of declining public resources brought on by the brutal confluence of de-industrialization and federal disinvestment left many neighborhood commercial areas at a loss in their competition with newly formed suburban retail developments. Moreover, surging crime rates and under-managed public space—which led to rising fear levels among urban space users—merely exacerbated this downward trend. This article examines the use of business improvement districts in inner city commercial areas. While much of the academic and popular press literature on BIDs has addressed their use in downtowns, their use is growing in smaller, neighborhood commercial and retail strips. While some neighborhood BIDs have a substantial history of service delivery and planning, most are recent entries onto the urban management landscape. After an analysis of neighborhood BIDs in major US cities, this article examines the commercial development policy of one city, Philadelphia. It then addresses the use of a neighborhood BID in one of Philadelphia's more hardscrabble commercial areas, Frankford. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]