The Simmering Battle Over Public Space

In Sunday's post, I began to think about the role of public space in a well-ordered society, and it brought me back to what I've recognized for several years: there's an ongoing battle over who controls it. Remarks in 2021 by former LA County Sheriff Alex Villanueva brought the issue into focus:

“Public space belongs to the entire public, not to one individual. And that is the fundamental responsibility of government. That’s the fundamental failure of the Board of Supervisors, L.A. City Council and the mayor of L.A. — they have refused to regulate public space,” Villanueva said Monday. “And that is why the problem is growing exponentially year after year.”

The particular problem was that the Venice boardwalk, a feature of a city beach area, had become a space for homeless encampments, which due to filth and antisocial behavior had driven out ordinary citizens who had expected to visit for recreation. In effect, the local authorities had abdicated their responsibility to regulate public space on behalf of the community. Villanueva, for a time at least, unilaterally stepped in, using his overall authority over LA County law enforcement to override the city's LAPD and use sheriff's deputies to clean up the boardwalk.

On one hand, this so irritated nearly every other local official that they coordinated an effort to vote Villanueva out as sheriff in the next election. On the other, city voters in the Venice council district also voted out the incumbent councilman who'd enabled the homeless problem there. Villanueva is attempting a comeback in next year's election. But so far, I think he's made the single most succinct articulation of the issue surrounding public space.

This is also related to what might be called the Starbucks Dilemma. I think Starbucks's problem began with an incident nobody remembers from 2018: two African-American men intended to hold a business meeting with a potential associate in a Philadelphia Starbucks. They seated themselves at a table as they waited for the other associate.

Neither placed an order; their intent was simply to hold the meeting in the Starbucks's comfortable public space. However, when one asked to use the restroom, he was told it was for paying customers only, and he was asked to leave. When he refused, the store manager called police and requested that the men be removed for trespassing. The two men, Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson, were arrested for trespassing and taken to jail, but they were released several hours later without charges.

A major controversy then ensued.

“We were there for a real reason, a real deal that we were working on,” Robinson explained. “We put in a lot of time, energy, effort … We were at a moment that could have a positive impact on a whole ladder of people, lives, families. So I was like, ‘No, you’re not stopping that right now.”’

The Democratic mayor, Jim Kenney, who is white, said what happened at the Starbucks “appears to exemplify what racial discrimination looks like in 2018”. The police commissioner, Richard Ross, who is black, said in a Facebook post that arresting officers “did absolutely nothing wrong”, and added that Nelson and Robinson were disrespectful to officers.

. . . Over the weekend, attention and outrage over [a viral] video grew, prompting a protest at the local Starbucks restaurant and a national boycott. By Monday, the men were set to meet with Starbucks’ CEO, Kevin Johnson, to discuss what happened.

Johnson has responded quickly to public outcry around the arrests, calling them “reprehensible”, apologizing and ordering stores closed for mandatory training to tackle unconscious bias.

Starbucks's original business model was to create a "third place" between home and work equivalent to a local pub or European coffee house. The problem is that it's a sorta-kinda public space, theoretically like a park or museum, but the users must pay to use it, indirectly in this case. The cost to the store of the pleasant, welcoming, community-like environment is offset by the premium price of the coffee drinks and snacks the customers buy. Nelson and Robinson were in effect subverting the business model by refusing to pay for the store's comfortable environment, which they nevertheless used for their own business purpose.

There's a certain elitist insincerity here: Starbucks's whole concept was invented by a middle-class American who was captivated by the atmosphere of the European coffee houses he saw as a tourist, and his target market from the start was bourgeois kids who'd seen the same coffee houses on their junior year abroad. Everything was going to be entre nous, African-Americans who wanted to use the restroom without buying expensive lattes were just never in the picture. The Philadelphia incident was effectively a system error.

But soon enough the COVID panic made that whole business model moot. The intent iof the lockdowns was to shut down all public space, airports, churches, parks, schools, museums, barber shops, restaurants. Chi-chi coffee houses were just incidental casualties. Starbucks closed many stores and changed others to take-out only. The expense of cleaning all the "third place" furniture and facilities made them uneconomic, and this business strategy continued after the lockdowns were lifted.

This effectively made the problem of providing public space for people who wouldn't pay for it or observe decorum disappear -- but only as long as nobody noticed that they were still paying "third place" prices for their lattes. But in 2025, Starbucks has decided it needs to revive the "third place" strategy. In June, company founder and inventor of the "third place" strategy Howard Schultz re-emphasized his vision:

“The third place is not something we need to reinvent — it’s who we are,” Schultz said. “People all over the world are longing for human connection… We are a company that is steeped in humanity. We are steeped in human connection, because of all of you and the people you represent.”

Schultz, who led Starbucks from a small Seattle roastery to a global brand with over 40,000 stores and nearly 500,000 partners, emphasized the need to reclaim Starbucks soul. “We’re not a company that needs AI to do what we do. It’s an enabler. What we need to do, is just be ourselves — be the people that we’ve been,” he said.

But if you restore all the wall hangings, chairs, and tables, you're back to the problem of freeloaders and druggies shooting up in the restrooms. I see more Philadelphia incidents in Starbucks's future, still with no good way to deal with them.

While the COVID lockdowns placed restrictions on public space that had unanticipated business consequences, Trump's crackdown on illegal migrants is having a similar impact:

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors declared a local state of emergency Tuesday in response to ongoing federal immigration enforcement raids, alleging the actions are preventing people from going to work and forcing some businesses to close.

. . . The proclamation approved by the board states that the raids that began around June 6 "have caused residents to be fearful of leaving their homes, to go to work, take public transportation, access county services including medical services, access open public programs and resources and attend appointments with immigration lawyers and legal service providers."

The immigration actions "have created a climate of fear, leading to widespread disruption in daily life and adverse impacts to our regional economy due to decreased attendance at workplaces, the temporary or permanent closure of businesses and restaurants and increased strain on our local institutions such as schools, hospitals and places of worship," according to the proclamation.

Put only a little differently, the ICE raids are having a massive impact on the use of public space. This also reflects the real size of the illegal immigration problem in the area; if illegals have a realistic fear of apprehension if they go out in public, this seems to have a major impact on the economy.

But these are just small pieces of the overall battle over public space. If the civil authorities abdicate their responsibility to control it, or if private enterprise refuses to manage quasi-public space or "third places", then other forces will inevitably claim control, or other factors like a pandemic or immigration crackdowns will intervene and force solutions. Nevertheless, the other factors will only force temporary or unsatisfactory solutions if authorities can't regulate public space themselves.