ABSTRACT

AN EXPLORATION INTO AMERICAN URBAN VALUES
AND THEIR REFLECTIONS IN
URBAN POLICY

BY
Walter William Wilkman Jr.

Focusing on certain aspects of the institutional
and cultural components of the city, this thesis begins
by exploring the way in which American cities have been
valued throughout our history. By citing the words and
works of influential men of our culture, it is demonstrated
that Americans have held a culturally based negative
value bias against cities. Evidence is produced that roots
this negative urban bias in‘the fact that the myriad of
institutions which make up the city have been distorted or
superseded by the concerns of one of the city's institutions,
the economic institution. It is further found that from the
1700's to the present, alternatives to urban life are
consistently asserted which center around a small town-
agrarian ideal.

It is hypothesized and found that that this strongly
rooted cultural bias against American cities and in favor of

theesmall town-agrarian ideal has been strongly reflected

Walter William Wilkman Jr.

in major urban policies which have had far reaching effects
on the nature of our cities and their ability to function
effectively. The policies of zoning, FHA housing, and
Federal highways are shown to reflect this bias in the
nature of their promotion, emphasis, money allocations, and
legal strength.

Suggestions are made to the effect that culture
and the institutional basis of the city be intelligently
and consciously considered in both the planning process
and urban policy making. It is also suggested that
research be done into the nature of culture and
institutions as they are embodied in the city in order that
they may become an integral part of urban planning and the

policy making process.

AN EXPLORATION INTO AMERICAN URBAN VALUES
AND THEIR REFLECTIONS IN

URBAN POLICY

BY

Walter William Wilkman Jr.

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State university
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

MASTER OF URBAN PLANNING

College of Social Science

1970

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are several individuals who have contributed
their knowledge and support this thesis. I owe a great
debt of gratitude to my wife Janice, who has spent
numerous hours typing the preliminary and final drafts
of this thesis, reviewing and proofreading its contents,
and who is responsible for the excellent graphs and
diagrams which appear throughout.

I am also deeply indebted to Sanford Farness who
advised and encouraged me in this endeavor, and who is
responsible for the human settlement model which is
presented in Chapter 1, and on which much of this thesis
is based. The knowledge and orientation I have gained
from Mr. Farness has added an invaluable dimension to my
life.

Mr. George Churchill also deserves my sincere
thanks for his advice and assistance in the duplication
of this manuscript.

I also want to express appreciation to my father
and my mother who put me through undergraduate school
and stimulated and encouraged my interest in continuing

on to graduate school.

11

TABLE OF CONTENTS

AC mmLE DGMENT S O O O O O O O O O O C O O 0

LIST OF TABLES O O O O O O I O O O O O O 0

LIST OF FIGIJRES 0 O O O O O O O O O O 0 O O

INTRODUCT ION O O O C C O O O . C O O C 0

Chapter

1

The Subject Under Study
Scope of the Study . . . . . . . .

DEFINITIONS . . . . . . . . . . . .

Introduction . . . . . .
The City as Currently Defined
Legal Definitions . . . .
Physical Definitions . .
Economic Definitions . .
Functional Definitions .
Psychological Definitions
Mixed Definitions . . .
The City as a Set of Instituti
The Nature of Institutions
The Sociocultural Framework .
Conclusion . . . . . . . . .
Terminology . . . . . . . . .

n

000.0)...00000

000.00.000.00

AMERICAN VALUES AND THE CITY . . .

Introduction . . .
The 1700's to the 1800' s
The 1800' s to the 1900' s
The Post-1900 Experience
Conclusion . . . . . . .

iii

Page
ii

vi

\DmCDQUI-bnb ID-

Chapter
3 AN ANALYTICAL VIEW OF AMERICAN VALUES . . .

Introduction . . . . . . .
Polar Values Toward the City
Negative Values . . . .
Positive Values . . .
Alternatives to the City
Sociocultural Analysis .
Conclusion . . . . . . .

4 VALUE REFLECTIONS IN ZONING . . . . . . . .

Introduction . . .
Relevant History .
Purposes . . . . .
Techniques . . . .
Districting . . .
Controls Within D
Effect on the City
Conclusion . . .

p.
.0m0000
n
00.10....
P.
0.0000.
n
00m00000

5 VALUE REFLECTIONS IN HOUSING POLICY . . . .

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Relevant History . .

Single-Family Versus Multiple-Family. Dwelling

Provisions . . .
Purposes . . . . .
Provisions . .
Effects on the City
Conclusion . . . .

6 VALUE REFLECTIONS IN FEDERAL TRANSPORTATION
POLICY 0 C C O O O O 0 O O O O O O O C 0

Introduction . .
Relevant History
Purposes . . . .
Provisions . .
Effects on the Cit
Conclusion . . .

0|<0000

7 SUGGESTIONS FOR THE PLANNING PROFESSION . .

Introduction . . .

The American and the City
The Planner' 3 Role . . .
Conclusion . . . . . . .

BIBLIWRAPI-N O O O O O O 0 O O O O O O O O O O O 0

iv

0 O t O O O O

O O J O I O O C

O O O O O O 0 8 O O O

Page

101
106
109
112

117

117
118

125
135
136
137
139

144

144
145
164
165
168
176

182
182
183
186
198

202

LIST OF TABLES

Table Page
6.1 Federal Aid Authorization By Type of Road
SYStem, 1946-1963 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 155
6.2 Practical Capacities Per Lane for Transit
Vehicle Types, With Equivalent Number
of Automobiles . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
6.3 The Cost of Getting to Work . . . . . . . . . 174

LIST OF FIGURES

Components of an Institution .
Life Cycle of an Institution .
Types of Institutions . . . .
The City . . . . . . . . . . .
Zoning Pyramid . . . . . . . .

Current Districting Concept .

Total Permanent Nonfarm Dwelling

Started 0 O C O O O O O O 0

Numbers of New Nonfarm Dwelling Units
Financed with Convential and with FHA-

Units

Insured and VA-Guaranteed Loans-—l935-l951

The City of the Nineteenth Century .

The City of the Twentieth Century

Financing of Urban Highways .

Consumer Expenditure for Automdbile
Transportation and Local Public Carriers

The Planning Process . . . . .

vi

Page
15
l6
17
20

101

102

120

129
147
150
156

157

187

INTRODUCTION
The Subject Under Study

The subject under study here is the way in which
cities in our culture have been valued, and how such values
have been reflected in major urban policy. Suggestions
for changes will be offered too.

To understand and have ready access to the
illusive and abstract realm of cultural values, the city
will be viewed as a sociocultural entity. In particular,
the city will be viewed as a complex set of interacting
and interrelating institutions, operating in the much
broader framework consisting of man, nature, culture,
institutions, and artifacts. (These terms and concepts
will receive much fuller attention in Chapter 1.)

In studying urban values, special attention will
be given to their positive and negative aspects. In
addition to determining whether the main thrust of
American urban values has been negative or positive, an
effort will be made to determine what characteristics
have been positively valued and what characteristics
have been negatively valued. In this way, the positive
and negative aspects of urban values will be investigated.

This thesis, then, will be concerned with studying

the values of Americans toward their cities, the reflections
of these values in urban policy, and the need for changes
responding to these reflections. The major hypothesis

to be considered is the following: The particular

nature of urban policy in the United States is the result
of reflections of strong cultural values which view the
city with a negative bias and which therefore are often

detrimental to the needs of the functioning urban entity.
Scope of the Study

It may already be obvious that the scope of this
study is bound to be rather broad. Information will be
drawn from many areas. Much of what we believe our
immediate and distant ancestors to have said or believed
must be gleaned from the popular literature of their
times. Literarypeople are often the first to take up
popular causes and are usually the most articulate spokesmen
of popular beliefs. The recordings of historians are
also extremely important where significant occurances,
statesmen's comments, and the mood of the times are
concerned. This study will also draw upon the area of
what might be termed "urban philosophy" and the social
sciences. Our laws are also important reflections of our
beliefs. They are the most durable way man has to express
his strongest beliefs. Law and policy will, then, also

enter into this study. The areas drawn upon, therefore,

include, but are not limited to, history, literature,
social science, urban philosophy and law.

It should be emphasized that the author is not
an expert or even generously knowledgeable in each of
these areas. The observations made in this study will be
drawn from both first hand readings and observations of
other, more highly qualified persons. To a large extent,
this study will have to focus on the literary and
historical areas using the observations and conclusions of

other writers.

CHAPTER 1
DEFINITIONS
Introduction

Most people "know" what a city is, at least they
feel they can recognize one and identify one, yet few
people can coherently define the concept "city”. Usually
attempts at definition end in frustrated comments to the
effect that the person really kggwg what a city is, but
cannot explain it in words. The objectives of this study
do not allow for such vagueness. It is therefore the
purpose of the following paragraphs to discuss several
possible definitions and establish one to be used in the
course of this thesis. Another consideration to be
presented below concerns the analytical framework on which
the study is based. This framework will be presented
and the various concepts used in it will be defined. The
final section of this chapter will be a list of terms

and definitions to be used throughout the thesis.

The Citypas Currently Defined

There are several classes of definitions of the
city currently in use. Various authors have listed from
two or three all the way up to fifteen or sixteen types of

4

definitions. The presentation here will concern itself
with only five types. These are the following: legal
definitions, economic definitions, functional definitions,
psychological definitions, and mixtures of the above.

Examples of each of these will be presented below.

Legal Definitions

The United States Census has developed several
definitions for varying degrees and types of urban
phenomena. These definitions are often referred to and
taken as generally usable definitions by persons doing
urban research.

To begin with, the Census Bureau gives a definition
of the term "urban". It defines urban as: "(a) places
of 2,500 inhabitants or more incorporated....(b) the
densely settled urban fringe, whether incorporated or
unincorporated....(c) towns in New England and townships
in New Jersey and Pennsylvania which contain no incorporated
municipalities as subdivisions and have either 25,000
inhabitants or more or a population of 2,500 to 25,000
and a density of 1,500 persons or more per square mile....
(d) counties in states other than New Jersey and
Pennsylvania that have no incorporated municipalities
within their boarders and have a density of 1,500 persons
per square mile....(e) unincorporated places of 2,500

inhabitants or more."1

The Census Bureau has also developed a definition
of what it considers the large interdependent working
whole that is based on the city. This is the Standard
Metropolitan Statistical Area (SMSA). The SMSA is
basically a city or cities of 50,000 inhabitants or more,
and surrounding counties, with “economic" and "social"
ties to the center city. The criteria are based on
percentages of workers tied to the center city, non~
agricultural workers, etc.2

The "urbanized area" was develOped by the Census
Bureau in order to describe and include as urban, areas
outside legal incorporated cities.3 The criteria outlined
for the term "urban“ will suffice to indicate the kinds
of considerations used in the definition of ”urbanized
area". Of course, not to be forgotten are the state
defined "incorporated cities" and other civil divisions
designed to delimit an area of legal jurisdiction.

Legal definitions of cities, such as the examples
cited above, are useful for the purposes they were created
for. They provide an institutionalized definition of an
area wherein, in the case of the census, certain data may
be collected, or in the case of incorporated areas, certain
powers and services may be carried out. When used for the
purpose of understanding the city as a social phenomenon,
however, they are grossly inadequate. They describe a

legal container and say something about its contents, but

have little to say about the essence of what a city, as a
functioning whole, is. Clearly, legal definitions are

useful only for the specific purposes they were created for.

Physical Definitions

Definitions of the city as a physical entity are
quite common. Usually, when people think of cities, they
think of the city's physical characteristics.

Stuart A. Queen and David B. Carpenter in their
book, The Amegican Qiiy, define the city as follows:
"...A city is a collection of people and buildings large
for its time and place and characterized by distinctive
activities."4 Victor Gruen, in his book 111; 323;; o_f_ 9}};
Cities, defines the city in this way: "If one were to
try to reduce to three, the qualities or characteristics
that make a city, they might be: (1) Compactness:
(2) Intensity of public life: (3) A small-grained pattern
in which all types of human activities are intermingled in
close proximity.“5

People, in both of these definitions, are only the
elements which fill the container called city. The essence
of the city appears here to be physical. But for what
purpose, and how do the physical entities take shape, and
why do people carry on "distinctive activities"? These
questions are not answered here, and cannot be answered in

a strictly physical definition.

Economig_De§initions

Cities are often thought of and defined as
economic units. Hallenbeck says that "the factor that seems
to distinguish cities more than any other is the kind of
production that forms the basis of economic life." He goes
on to say that “cities exist for the purpose of commerce
and industry."6

This type of definition views the city as the
workshop of the nation. But what about the city's myriad
of other functions? Can cities really be defined as
economic units in any complete sense of the word? The

belief here is that they cannot.

Functional Deiinitions

Due to the way in which functional definitions
have usually been formulated, they may often be considered
sub-types of economic definitions. This is because they
often focus on a city's income producing activity.
Hallenbeck goes through several such functional classifi-
cation systems. Gist and Halbert, he says, list six
types: (1) production centers, (2) centers of trade and
commerce, (3) political capitals, (4) cultural centers,
(5) health and recreational centers, and (6) diversified
cities.7 Hallenbeck also refers to a list developed by
Harris. In this scheme there are nine types: (1) retail
centers, (2) diversified cities, (3) wholesale cities,

(4) manufacturing cities, (5) transportation centers,

(6) mining towns, (7) university towns, (8) resort and
retirement towns, and (9) political centers.8

For very specialized purposes, such definitions
may serve a person well, but the term "city" cannot be
simply defined in terms of its major income producing
activity. As with economic definitions, this type of def-

inition ignores the city's many other functions.

Psychgioqical Definitions

In recent years, it has been popular to define
cities in "psychological" terms. This has added a new
element to the realm of urban definitions. Hallenbeck,
after exploring a number of definitions comes up with the
conclusion that cities exist for people, and it is by
people that they operate as living things. Cities must
be “alive". The material aspects of cities, according
to Hallenbeck, loom so large that they can often be mistaken
for the important things. Neglected, says Hallenbeck, are
the "...psychological factors which, after all, are
controlling in the history and growth of self-sufficient
governing communities."9

This definition comes close to the city's essence
but stops just short of it. Cities are not merely groups
of individuals: they are not made up of psychological
factors as their essential units. A city is no more a
group of individuals than a brick wall is a group of

bricks. Just as a collection of bricks could form a road,

10

a group of people could form a line.10 The city's
essence lies in the social relationships it supports in
its container. As Haworth, in his book The Good City,
points out: “The individuals compose a city because of
the form that is etched out by the settled relations in
which they stand to each other.“11 This explains the

city's resistance to the express will of some individuals.

Mixed Definitions

Some authors, rather than commit themselves
to one definition, put forth a long dissertation on the
city's many qualities and characteristics, or they
offer a single definition combining any number of the
above or other definition types. An example of this
type is one put forth by Thomlinson in his book Urban
Structure. In defining the city, Thomlinson says:

A modern city is: (l) A large agglomeration of
people living in a contiguously built up area, (2) who
function to produce non-agricultural goods and services
and more particularly to distribute all manner of
goods and services, (3) and who, as a result of carrying
on such functions, develop a way of life characterized
by anonymity, impersonal and segmentalized contacts
with other people, and secondary controls.12

This definition presents a combination of physical, human,
and economic characteristics.

Merely adding criteria to a definition, however,

does not make it complete. None of the above definitions

say anything about the range of social activities that

comprise the city, and the interrelationships that bind

11

them together. Government is only one urban function,
economic activities are only one function, the human
elements are only the individual actors in the system,

and the physical parts are only tools. Put them together,
and all you have is a list of urban functions and elements,
not a definition of the city.

Thus we have several currently used definitions
and versions of the concept "city". They all describe
and focus upon a partial aspect or group of aspects of
the city and may even work quite well as operational
definitions under specific circumstances. None, however,
describes what, in essence, makes the city a working,

interacting whole. A definition which comes closer to

doing this is described below.
The City as a Set of institutions

Several urban social scientists have come to
realize that cities are, in essence, sets of interrelated
institutions. Lawrence Haworth has pointed out that
"instead of saying 'The city is the people', we shall
get more nearer to the heart of our problem by saying,
'The city is an institution, and a collection of
institutions.'"13

Mumford, in gh§_gi£y_ig History, admonishes the
reader that he must avoid the over-particularized

definition of the city. Congestion, an encircling wall,

12

large numbers, are all “accidental characteristics of
the city". The city, he emphasizes, is more correctly
a complex of interrelated and constantly interacting
social functions.14 Mumford makes note of the fact that
"what happened...with the rise of cities was that many
functions were brought together within a limited area
and the components of the city were kept in a dynamic
state of tension and interaction."15 Mumford clearly
implies that unless one understands the institutions, ideas,
and culture of a civilization, physical structures and
elements remain mute and unexplained, for physical elements
are in reality material culture.

Weberfs theory of urban communities approaches
the essence of the issue best. He saw the urban
community as made up of: (1) Social Actions (interhuman
behavior with meaning to the involved parties), (2) Social
Relations (the stable arrangement of elements appearing
in social action), (3) Social Institutions (stable patterns
of behaviors), (4) Community (a total systematic unit of
human life distinguished by an order of institutions).16
The social element and the institutional element (the
distinction between these is purely analytical) form
the basis of his conception of urban communities. This
is the essence of the urban community: all other forms and
elements grow out of these.

The city is thus defined in this thesis as follows:

5_city consists primarily g; relatively fixed arrangements

13

_§ interacting and integgelating insgitutiong’operating
within a_proximity and argangement gonducive 32 efficient

functioning.

The Nature of Institutions

The concept "institution" plays a central role
in the definition of city used in this thesis. Because
of this fact, this section will be concluded with a
brief discussion of the nature of institutions.
Specifically their meaning, types, and characteristics
will be discussed.

In Weber's book, The City, institution is referred
to in the following way: "An institution, such as a
state, a family, a religion, or a system of law is a
'system of relations'...,institution is an economy for
speaking about the occurrence of complex social relations."17
Haworth points out that institutions are both the outcome
of human actions and are established structures.18 To
summarize these views, and provide a specific definition
of "institution", it will be the contention here that:
institutions aig_§hg_iixed and structui§g_patterns Q§_
behavior by_which man satisfies his common, iggg_£ggm,
and more basic needs.

Institutions form the basic framework of urban
form and character. Every viable institution is character-

ized by personnel (members), codes and other normative

14

elements (major purposes), conceptual and ideological
elements (values), attitude and behavior elements (social
roles) and symbolic and physical elements (artifacts).
All of these components are designed to serve certain
basic purposes or goals determined by the nature and type
of institution under consideration. (See Figure 1.1)
Also important is the fact that institutions exist in
a time dimension consisting of a four-part cycle. The
cycle starts with a period of insipient organization
when a need is felt and the institution is created. As
the institution develops, it enters a period of
efficiency. As time goes on, more and more elements are
structured and the institution enters a period of
formalism. This formalism makes changing the institution
difficult with the result that eventually it falls into
a period of disorganization which in turn leads it back
to (re-) organization and the beginning of a new cycle.
(See Figure 1.2)

There are three basic types of institutions:
value creating institutions, regulatory institutions,
and service institutions. Within these types, there are
several major and long term institutions which can be
identified. (See Figure 1.3) These long term institutions
include, but are not limited to, the following: religion,
art, philosophy, science (value creating): family,

education, engineering, medicine, recreation, economics

15

P RSONNEL
MEMBERS)

r-D CODAL AND OTHER NORMATIVE ELEMENTS 4"
(MAJOR PURPOSES)

AAA
III

ATTITUDES 8. BEHAVI OR-CONCEPTS 8. IDEOLOGY
(VALUES 3. ROLES)

SYMBOLIC AND PHYSICAL ELEMENTS
CARTIEACTS)

PT E

Figure 1.1 Components of an Institution

 

 

 

16

PERIOD OF PERIOD OF
EFFICIENCY FORMALISM

0————>O

PERIOD OF PERIOD OF I
INSIPIENT DISORGANIZATION
ORGANIZATION

Figure 1.2 Life Cycle of an Institution

 

 

 

JJ-Qlll.

tr

r

fl.

 

17

 

REGULATORY
INSTITUTIONS

  

LA“!

GOVERNMENT

Figure 1.3 Types of Institutions

18

(service): government, and law (regulatory).

Institutions demand discipline as well as freedom;
they channel and construct life into patterns of action
and form.19 As a functioning whole, the city operates
via the interaction and cooperation established between
its basic institutions. To the extent that they are
balanced, urban life is balanced. To the extent one or
a few institutions dominate, urban life in imbalanced.

The state of institutional balance or imbalance expresses
itself, not only in the life of the people, but in the
various forms of physical culture. The Greek city-state,
for example, was dominated by the combined institutions

of religion and government. This dominance was reflected
in the central places given to the acropolis and the
agora.20 The medieval city was also dominated by religious
and governmental institutions, and as a result, the

church and the castle were dominant features of medieval
settlements.21 There has probably never been a city
wherein anything approaching institutional balance existed.
For better or for worse, cities have always been dominated
by the functioning of one or a few institutions. The
nature of the city is that of the institutions which form
its foundation. The institutions form the purposes and
reasons for being of the city.

It can be seen, therefore, how the city may be

best defined as a set of institutions, and how the

19

particular configuration of institutions form the
character of the community itself. The following section
discusses how this definition fits into a general

analytical framework.
The Sociocuitural Framework

The previous paragraphs have emphasized that
cities are primarily sets of interrelating and interacting
institutions: there are, however, other components.

Every human settlement consists of five basic
components of which institutions are only one. Institutions
are the basic and essential components, but institutions
do not exist in isolation. They are made up of people:
their character is determined by culture: they exist
within a natural environment; and they produce and utilize
artifacts. A complete list of the components of a human
settlement, then, must include HEB; Nature, Culture,
Institutions, and Artifacts. In this thesis the focus
shall be on three of the components, institutions,
culture, and artifacts. See Figure 1.4 for a diagramatic
portrayal of the human settlement with its five components

and institutions as its fecus.
Conclusion

Cities are not what they do, they are not the

physical or human components that fill them, and they

20

 

INSTITUTION

ARTIFACTS

E
Du
w
IL
U
C

 

 

Figure 1.4 The City

 

 

1. ,
.5. A. «a...

14.5% (I: . ‘
> .

a.

 

 

21

are not jurisdictions. They are groups of interdependent
need-related activities which we have termed here
"institutions”. As a whole, that is, as a human settlement,
they consist of Man, Nature, Culture, Institutions, and
Artifacts. Important elements of the study to follow

will be related directly to the elements of culture,
institutions and artifacts of this framework. Even

when it is not mentioned, however, it should be kept in

mind throughout the pages to follow.

Terminology

giiy: The city is primarily a relatively fixed
arrangement of interacting and interrelating institutions
operating within a proximity and arrangement conducive
to efficient functioning.

Man: The human component. Man is the actor,
the deer.

Nature: Nature consists of all things not
specifically fashioned by man. It consists of such
things as flora, fauna, earth, air, water, etc.

Culture: Culture is the sum of man's values,
knowledge, and other meaningful symbols.

institutions: Institutions are the fixed and
structured patterns of behavior by which man satisfies
his commen, long term, and more basic needs, and which

form the core of the city.

22

Artifacts: Any physical object or aggregate of

physical objects specifically fashioned by man.

FOOTNOTES

1. Raymond E. Murphy, The Amegican City: Ag_
Urban Geography (New York: Mc Graw-Hill Book Co., 1966),
p. 9. ,

2. Murphy, pp. 18—21.

3. Murphy, pp. 24-25.

4. Stuart A. Queen and David B. Carpenter, The

American City (New York: Mc Graw-Hill Book Co., 1953),
p. 18.

York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), p. 28.

6. Wilbur C. Hallenbeck, American urban Communities
(New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1951), p. 33.

7. Noel P. Gist and L. A. Halbert, urban Society,
third edition, (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1948),
pp. 8-15, cited by Hallenbeck, p. 75.

8. Channcy Harris, "A Functional Classification
of Cities in the United States“, Geographical Review, XXIII
(January, 1943), 86-89, cited by Hallenbeck, p. 75.

9. Hallenbeck, pp. 35-36.

10. Lawrence Haworth, The Good City (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 19637, p. 35.

11. Haworth, p. 35.

12. Ralph Thomlinson, Urban Structure (New York:
Random House, 1969), pp. 41-42.

13. Haworth, p. 28.

14. Lewis Mumford, The City ig_History (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1961), p. 85.

15. Mumford, p. 31.

23

24

16. Don Martindale, "Prefatory Remarks: The
Theory of the City", in Max Weber, The City (New York:
The Free Press, 1958), p. 54.

17. Martindale, in Weber, p. 51.

18. Haworth, pp. 27-28.

19. Haworth, p. 37.

20. Clifford R. Bragdon, "Urban Cultural Evolution:
An Historical Perspective" (Unpublished Master's thesis,
Michigan State University, 1965), pp. 29-30.

21. Bragdon, p. 60.

CHAPTER 2
AMERICAN VALUES AND THE CITY
Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to explore the
values several prominent Americans have expressed toward
American cities. This will be done in order to gain some
insight into the nature of these values and the degree
to which they have been transmitted through history.

During the middle ages, people escaped to the
city in Order to find freedom--freedom from feudal barons.
Today you may be more likely to find that “an infant
rebellion is born in the mind of every thinking American
when he is jammed into an elevator car or is herded into
a subway train, or is forced to stand in line to be
served."1 Strauss has pointed out, that in American
literature, antagonism toward the city has been a
persistent theme throughout our history. Leo Marx made
a study of this, and found that in literature, urban
antagonism is often balanced with rural escape. Specifically
he finds persistently in American literature the three
part theme of retreat from civilization (resulting from

alienation from the complex life in the city), exploration

25

26

of an idyllic wilderness (idyllic wandering through the
wilderness), and the return to civilization (a result

of the sudden intrusion of civilization: necessary but
never seen as very satisfactory).2 Such persistent themes
indicate strong feelings about the complexities of urban
life.

It will become clear early in this chapter, that
the preponderance of the attitudes expressed by the
influential Americans studied are primarily negative.

It should be understood, however, that no attempt has been
made to solicit such views exclusively; indeed it will

be a major endeavor of this thesis to explain the main
causes of the overwhelming number of views unfavorable
toward the city. The analysis of the views (Chapter 3)
explored in this chapter will dwell not so much on the
onesidedness of the views, but rather it will focus on

the polarities of the values surrounding the views.

The reader is advised to remain alert to both the positive
and negative implications of the various quotations to
follow.

This chapter is organized into a general time
sequence, dating from the 1700's to the present. Three
major periods will be explored: One from the 1700's to
the 1800's: another from the 1800's to 1900's: and a
final one from the 1900's to the present. The purpose

of this division is to reflect on the early growth of our

27

cities, the impact of the Industrial Revolution, and

the aftermath of this impact. The following is not intended
to be a complete history, but rather a selective and
sequential selection of the views of major American

figures toward the American city.
The 1700's to the 1800's

The heritage of this country may be British,
but it was fostered and opened up by pioneers and farmers
and thus our values toward the city are not those of
our British counterparts. "...Before the Civil War, the
main figures of American philoSOphical thought were
persistently critical of the American city....Jefferson,
Emerson, and Thoreau preferred life in Monticello,
Concord, or beside Walden Pond."3 And the American city
was not a backward, uncivilized outpost of Britain,
either: by 1740 the urbanity and affluence of the American
city was widely recognized.4 Cities during these early
years were not the major form of human settlement however:
the dominant settlement was based on the farm. During
the first few decades of American economic expansion,
transportation was largely by foot or horse, and cities
remained relatively compact. Because of the openness of
the rest of the country, such density was unnatural and
something which happened in spite of, not thanks to,

Americans.5

28

J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur was a French
born writer who moved to America to write and work as a
mapmaker and surveyor and later as a self-proclaimed
simple farmer. Although he was enchanted with New York,
he was not sympathetic toward European cities and saw
American cities becoming more like them. Perhaps
influenced by his views toward Europe, he identified
the farm orientation of America with freedom and the
cities of Europe with domination by nobility.

In his Letters from ag_American Farmer of 1782,
Crevecoeur described himself in the following way: "I am
neither a philosopher, politician, divine, or a naturalist,
but a simple farmer." In answering the question, What is
an American?, Crevecoeur gives the following response:

He is arrived on a new continent: a modern
society offers itself to his contemplation, different
from that he has hitherto seen. It is not composed,
as in Europe, of great lords who possess everything
and of a herd of people who have nothing. Here are
no aristocratical families, no courts, no king, no
bishops, no ecclesiastical dominion, no invisible
power giving to a few a very visible one: no great
manufacturers employing thousands, no great refinements
of 1uxury....Some few towns excepted, we are all tillers
of the earth from Nova Scotia to West Florida, We are
a people of cultivators....We are all animated with the
spirit of an industry which is unfretted and unrestrained
because each person works for himself.6

Crevecoeur voiced reservations only for the

pioneer who lived beyond the clutches of law and society,

and who was, therefore, no better than a canrivorous animal

of superior rank, living on the flesh of wild animals.7

29

Obviously, what America stood for to Crevecoeur, outside
of a few towns and a few wild pioneers, was the farm and
tilling the soil. Cities were exceptions to the true
American spirit.

During this time, late in the 1700's, Americans
were feeling a need to justify their new found freedom
and show how they were superior to the Old World.
Nationalists, knowing that America could never match
Europe's claim to civilization, turned to our vast
wilderness as the only real claim our country had to fame.
Even though many of those who farmed, trapped, and
pioneered found such a base for pride ridiculous, nonethe-
less, the movement was underway and its strength multiplied.
Numerous volumes appeared praising natural beauty as the
unique virtue of America. Gilpen's 1792 Remarks gg_Forest
Scenery and Other Woodland Views, was a early and famous
nationalist volume. "A fig for your Italian scenery!"
cried one enthusiastic patriot, "This is the country where
nature reigns in her virgin beauty...." Edmund Burke
wrote his PhiloSOphical Enquiry into the Origin g§_ggi_
ig§a§_gg_the Sublime and Beautiful, in 1757. Immanuel Kant

wrote his Observations Qg_the Feeling g; the Beautiful and

 

 

the Sublime (1763) and his Critigue g; Judgement in 1790.
Benjamin Rush noted at this time that "man is naturally
a wild animal, and taken from the woods, he is never

happy.8 Clearly, the trend of American thought, at this

30

time, was away from the civilized polish of cities and
toward the "simplicity" of nature.

A strong influence in American culture was
Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson dearly loved the farmer and
thought of him as the bulwark of American democracy.

Yet he loved also the gaiety, architecture, painting,
music, and similar amenities only found in civilized

life. Jefferson was above all, however, strongly
influenced by considerations of national security. It

was this latter influence that drove him to fear for
America, lest she develop into a land of cities. Foremost
in his fear was the possibility that America would

develop cities like those of Europe.

He considered cultivation of the earth preferable
to manufacturing. "In Europe," he said in his Ng£§§.gg
the State 9i_Virginia (1785), "the lands are either
cultivated or locked up against the cultivator.
Manufacturers must, therefore, be resorted to of necessity,
not of choice, to support the surplus of their people."9
The fact that our manufactures were of poor quality was of
no consequence: Americans were tillers of the soil.
"...Our people will certainly return as soon as they can,
to the raising of raw materials and exchanging them for
finer materials than they are able to manufacture .

themselves."10

His distrust of manufacturing cities was also

31

aimed at the workmen themselves. "It is better to carry
provisions and material to workmen, than to bring them

to the provisions and materials and with them their
manners and principles."11 Jefferson definitely chose

to see the nation a land of farms rather than one of
“teeming" cities. In this same manuscript he made some of
his most impassioned statements about the city:

Those who labor in the earth are the chosen
people of God...whose breasts He has made His peculiar
deposit for substantial and genuine virtue....The
mobs of great cities add just so much to the support
of government as sores do to the strength of the
human body. It is the manner and spirit of a people
which preserves a republic in vigor. A degeneracy
in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart
of its laws and constitution.12

These are not isolated quotations from this most

influential man in American culture. Jefferson was quite
openly opposed to cities and expressed these feelings

in a number of writings. In a letter to James Madison,
in 1787, he had this to say: "I think governments will
remain virtuous for many centuries, as long as they are
chiefly agricultural: and this will be as long as there
shall be vacant lands....When they get piled upon one
another in large cities, as in Europe, they may become as
corrupt as in Europe."13 In a letter to Benjamin Rush in
1800 he expressed a hope that the yellow fever would
discourage the building of great cities. He later
suggested building on a checkerboard pattern to avoid

this danger.14 And in a letter to Dr. Caspar Wistar in

32

1807 he again expressed his distaste for cities, except
this time with some minor reservations: "Dear Sir--I
have a grandson...now about 15 years of age, in whose
education I take a lively interest....I am not a friend
to placing growing men in populous cities, because they
acquire the habits and partialities which do not
contribute to the happiness of their afterlife. But
there are particular branches of science which are not
so advantageously taught elsewhere in the United States
as in Philadelphia."15

Slowly, however, his views began to change, not
out of "choice", but mainly "necessity". Visits to Paris,
however, brought out his cultural proclivities and led
to a weakening of his anti-urban bias. Most of the change,
however, was due to his strong feeling for America's
national security. The War of 1812 showed Jefferson the
need for domestic manufacturing. “We must now place the
manufacturer beside the agriculturalist...."l6 By 1816,
the change was clear. In a letter to Benjamin Austin of
that year, Jefferson was finally forced to admit America's
need for manufacturing cities. "Shall we make our own
comforts or go without them, at the will of a foreign
nation?...Experience has now taught me that manufacturers
are now as necessary to our independence as to our
comfort."17 His distaste for cities was not, however,

completely dampened. In a letter to William Short, he

33

stated that: “A city life offers you indeed more means of
dissipating time, but more frequently also and more
painful Objects of vice and wretchedness...all the
disparities of human nature."18

Thomas Jefferson feared the city as exemplified
by that in Europe. He found virtue in the country and
particularly in the farmer. He was reluctant to see a
young man go to the city and was even more reluctant to
see the need for cities which could guarantee America's
independence in a hostile world.

As the time period covered in this section came
to a close, American society became mg£g_urban and affection
for the city declined or more accurately, tendencies to
negatively value the city increased.19 Suddenly, for the
first time in history, it was possible to live and even
travel widely without coming into contact with the wildness.

Roderick Nash points out in his book, The Wildernesg_and the

 

Ameiican Mind, that at this time the Leatherstocking stories
of James F. Cooper, Robert Montgomery Byrd, Timothy Flint,
and William Gilmore Simms were becoming increasingly
popular.20 But also during this time, the American city
was resuming the expansion experienced during the period
before the War of 1812 and worries over water, fire, crime,

and health were also resuming.21

34

TheyiBOO's to the 1900's

The beginning of this era marks a period of
intense urbanization. The census of 1890 only gave.
technical confirmation to what everyone already knew:
frontier America was gone forever, ours was an urbanized
nation to a large degree. The surge of cities associated
with the Industrial Revolution was a widespread experience:
America was a little later than others, but what we had
lost in time we soon made up for in sheer size. In the
1880's Prussia's cities grew by two million. France's
cities grew by one million. England and Wales were not
far behind: they grew by three quarters of a million.
London and Paris had, by 1890, quadrupled. The united
States had one third of its population in cities of over
four thousand. Cities of twelve to twenty thousand in
population increased in number from one half to over one
million in population. Twin Cities increased three times
and Columbus and Cleveland increased by 80 percent.22
Between 1825 and 1845 New York doubled its population and
then redoubled its population in ten years. Between 1830
and 1850 Cincinnati went from 25 thousand to 115 thousand
people.23 In all of America's large cities, mansions were
starting to be subdivided to house immigrants arriving A
daily. Warehouses were converted to tenements in several

cities and slums were appearing all over. Housing shortages

35

in the 1850's contributed to high death rates. Congestion
was inescapable.24

Standardization and mass production became

bywords: it was often said that a penny profit could produce
a millionaire. Don Martindale, in his introduction to

Max Weber's book, The City, makes the following observation
in describing the city of the 1800's:

The city was a monster with an endless appetite
for anything fertile imaginations could dream of
supplying: brick, asphalt, concrete, steel, glass
in endless arrangements and compounds. The city
was also...able to grant giant monopolies in the form
of franchises to an amazing series of utilities
affecting access to the use of earth, water, and
sky.25

America greeted with shock the idea that her

national heritage, in the form of an open frontier and farms,
was slipping away. "Articles in the nation's leading
periodicals voiced concern over the 'drift to the cities'
and consequent loss of pioneer values." In fact, Americans
actually went so far as to turn the pioneer's distaste for
the wilderness into his first love. Pioneers in their day
were actually known for their hatred of the wilderness

and manifested this hate in their desire to civilize the
wanton woodlands. "At the end of the nineteenth century,
cities were regarded with a hostility once reserved for
Wild forests.“26 City criticism was not only a product-

of a yearning for nature, it was also spawned out of a

concern for civilization. Let us now look at the views

of a number of Americans in this period to see how this

36

shock and concern was expressed.
Alexis de Tocqueville was a Frenchman, but he
has had much influence on American culture due to his
extensive observations on our life and society. It was
his feeling that American cities were a political
menace. In 1835 he said: "The lower ranks which inhabit
these cities constitute a rabble even more formidable than
the populace of European towns...,serious riots have broken
out in Philadelphia and New York." De Tocqueville was
again speaking with an eye to the European experience
when he said: "I look upon the size of certain American
cities and...their population, as a real danger which
threatens the future security of the democratic republics
of the New World."27 Cities to de Tocqueville were a clear
and present danger, surely, they were to be avoided if at
all possible. As with Jefferson, the European city was a
grim model of the city's undesirable and dangerous nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was a highly sensitive author
of the nineteenth century. He was a transcendentalist
who believed that one could reform humanity by relying
on intuition and the perfectability of mankind. He was
considered by many then and still today as the ideal
American scholar. This scholar and writer of the
nineteenth century had much to say about the cities he

experienced in this country.

37

Emerson did not consider civilized life as only
possible in the city and so, although a lover of civility,
he disliked the city. His cultural experiences did,
however, come from the city. He stated in his Journal
in 1844, "I wish to have rural strength and religion
for my children and I wish city faculty and polish."28
Emerson indicated his distaste for the city in a letter
to a friend. In this letter he stated: "I always seem
to suffer some loss of faith on entering cities. They
are great conspiracies: the parties are all maskers who
have taken mutual oaths of silence not to betray each
other's secret and each to keep the other's madness in
countenance." Conspiracy and trickery were avoided by
good men, according to Emerson, by going to the woods.29

Indeed, a persistent theme with Emerson appears
to center around the goodness of nature and farming and
the evil of the city. In his essay "Farming", Emerson
states: “The city is always recruited from the country.
The men in cities who are the centers of energy, the
driving-wheels of trade, politics, or practical arts and
the women of genius are the children or grandchildren of
farmers, and are spending the energies which their father's
hardy silent life accumulated in frosty furrows in poverty,
.necessity, and darkness.“30 In this same essay he also)
asserts that these driving-wheels of great cities eventually

look back on the farm as a haven when they no longer are

38

able to compete. "...Who knows how many glances of
remorse are turned this way[:to the farm:]from the bankrupts
of trade, from the mortified pleaders in courts and senates,
or from the victims of idleness and pleasure? Poisoned
by town life and town vices, the sufferer resolves:
'Well, my children, whom I have injured, shall go back
to the land to be recruited and cured by that which should
have been my nursery and now shall be their hospita1.'"3l
Emerson saw in nature and the farm virtue and
unadulterated innocence. In his essay "Farming" from
which some of the above quotes were taken, he states:
”That uncorrupted behavior we admire in animals and in
young children belongs to...the man who lives in the
presence of nature. Cities force growth and make men
talkative and entertaining, but they make them artificial."32
And at Thoreau's funeral, he said, "...one who surpasses
his fellow in virtue is no longer a part of the city."33
Again the city is made the target of an American
of great influence and cultural prominence. Emerson saw
the city as an artificial, conspiratory place which left
men of high virtues no choice but to choose a life away
from the city, a life near the purity of nature.
Emerson, his contemporaries, and his predecessors
were not alone. A general distaste for cities and
idealization of frontier America was well under way at this

time. By the 1840's it was common for literary persons

39

of the major Eastern cities to make junkets into the
wilderness, collect their impressions and return to tell
their fellow citizens of their adventures in the most
extreme of Romantic style. Charles Fenno Hoffman,

Roderick Nash explains, was a perfect example of the editors

of this era. As editor and writer for the Atlantic

 

Monthly, he allowed extensive space for romantic wilderness
tales.34 Appreciation eventually led to remorse at the
extinction of the America of scenic beauty and unexplored
lands. Among the more prominent in American culture to
take nationalistic pride in the natural beauties of
America was the famous author Henry David Thoreau.
Thoreau's writing is considered among the best of his

time, and he has been read by nearly every product of
American educational institutions.

In 1851 Thereau stated that "...on this side is
the city, on that the wilderness and I am ever leaving the
city more and more, and withdrawing into the wilderness."35
In his work Walden (1854) he expressed his feelings toward
the city most openly. But Thoreau was not only anti-city,
he was also anti-farmer and small town. His idea of an
alternative to the corrupt city was the life of the
isolated individual. He detested both city and civilization.
When Thoreau wrote the following quotations, he had just
returned to Concord after a long stay in a small cabin on

Walden Pond. He describes himself as a "sojourner in

40

civilized life again." He writes: "The mass of
civilized men lead lives of quiet desperation. From the
desperate city they go to the desperate country...."36
The farmer agg_the city dweller were both the unlucky
inheritors of civilization according to Thoreau. "I see
young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have
inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools:
for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better
if they had been born in the open pasture...."37 But
Thoreau's views need no more than the following quote
to make their essence clearly felt. In Walden, Thoreau
says of the railroad: "We do not ride on the railroad,
it rides on us...."38

In their survey of American intellectuals and
the city, Morton and Lucia White cite several influentials
as being highly antagonistic toward the city. In the
interest of space, they will only be mentioned here.
Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe, all prominent in American
culture, were highly critical of the city, and expressed
their feelings freely in their writings and via the
characters in their stories. In Redburn, Melville
describes London as filthy, degrading, and gaudy. The
happiest moments in Redburn, the Whites tell us, are had
in the country. Melville's book Pierre is another
mid-1800's example of anti-urbanism. Hawthorne was also

anti—urban and in The Blithedale Romance, the characters

41

make their distaste for the city known. Th9,flg;hig,§ggg,
also by Hawthorne, lashes out against the city. Poe,
the Whites tell us, was equally as anti-urban and
expressions of this may be found in several of his many
short stories.39

Henry Adams is another influential discussed by
the Whites. Adams was one of the few to find fault with
the American city, not because of its dirt and corruption,
but rather because it was not civilized enough. "For
Adams, the age of walden, Concord, and Monticello was
over....Adams was a refined, highly civilized, urbane, and
urban man....For Adams, the American city was a three
dimensional, menacing thing."4O Literature, science,
poetry, and philosophy marked the good city for Adams,
and no American city was well rounded enough to be suffi-
ciently endowed with these. The crowds, the bankers, and
the Jews were Adams' main enemies.41 In the end, however,
Adams chose the simplicity of the small town even with
its lack of civility. His favorite retreats were Quincy,
and Mt. vernon. With Adams, therefore, a slight shift
may be detected from past literary leaders. Adams'
disgust for the city centered on its lack of a well
rounded sophistication, and he wished not for its demise,
but rather its elevation. His choice for a living
environment is not in the peace and quiet of the farm,

but rather, one step up, in the warmth and humanity of the

42

small urban settlement.

Andrew Jackson Downing was well read by the people
of the middle 1800's and he was definitely against the
disorderly city and in favor of the neat and open village.
He was particularly distressed at the cheap imitations
of small town America which were being built by speculators.
His feelings were with the nationalists, and in his essay
"Our Country Villages" he states that "...the natural
features of our common country...are as agreeable and
prepossessing as those of any other 1and,...if the
Alleghanies are rather dwarfish when compared to the Alps,
there are peaks and summits in...the Rocky Mountains...."
He felt strongly about these beauties, and believed
that "Providence has blessed this country--our country
with 'natural born’ features, which we may look upon and
be glad.” He was distressed that "...the fair landscape
here and there [was deformed:]by miserable shabby looking
towns and villages."42 Downing definitely did not like
the large city, as it was basically unamenable to human
life: the village or small town was the answer, but not
as the subdividers tried to present it. They left him
(the prospective buyer) with "houses on all sides,
almost as closely placed as in the city from which he has
endeavored to fly from...."43 What Downing wanted to I
see was a place to which people could flee and reap all

the advantages of rural life. His ideal rural village

 

 

 

43

left twenty acres open in the center as a rural park:

it had wide streets with 100 foot lots on the side streets:
and quarter acre lots fronting on the park.44 Downing,
thus, disliked the city and preferred the natural beauties
of the nation. His alternative to the congested and
slightly superior, crowded suburbs, was a wide open rural
village centered on a life with nature.

Henry James is another of the influential leaders
of American culture who spoke out against the city. Like
Adams, his distaste for the American city centered on
its lack of refinements. White and White point out that
in James' novels and writings lie some strong anti-urban
sentiments.

In the course of painstaking observation and
appraisal, Henry James has come to feel that American
cities at the turn of the century were lacking in
so many of the amenities of life as to be for him
uninhabitable. He regretted their loss of the
pleasant and cultivated vestiges of the country-
gardens and orchards. He deplored the social
change in cities from homogeneous communities...to
polyglot and mannerless metropolises.45

James, like Adams, then, both deplored the city
for its crudities and lack of sophistication and found
basic virtue in the country.

Utopias often tell one much about a society, its
values, and its culture. Several such utopias (Downing's
rural village may be classified as one) will be discussed

in this chapter. The utopia of Dr. Benjamin Ward, "Hygenia"

0r the "City of Health", reflects a definite reaction

 

44

against the crowded and unhealthy conditions of the cities
of the 1870's. Hygenia was to be a city wherein all
citizens could enjoy healthful, well rounded lives. The
city's main characteristic was its openness. Open land
abounded. Hygenia housed 100,000 people on 4,000 acres,
25 acres gross per person.46

William Dean Howells is another kingpin in
American cultural history. Howells was well rounded: he
knew all aspects of life--rural village, small city, and
European metropolis, and he felt affection for all of
them to some degree. He was also a realist, and not so
prone to the dripping romance of his predecessors.
Howells' attention was centered upon two newly arrived
types, the millionaire and the immigrant. Although he
was not the bigot Henry Adams was, he did worry about the
effect the immigrants might have on his country.

He had a distaste for cities to be sure, but he
was practical in that he remained attached to the city and
its people. Of New York, Howells wrote: "...I...was glad
to come away. Indeed, the metropolis disappointed me,
which was sad for the metropolis, and annoying to me."47
He remained steadfastly critical of the city, however, and
after moving to Boston, wrote a series of anti-urban

novels which became known as Boston-Torn-gg-Tatters.48

 

Eventually, as has been the pattern so far,

Howells came around to writing about the ideals of

45

family, neighborliness, and closeness to the earth. He
expressed the belief that if it could be said that one
occupation was honored above another, it was the cultivatiOn
of the earth. He suggested that cities be replaced with
well spaced capitals which would exist only for the

conduct of public affairs. The permanent social life of
the country, he believed, should be lived in villages

and hamlets within easy reach of the capitals.

Howells reluctantly rejected the city of his time
in favor of the life in the country. He left to the city
only the function of government. The countryside would
supply the rest of life's needs.

Edward Bellamy in his book of 1888, Looking
Backward, presents us with another example of utopia.

Let us quickly look at some of the features of Boston in
the year 2000 for an idea of how this great thinker of
our culture would have liked to have seen our cities.

Every quarter in the Boston of 2000 has large open
spaces with trees, statues, and fountains. Water pollution
is gone ("That blue ribbon...was it not the Charles?").

Air pollution is gone ("I really think that the absence
of chimneys, and their smoke is the detail that first
impressed me."). The city's magnificence reflects
"material prosperity". There is no more confusion from-
advertisement and cut throat competition. The stores are

all alike, the clerk is gone, and the merchandise is

46

fairly and equally displayed.49 Bellamy, unlike those
discussed above, chose to remove the cancerous tissue

from the city, instead of burying the patient in favor
of a healthy child. His criticisms are generally like
the others: his technique, however, is quite different.

Approaching the twentieth century, we begin to
see more of the kind of approach used by Bellamy. The
small town and agricultural virtue themes remain to a
large extent, but the move is not always away from the
city, rather, in more and more cases, it is toward
bringing country virtues into the city, or to combine
city with country.

William James showed early vestiges of this
trend. His "...love of nature was tempered by a fondness
for sociability and he was unable to subscribe either to
an extreme primitivism like Thoreau's or the uncivilized
sentiments of his brother."50 James was simply against
bigness in any form. "The bigger the unit you deal with,
the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the
life displayed."51 The city as a group of village
sized units would have been more to James' liking.

This period was characterized by more than
criticism and utopia. Social reform was gaining more and
more momentum. Jane Addams was among the foremost
leaders. She wanted to bring the city up to something

it was not: she saw the American city as ugly, filthy,

47

I gaudy. About Jane Addams, Morton and Lucia White have
I following to say:

Jane Addams viewed the city environment as itself
an opportunity for extending social intelligence
because it could offer varied possibilities for
communication, varied opportunities for removing
misunderstanding. Any yet her own special way of
dealing with the problem of communication in the
city was to build a settlement house, a smaller unit
within the city that was an effort to revive the
localism of an earlier day.52

Clearly, Hull House was an explicit effort to
:apture the human virtue believed by so many to lie in
a rural community. It was an attempt to reduce the large
I indifferent into the small and humane.

In the next and final section some contemporary
>st-l900) views of the city will be looked at. Again
:onsideration of how several influentials have valued
a city will be discussed, only this time the focus will

more on plans and schemes specifically dreamed up as

:ernatives to city life.
The Post—1900 Experience

It should not be too surprising to see that the
arican with his rural beginnings of shaded lanes and
let grassy fields would be disturbed by the all brick
i asphalt existence of nineteenth century cities.
rauss, in his book Images g§_the American City, makes the
Llowing observation. "The symbolic split between big

ty and country-side grew wider as the nineteenth century

 

 

48

progressed so that big cities seemed to many to be totally
lacking in all the visual and moral qualities of small
towns and country-side."53

Given their background, could it be expected
that second generation immigrants and urbanites would
shrug off rural leanings in favor of the city and its
culture? No, says Strauss, the die was cast. Country
homes outside the city were becoming the symbol of
success. As people, including immigrants, gained money,
the move was "up-town and out-of-town."54 The influx of
ruralites underscored the tendency to make the best of
two worlds--city and country. As the following
philosophers' views are perused, this city and country
theme will appear more and more often.

Urban utOpias were appearing more frequently
as America became more urban. Near the beginning of the
twentieth century, it was quite clear that America's future
was to be an urban one, and idealized forms of the city
were more often than not combinations of urban and rural.
Density was the antagonist in most schemes and the only
alternative life known where density was not a factor
was the farm. Frank Rosewater's ideal city, "Red Cross",
is typical. Rosewater's ideal of 1903 was a fine blend
of city and country with grand parkways replacing the I
muddy lane and fine residences throughout with shopping

centers having the amenities of clean crisp air.55

49

Such ideas were not expressed by only a few
obsessed individuals either. John Dewey, the great
American philosopher and educator, showed much respect,
as did the early sociologists and social workers, for the
"...small neighborly group as over against the overwhelming
urban agglomeration."56 Dewey approached education with
an eye to an earlier period in American history, a
period when farms outnumbered factories. The progressive
school devised by Dewey was to combine "...the benefits
of the industrial age with the sweetness and light of the
farming community."57 In The Public and its Problems,
Dewey summed up his philosophy by referring to Emerson:
“We lie, as Emerson said, in the lap of an immense
intelligence. But that intellignece is dormant and its
communications are broken, inarticulate and faint until
it possesses the local community as its medium."58

To this great and influential master of American
education, we can add similar views of our foremost urban
sociologist, Robert Ezra Park. Park's feelings toward the
city were truly ambivalent. He used the analogy of the
moth drawn into the flame to indicate his feelings
toward the city as both an attractive and a destructive
thing. Although he was a student and scholar of the city,
he continued the American intellectual's uneasiness
toward the urban milieu. Pre-urban social organization

is preferred by Park. The following statement by White

50

and White describes Park's ambiguous view toward the

American city:
The physician who works on cancer is challenged
by that human scourge without being pleased by it.
In the same way, the student of what Jefferson called,
the cancer of the body politic, might be challenged
by ii_without being pleased by it....Park's published
statements on the city reveal more the admiration
of the scientist investigating a fascinating
phenomenon rather than the delight of a person who
finds the phenomenon intrinsically pleasing.59
Benton MacKaye was a member of the Regional
Planning Association in 1928 and is well known for his
advocacy of planning on a regional scale. In his plans,
he abhors the "iron civilization" or city and embraces
the country. He viewed the metropolis and its hinterland
as a set of flows. Raw material from the countryside
goes into the city where it is consumed. This flow, he
felt, saps the countryside and bloats the city.

In his book, The New Exploration: A Philosophy

 

9: Regional Planning, published in 1928, he makes several
statements which reveal his views toward the city and his
ideas about proper regional planning. “Here is a

dormant but vital and specific conflict in men's minds:

it is," said MacKaye, “the subconscious effort to

develop the inherent human values of a country[:setting:L..
against that other subconscious effort to develop the
mundane values of an exotic mechanized iron civilization.”6O
MacKaye feared the spread of the city and called it an

"eruption of iron civilization“. He feared that "...‘the

51

backflows' from our metropolitan centers, big and little,
may coalesce into a laval flow or else...into a modern
glacier whose iron fabric may do to the human life and
aspiration what the ice sheet did to life in other forms."61

He had hope for mankind, however, in that he
felt that every man possesses a barbarous thrill for
freedom which needed only to be awakened. This dormant
thrill, MacKaye felt, would lead man toward a land in
which to live as he was intended. MacKaye felt that the
people of his time were currently in a state of confusion.
”The confusion in men's minds regarding the underlying
nature of the indigenous and metropolitan world is
entertaining but it is tragic. These worlds...represent...
the antipodes of human experience: one is inherent, the
other is intrusive: one is natural, the other is
mechanized: one is art, the other is artiface: one is
symphonic, the other is cacophonous."62

His idea of a regional plan, he felt, held the
answer to this dilemma. ”The...prob1em...," MacKaye
tells us, "treated in this philosophy of regional planning
is the strategy of this indigenous world with respect to
its contact with this metropolitan flow. The strategy
consists...in developing the indigenous environments
(primeval, rural, and communal) and in confronting the
encroachments of the metropolitan environment."63 His

regional plan consisted of a wild hinterland of primeval

52

character, a predominantly village and farm environment
for most of the people, and along the roads connecting
these, the urban functions acting as attractive
passageways between villages. His plan thus consisted of
three elemental settings:

1. Man-Nature contact, capable of full development
in the natural environment.

2. Man-Man contact, capable of full development
in the communal setting.

3. Specialized Man-Man contact, developed in the
city proper.64

Together these constituted MacKaye's elements of "living
in the Open".

Architecture also has its urban critic.

Frank Lloyd Wright is considered among the best and most
progressive of American architects. Wright's views on the
city were expressed most fully in his conception of a
utopian city which he called "Broadacre City".

There is no doubt about Wright's feelings toward
the city. To him it was an ugly, inhuman, and artificial
conglomeration. Wright's criticism focused on two
elements of urban life: the city as a structure and the

citizen who inhabits it. In When Democracy Builds,

 

Wright makes clear his feelings toward the citizen and
the physical city: "A parasite of the spirit is here:
this whirling dirvish in a whirling vortex. Yes: enamored

of the whirl." It is an unnatural environment that the

53

citizen experiences. "Perpetual to and fro excites this
citified citizen, robs him of the deeper meditation
and reflection once his as he lived and walked under
clean sky among the greenery to which he was born
companion."65 The citizen according to Wright has made a
very poor deal with his destiny. "He has traded native
pastimes with streams, woods, fields, and animals for
the taint of carbon monoxide rising to a rental aggregate
of cells upended on hard pavements."66 Wright sees this
"citified citizen" as a member of a group of parasites
who "...all go in different directions to various ugly
scaffoldings...only to get into some other cubicle occupied
by some other parasite—of-rent higher up under some other
landlord....His vicarious life is virtually sterilized
by machinery."67 He has become a product of his machine
city and now can do no more than create more machinery.
This next statement by Wright sums up his view of the
American city quite well: ”Were motor oil and castor oil
to dry up, the great city would cease to function and the
citizen promptly perish.“68

The city according to Wright violated man's
basic nature and inherent rights. Broadacre City

returned these rights to man. In Architectural Record

 

in 1935, Wright wrote: "Given the simple exercise of several

inherently just rights of man, the freedom to decentralize,

to redistribute and to correlate the properties of the

 

54

life of man on earth to his birthright--the ground itself--

and Broadacre City becomes reality."69 In When Democracy

 

Builds, Wright enjoined humanity to reject the city in
favor of nature. ”The value of man's heritage has gone
far from him in cities....Centralization has overbuilt
them all....The surge and mechanical uproar...fills the
citified ears as the song of birds, wind in the trees,
animal cries, or voices and songs of his loved ones once
filled his heart."70 Obviously Wright sees the city as

a great abductor which has removed man from his indigenous
rural environment.

The machine is not all villainous, however, it
can be liberating if only used to advantage. Three types
of inventions are viewed by Wright as potential freedom
vehicles: the auto: the radio, telephone, and telegraph:
and the standardized machine shop. These three offer
release from the city. "...Broadacre is release from all
that fatal 'success' which is really only excess....It
has thrown the scaffolding aside."71 Wright saw the harmony
and order of the farm as the future of the city, and
Broadacre City reflected this. "Broadacre would be so
built in sympathy with nature that a deep feeling for the
beauty of the terrain would be a fundamental qualification
of the new city builders."72 This represented quite a
change for man, he "...would go on a more normal way,

without mechanical screams, sobs, roars, shrieks, or

55

smoke...“73 Broadacre would suffocate greed. "No more
stalling of time and crucifying of life just to keep
things congested for the pacing of some money-maker's
patent money making system...."74

Broadacre was to be a city of farms, each at least
one acre in size, larger for larger families. The emphasis
is on human scale. "All common interests take place on a
simple coordinate wherein all are employed: little farms,
little homes, for industry, little factories, little
schools, a little university going to the people mostly by
way of their interest in the ground, little laboratories
on their own ground for professional men. And the farm
itself...becomes the most attractive unit of the city.“75

Frank Lloyd Wright clearly wanted nothing to do
with the American city. He saw it as a machine, an ugly
scaffolding made to support and nurture the renter-
parasites who were its inhabitants. This architect of
architects spoke freely for the rural life of America's
past as preferable to the cities of his day.

Clarence Perry is to urban planning what Wright is
to architecture. His concepts have been embraced by
planners the world over. Below we will take a look at
Perry's attitudes toward the city and what he felt was
an acceptable alternative.

Perry bemoans the price paid for density in the

American city in his book Housing for the Machine Age,

56

published in 1939. "To appreciate what the apartment
child has lost, we have only to recall what the
children in the single—family dwelling still enjoy."
They, according to Perry, explore, build manual skills,
learn kindness in handling animals, fairness in games,
and responsibility through direct parental guidance.
Delinquency, Perry suggests, is a result of lack of these
freedoms under parental guidance. In the dense city,
Perry says, people live close physically, but miles apart
socially. Urbanites are highly transient. The city, to
Perry, is at best a paradox. "Crimes, insanity, suicides.
Have you ever gazed on a picture so grim? And within
the same frame, more music, more books, more education:
What supreme irony!"76

Perry felt that the city environment lacked
wholeness. "The truth is," he says, "that the natural
nest of the human family is not merely six solid walls,
but this box plus a surrounding medium through which
sunshine and air can penetrate and in which social
activities...can be carried on."77 To fulfill this
"surrounding medium", Perry develOped the concept of
the neighborhood unit. In essence, the neighborhood unit
is an almost self-sufficient community with six basic
characteristics:

1. Size: Enough to serve one elementary school,
actual size varying with density.

57

2. Boundaries: Arterial streets.

3. Open Spaces: Plentiful with parks and recreational
spaces.

4. Institutional Sites: All grouped at the center
(only those needed to serve the neighborhood
itself).

5. 'Local Shops: Local stores at street junctions.

6. Internal Street System: Facilitating internal
circulation and discouraging cross traffic.78

Here, in Perry's conception, is a community small
town atmosphere to replace the indifferent overwhelming
city. The city, according to Perry, should consist of
several small towns in the form of neighborhood units.

Clarence Stein was one of the early implementors
of Perry's ideas. He helped build a number of new towns in
America which reflected the ideas of Ebenezer Howard,
founder of the New Town concept, and Clarence Perry.
Radburn was built in the early 1930's and three "Greenbelt"
towns were built later in the thirties, as a part of the
Federal Government's program to provide more and more
decent housing. Greenhills was built in Ohio: Greendale
in Wisconsin: and Greenbelt in Maryland. Neighborhood
unit concepts from Perry were used in all. All but one of
the elements of Howard's Garden City concept were
instituted: All had a rural greenbelt surrounding the
town: all were planned for "healthy living": none, however,
were planned for industry. This is an important fact and

will be dealt with in the next chapter.

58

Conclusion

 

This chapter on American values and the city has
revealed a clear and strong tendency to negatively value
the city. This tendency has been shown to exist among
many of American culture's most influential people in
such diverse fields as literature, urban sociology,
education, philosophy, social work, architecture, urban
planning and government. All of them were innovators
and leaders, and all of them found the city lacking.

Because these people form a basic part of the
American cultural milieu, it can be expected that they
should have both reflected and shaped much of American
culture, and indeed they have. They are among the most
articulate and perceptive people our culture has, and it is
their words which are later taken up and followed. Indeed,
if it is recalled, there were at least two places in the
very small sampling of the writings of these people, where
direct reference is made to one of the others in the course
of making a point. Jefferson is referred to by Robert
Ezra Park in substantiating his label of the city as a
"cancer". Emerson is referred to by Dewey when he
supports his idea of basing his progressive school on the
local community. These quotes were not sought for their
"cross reference" value. Clearly, these people have both

influenced each other and the whole of American culture.

59

Because these people's thoughts are so important
to the basic thinking in our culture and in the decision
making process, it is important to understand them.

The next chapter analyzes the particular configuration
of value polarities revealed in this chapter and looks
into their significance to the city as defined in this

thesis.

FOOTNOTES

1. Elmer T. Peterson, ”Cities are Abnormal", in
Cities are Abnormal, ed. Elmer T. Peterson (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1956), p. 10.

2. Leo Marx, "Pastoral Ideals and City Troubles",
in The Fitness of Man' 5 Environment, Smithsonian
Annual II (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press,
1968), pp. 122- 123.

 

 

3. Morton White and Lucia White, The Intellectuai
Versus the City (New York: Mentor Books, 1964), p. 45.

4. Constance McLaughlin Green, The Rise of Urban
America (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 19677, p. 2.

 

Nineteenth Century (New York: MacMillan Co., 1899), p. 469.

6. J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Letteig:from
gg American Farmer (New York: Fox, Duffield, 1904),
pp. 49-50,.cited by David R. Weimer, City and Country ig_
America (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962), pp. 4-5.

 

7. Crevecoeur, p. 7, cited by Weimer, p. 8.

8. Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American
Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), pp. _45- 78.

9. Thomas Jefferson, "Notes on the State of
Virginia", in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol..III,
ed. Paul Leicester Ford (New York: G. P. Putnam' 3 Sons,
1894), p. 268, cited by Weimer, p. 29.

10. Jefferson, "Notes", in Ford, Writings, Vol. III,
p. 268, cited by Weimer, p. 28.

11. Jefferson, "Notes", in Ford, Writings, Vol. III,'
p. 269, cited by Weimer, p. 29.

12. Jefferson, "Notes", in Ford, Writings, Vol. III,
pp. 268-269, cited by Weimer, pp. 29-30.

13. Thomas Jefferson, "To James Madison", in Ford,
Writings, Vol. IV, pp. 479-480, cited by Weimer, pp. 30-31.

60

61

14. White and White, p. 28.

15. Thomas Jefferson, "To Doctor Caspar Wistar", in
Ford, Writings, Vol. IX, p. 79, cited by Weimer, p. 33.

16. Thomas Jefferson, in Works 9; Thomas Jefferson,
Vol. IV, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (New York: G. P. Putnam's
Sons, 1904), p. 86, cited by White and White, p. 29.

17. Thomas Jefferson, "To Benjamin Austin", in
Ford, Writings, Vol. X, p. 10, cited by Weimer, pp. 35-36.

18. Jefferson, in Ford, Writings, Vol. XV, cited
by White and White, p. 30.

19. White and White, p. 14.

20. Nash, p. 76.

21. White and White, p. 32.

22. Don Martindale, “Prefatory Remarks: The Theory

of the City", in Max Weber, The City (New York: Free
Press, 1958), p. 12.

23. Anselem L. Strauss, Ima es g§_the American
City (Glencoe: Free Press, 1961), p. 153.

24. Green, p. 78.
25. Martindale, in M. Weber, p. 15.
26. Nash, pp. 143"].470

27. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy ig_America
(New York: Knopf, 1945), p. 290, cited by White and White,
pp. 34—35.

28. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in The Heart g§_Emerson's
JOurnals, ed. Bliss Perry (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.,
1937), p. 208, cited by White and White, p. 38.

29. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Thg_Cor£espondence g;
Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Joseph Slater (New
YOrk: Columbia university Press, 1901), pp. 269-270, cited
by White and White, p. 39.

 

30. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Farming", in Society_and
Solitude: Twelve Chapters (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin,
1870), p. 136, cited by Weimer, p. 38.

62
37 31. Emerson, "Farming", p. 134, cited by Weimer,
p. .

32. Emerson, "Farming", p. 148, cited by Weimer,
p. 45.

33. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in The Complete Works 9;
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. I, ed. E. W. Emerson (Boston:
Houghton, Mifflin, 1903-1904), pp. 66-67, cited by White
and White, p. 41.

34. Nash, pp. 60-61.

35. Henry David Thoreau, "Walking", in The Writings
g£_Henry David Thoreau, Vol IX, ed. Walden (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1893), pp. 251, 267, 275, cited by Nash,
p. 84.

36. Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Boston: Houghton,
Mifflin, 1893), pp. 7-15, cited by Weimer, pp. 46-47.

37. Thoreau, Walden, p. 11, cited by Weimer, p. 46.
38. Thoreau, Walden, p. 146, cited by Weimer, p. 54.
39. White and White, pp. 47-55. *

40. White and White, p. 65.

41. White and White, p. 67.

42. Andrew Jackson Downing, "Our Country Villages",

in Rural Escape, ed. George William Curtis (New YOrk:
Leavitt and Allen, 1857), p. 236, cited by Weimer, pp. 162-3.

 

43. Downing, in Curtis, p. 240, cited by Weimer,
p. 166.

44. Downing, in Curtis, pp. 241—2, cited by Weimer,
pp. 167-8.

45, White and White, pp, 100-101.

46. Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1961), p. 478.

47. William Dean Howells, in Life ig_Letters gfi
William Dean Howells, Vol. II, ed. Mildred Howells
(New York: Russell and Russell, 1928), p. 31, cited by
White and White, p. 107.

63

48. White and White, p. 108.

49. Edward Bellamy, Looking_Backward, 2000;1887
(New York: Grosset and Dunlap, n.d.), pp. 37-108, cited
by Weimer, pp. 78-84.

 

50. White and White, pp. 146-147.

51. William James, in The Lette;§_gf William James,
Vol II, ed. Henry James (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press,
1920), p. 90, cited by White and White, p. 151.

 

 

52. White and White, p. 158.

53. Strauss, pp. 222-223.

54. Strauss, p. 217.

55. Strauss, p. 206.

56. White and White, p. 171.

57. White and White, p. 174.

58. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems,
(New York: H. Holt and Co., 1927), p. 219, cited by White
and White, p. 178.

59. White and White, p. 170.

60. Benton MacKaye, The New Exploration: 5.
Philosophy g: Regional Planning (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1928), p. 118, cited by Weimer, p. 189.

61. MacKaye, p. 118, cited by Weimer, p. 190.

62. MacKaye, p. 151, cited by Weimer, pp. 191-192.

63. MacKaye, p. 74, cited by Weimer, p. 189.

64. MacKaye, pp. 205-206, cited by Weimer, pp. 192-3.

65. Frank Lloyd Wright, When Democracy Builds,
rev. ed. (Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 1945), p. 1,
cited by Weimer, p. 313.

66. Wright, Democragy, p. 1, cited by Weimer,
pp. 313-314.

67. Wright, Democrac , p. 2, cited by Weimer, p. 314.

64

68. Wright, Democragy, p. 2, cited by Weimer, p. 314.

69. Frank Lloyd Wright, "Broadacre City: A New
Community Plan", Architectggal Recorg, LXXVII (April, 1935),
p. 244, cited by Weimer, p. 304.

70. Wright, Demogracy, p. 1, cited by Weimer, p. 313.

71. Wright, "Broadacre", p. 245, cited by Weimer,
p. 305.

72. Wright, Democracy, p. 63, cited by Weimer, p. 318.
73. Wright, Democracy, p. 65, cited by Weimer, p. 319.
74. Wright, Democracy, p. 67, cited by Weimer, p. 321.

75. Wright, "Broadacre", p. 247, cited by Weimer,
p. 307.

76. Clarence Arthur Perry, Housing for the Machine
Age (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1939). pp. 19-20,
cited by Weimer, pp. 198-200.

77. Perry, p. 24, cited by Weimer, p. 201.

78. Perry, p. 51, cited by Weimer, pp. 202-204.

CHAPTER 3
AN ANALYTICAL VIEW OF AMERICAN VALUES
Introduction

This chapter contains an analysis of the views
and proposals reviewed in Chapter 2. Although the above
historical probe has shown that American's have overwhelm-
ingly rejected the city, there have been some positive
implications made about cities, and even a few definite
pro-city statements. This chapter will analyze the views
and proposals presented in the above chapter in search
of both the positive and negative values (which are
termed, here, value polarities). The chapter will also
delve into the major alternative to the city (country,‘
small town, etc.) in order to identify what has been found
to be preferable to urban life. This will be followed
by the final analytical probe wherein all of the above
will be investigated in terms of the sociocultural
analytical framework described in Chapter 1. What we have
then, is an analysis of the value polarities surrounding
the city, a look at the alternatives chosen to urban life,
and a section wherein all of this will be put into the

sociocultural analytical framework.

65

66

Before doing these things, however, what is
meant by value polarities where the city is concerned
should be clarified, and how a sociocultural analysis of
these polarities will be done should be mentioned.
Ebenezer Howard, developer of the famed Garden City
concept, provides a clear example, in his identification
of the town and country magnets, of what is meant by value
polarities. Look at how Howard juxtaposes positive and
negative in his listing of the elements under the town
magnet and the country magnet.

Town Magnet

Closing out of nature—-Socia1 opportunity

.Isolation of crowds--P1aces of amusement

Distance from work--High money wages

High rents and prices--Chances of employment

Excessive hours-~Army of unemployed

F095 and droughts--Costly drainage

Foul air, murky sky-AWell-lite streets

Slums and gin p1aces--Pa1atia1 edifices

Country Magnet

Lack of society-—Beauty of nature

Hands out of work—-Land lying idle

Trespassers beware--Wood, meadow, forest

Long hours, low wages-~Fresh air, low rents

Lack of drainage--Abundance of water

Lack of amusement--Bright sunshine

No public spirit-~Need for reform

Crowded dwellings——Deserted villages1

The polarities of these environments were well
understood by Howard. He has provided us with two good
lists of the attractions and repulsions of both the town
and the country environments. Howard also understood, at

least implicitly, that living environments are forged

67

out of the opposing forces of such polarities as he listed
under town and country. His understanding of these polar
forces is well expressed in his third magnet, what he
terms the town-country magnet. This magnet shows how
he feels the polar opposites between and within the town
and the country magnets can be integrated to produce a
living environment. Notice how he has combined and
arranged the town and country polarities to produce the
third magnet, the town-country magnet.

Town-Country Magnet

Beauty of nature-—Socia1 opportunity

Fields and parks of easy access

Low rents--High wages

Low rates--P1enty to do

Low prices--No_sweating

Field for enterprise--Flow of capital

Pure air and water--Good drainage

Bright homes and gardens-~No smoke, no slums

Freedom-~Cooperation2

In the middle of these three magnets he put
"The People“ and the question: "Where will they go?"
Although Howard's Town-Country magnet is a highly
idealized example of the shaping powers of opposing
polarities, it is a good example of what is meant by
opposing forces creating a living environment. Indeed,
they follow much the same pattern as the value polarities
expressed in the views reviewed in Chapter 2.

Such polar opposites are not at all unique, they

have been shaping forces throughout history. The Bible

is full of such "ambiguities". The city is the City of

68

Zion; the city is the City of God. It is both Babylon
and the Scarlet Woman. It is the House of God; it is
the house of inequity. Amos the herdsman denounces it;
Jeremiah weeps over it. One of the common threads through-
out the Bible is the destruction and rebuilding of the
city.3 This plethora of polarities is what will be
investigated here.

The sociocultural analysis which will end this
chapter, will bring the five part framework directly
into play for the purpose of understanding the raison
d'étre for the particular configuration of polarities
expressed by the people of our culture. Although the
emphasis will be on the institutional element of the
Man, Nature, Culture, Institution, and Artifact framework,
an identification of the part played by each of the

elements will be made.
P013; Values Toward the City

In this section, the views outlined in Chapter 2
will be analyzed in an attempt to gain an understanding
of what it is about cities that has been negatively
valued. As has been mentioned earlier, and as is
apparent in Chapter 2, the majority of views expressed
have been negative. This does not mean that positive
values are not possible, nor does it mean that they have

not been expressed. As this analysis will bring out,

69

there are a number of things about the city that even the

people reviewed in Chapter 2 recognize as desirable.

Negative Values

A common thread runs through and links every
single criticism of the city contained in Chapter 2. This
thread may be called commercialism, capitalism, free
enterprise, or a number of other designations. What is
important is this: the above cited peOple were all, in
some way or another, criticizing the excesses which came
in with the rise of the merchant class. The rise and
the dominance of this new philos0phy and the city it
created is the common linkage.

Crevecoeur was less concerned about showing his
distaste for cities as he was about emphasizing the freedom
experienced by every American symbolized in land owner-
ship. He does, however, make a point of lumping cities
in with the great lords, monarchs, and aristocrats.
Freedom, to him, was inherent in our being a land of
tillers of the soil. Cities were just one part of the
bondage identified with life in Europe.

Jefferson was much more definite in his inditement
of cities. In Jefferson's strong desire to protect
America's national interest, he focused his attack on the
manufacturing elements of cities. He preferred for our

nation to remain extractors and growers rather than

7O

finishers. He feared the kind of people associated with
manufacturing cities like those of Europe where the
Industrial Revolution was getting its earliest start.

The men of manufacturing cities were mobs with no
principles or manners, as far as Jefferson was concerned.
Jefferson feared the filth and disease characteristic of
European manufacturing cities and the men these cities
seemed to produce.

De Tocqueville centered his attack on the people
of great cities. Calling them rabble, he feared that they
would rise up in rebellion to overthrow our then young
democracy. Like Jefferson, de Tocqueville uses the
great manufacturing cities of Europe as examples of what
he feared.

Emerson's negative comments on the city are less
precise than Jefferson's. He centers his criticism on
the apparent lack of sincerity found in cities, and on
imbalance of material values found there, to the detriment
of spiritual values.

Thoreau constitutes the most extreme of the
urban commentators reviewed in Chapter 2. He not only
dislike cities, he also found fault with farming. The
isolated individual was his ideal. In both city and
farm he viewed the economic pressures of making a living
to be unnatural to the inherent needs of man.

Henry Adams viewed the American city with disgust

71

because it lacked civility. Adams let his ethnic prejudice
color his interpretation of what was wrong with our cities
however. To him it was an overabundance of "Jews" and
"bankers". This may be interpreted as meaning that Adams
disliked the big city for its overemphasis on economic
profit.

Andrew Jackson Downing disliked the city because
it lacked human qualities due to its size and density and
hurried pace. He saw it as a place to escape from, and
viewed with dismay the fact that the land developers
were building suburbs so much like the cities they were
intended to provide release from.

Henry James focused his criticism on the fact
that cities lacked the full complement of life's amenities.
This lack of amenity is associated with the disorder and
vulgarity prevalent in the city of his day.

Dr. Benjamin Ward's city "Hygenia" was designed
in reaction to the overly dense and unhealthy conditions
in the cities of his day. Ward regarded the cities he
experienced as unfit for human habitation. Human beings
were simply not, according to Ward, meant to live like so
many bees in a beehive.

Howells was especially fearful of the effect
that so many immigrants coming in response to the needs
of the then burgeoning American industry might have on

our country. Howells' fears rested, then, upon the

72

hoards of foreign immigrants attracted here by American
big business.

Bellamy's utopian Boston shows what he disliked
about cities in the characteristics of Boston he changed
in order to make it utOpian. Major changes included
doing away with air pollution, water pollution, poverty,
and petty competition, all characteristic of the laissez-
faire philosophy then prevalent.

Henry James' brother, William James, found much
to criticize simply in the bigness of American cities. He
considered large cities brutal and inhuman. The larger
they were, the more brutal and inhuman they were.

Jane Addams was also concerned with the inhumanity
of cities; her concern was with what effect the exaggerated
scale, characteristic of American cities, was having on
the people who lived in them.

John Dewey and Robert Ezra Park were also critical
of the American city's bigness and inhumanity. Dewey
felt it to be detrimental to the growth and development
of children. Park considered it a cancer, something
to study in an effort to discover how best to cure it.

MacKaye called the city "iron civilization” and
in so doing found its greatest fault to be an ever hungry
and overly greedy industrial base. He saw the city aS'
sapping the countryside of its land and resources and giving

nothing in return.

73

Being an architect, Frank Lloyd wright focused
his attention on the city as an ugly scaffolding of
parasites. The city to Wright is too fast paced, ugly and
inhuman. Everyone in the city lives in a rented world
for the purpose of leaching, like parasites, off of one
another. The exaggerations of the business world are
Wright's basic criticisms.

Finally, Clarence Perry was concerned with the
effect large and over-built cities were having on family
life. Perry finds the city an overly dense place with no
place for family growth and development.

To these people, then, the city is too large, too
fast paced, too dirty, overly built, detrimental to human
needs, too greedy, and unhealthy. ‘With the advances of
the Industrial Revolution, we had the technology and the
know-how to prevent or do away with much of this, but we
did not; instead, the advances were used to build personal

fortunes.

Positive values

As might be expected, finding positive implications
in the views expressed in Chapter 2 is a more difficult
task than finding negative ones. In many cases such views
are completely lacking, but in many others, they are at'
least implied.

Just as in the case of the negative values, the

positive values expressed or implied toward the city have

74

a common link. The city is positively valued because it
is the center of civilization, the life blood of such
cultural pursuits as the theater, the arts, music,
literature, social life, etc. The city is also valued

for its ability to provide economic opportunity. Cultural
and economic opportunity are thus seen as the city's main
virtues.

Jefferson loved gaiety, architecture, painting,
and music, and knew that only the large city could provide
these amenities. In fact, he was considerably softened
by trips to Paris where he had his more sophisticated tastes
tempted. He also valued the city for its ability to give
independence via self—sufficient manufacturing, and when
it came to the education of his nephew, science wasbest
taught in Philadelphia. The city was, therefore, not all
undesirable. It had culture, and it offered economic
and material independence.

Emerson loved the civilized life, and although
he did not feel that one had to have cities to have
"culture", he did recognize that the city had more
"culture" to offer than the country. He also recognized
the city as a place for business opportunity.

Henry Adams knew that the city was a place wherein
a person could find the necessities for a full and well
rounded life and was disappointed at the fact that

business and money lenders overwhelmed the city's positive

75

features. Like Adams, Henry James also was disappointed in
the American city for its crudity and lack of sophistication,
elements which he knew cities should have.

Edward Bellamy knew of the virtues of city life,
and rather than devise a farm-like utopia, he merely
extracted the city's bad elements, leaving its culture,
monumentalism, prosperity, and opportunity.

Jane Addams knew that the city, even with all
its inhumanity, was a place for economic opportunity.

Dewey knew that the city offered material and cultural
benefits and sought to retain these in his progressive
School.

Cities are, then, capable of being positively
valued, but because our cities grew up in a surge of
speculation, such city elements as would command positive
values have been suppressed in the rush to build. European
cities had more of these elements and thus those who knew
European cities both loved them for their civility and
feared them for the industrialism that was beginning
to dominate theqfi' Those who valued cities, therefore,
focused on their cultural amenities and to some extent

on their opportunity for economic security.

76

Altegnatives to the City

Even with the above identified positive values,
however, it is clear that the thrust of opinion concerning
the city has been negative. This fact and the specific
targets of the negative values are extremely important
to the development of this thesis. Also important,
perhaps even more so, are the kinds of alternatives the
above people identify when they do find fault with the city.
In the paragraphs below the alternatives identified by these
people will be separated and their significance willfbe
explored.

As was the case for both the positive and the
negative values identified above, the major alternative
chosen has a common thread running through it. It ranges
from complete isolation or the farm to a blending of city
and farm, but always it is a simpler and smaller unit of
life that is chosen, one where the forces of economic
determinism are not so strongly felt.

Earlier in our history, at the time of J. Hector
St. JOhn de Crevecoeur, American cities had not developed
to the massive extent experienced in Europe, and as a
result the reaction was to what we were afraid of
developing, not what we had developed. Jefferson and
Crevecoeur equated the farm and rural life with the

good life and did not want to see European type cities in

77

the Uhited States. Thoreau, the one radical in this
analysis, chose isolation, but his friend Emerson chose to
remain close to the virtues of the farm.

As we move on in history, and it becomes apparent
that we were unavoidably to be an industrial and urban
nation, the alternative chosen by the people reviewed in
this period is that of the village or small town.

Andrew Jackson Downing, proposed as the ideal
human settlement, the village. Dr. Benjamin Ward chose to
spread his city "Hygenia" out so that the result was rural
in character. William Dean Howells chose to have the bulk
of life's activities centered in villages with the arts and
government occurring in well spaced capital "cities“.
Bellamy brought a bit of the farm into the city by equipping
it with generous open spaces. William James chose the
village as preferable to the city.

Jane Addams' Hull House may be seen as an attempt
to bring some of the small town virtues of local community
life back into the city and Dewey chose the local
community as the medium for his progressive school.

Benton MacKaye strongly advocated learning the
"art of living in the open" and developed his regional
planning philoSOphy around the idea of leaving the
metropolis and returning to the land, the natural habitat
of man.

Frank Lloyd Wright, the most vociferous critic

78

in this investigation, chose neither the small town nor the
farm. His Broadacre City is a city of farms.

Clearly, the positive feelings toward the farm
and small town run strongly in American culture. The
feelings toward the city are strongly negative. Cities
are negatively valued because of their lack of consideration
for human life; the small town or farm is positively
valued because it offers an environment free enough of
other dominating values to allow it to offer the opportunity
for a more human existence. But why the farm andqnot some
other form of the city? True, some utopian cities were
proposed which retained much of what is g;pgg_in nature,
but most chose a small town or rural-like existence. This
alternative was chosen simply because it was the only
other alternative known and it was the most readily
available. Now that we are armed with a fuller understanding
of the nature of American values toward the city, let us
go on to analyze this cultural information in light of

the sociocultural framework identified in Chapter 1.
Sociocultgral Analysis

First of all, the five part sociocultural frame-
work for looking at human settlements will be reviewed.
Recall that it is made up of five elements of Man,
Nature, Culture, Institutions, and Artifacts. Man is

the actor who acts to satisfy his long term needs through

79

institutions and in so doing, creates artifacts and affects
and is affected by nature. All of this occurs within the
context of his culture which passes on knowledge and ways

of doing things to him which he adapts to the demands

of his current situation and passes on to future generations.
The city is, of course, a dynamic set of interrelating

and interacting institutions which work together in relative
proximity to one another to serve the needs of man. They
exist, of course, in the essential framework consisting

of the five elements cited above.

As the review has already stated, a city is made
up of a number of institutions and is in fact a functioning
set of institutions. The institutions are many and varied
because man's needs are many and varied. The major insti-
tutions include, but are not limited to, religion, art,
philosophy, science, family, education, engineering,
medicine, economics, government, law, and recreation.

Each of these, as was discussed in Chapter 1, has its
own personnel, codes, concepts, attitudes and symbols
which are all channeled in the direction of the
institution's major goals.

The economic institution is only one of the
institutions which make up the city. Like all other
institutions, it has codes, concepts, attitudes, personnel,
and symbols. The purpose of the economic institution is

the allocation of scarce resources and in this country,

80

has been organized as a free enterprise system. In the
economic institution, as organized in this system,

each individual attempts to maximize his profit in the
supply of goods and services in a competitive market.
In the heat of competition and the pursuit of profit,
other considerations are often overwhelmed. This is
clearly what happened during the Industrial Revolution,
and the era of laissez-faire in this country, and it

is significant to the criticism that has been leveled
at American cities throughout history.

By viewing the city as a functioning set of
institutions, and keeping this in mind when referring
to the dominant criticism aimed at American cities, it
is clear that what has been wrong with American cities
is an overdominance of our economic institution.

The people who have leveled such heavy criticism
at the city have not disliked cities per se; what they
have disliked are cities dominated by the economic
institution. Such imbalance is bound to cause certain
needs to be poorly met. For example, government should
serve man's need to have certain aspects of his life
fairly and equitably served and controlled. When,
however, as has been the case with American cities,
governments allocate a great deal of their time and
energy competing with other cities to attract more

industry, certain of the needs for government

81

are bound to go unmet. People have reacted against the city
both as a place to have needs satisfied and as an artifact
or physical entity primarily because it has shown the signs
of the dominating economic institution, which, in satisfying
its own purposes, has either neglected or distorted many
of the purposes designed to be met by the other institutions
which make the city a working entity.

In summary, what has happened in this country
is that out of the myriad of institutions which make up
the city, the economic institution has been dominant. This
has resulted in an institutional imbalance which has
caused the needs, usually satisfied by other institutions,
to be neglected or ignored and has caused the creation
of a physical city reflecting mainly the values of the
economic institution.

Culturally, our past is heavily rural and
pioneer in nature. Jefferson and Crevecoeur feared the
cities of Europe where the Industrial Revolution had
already begun. When the Industrial Revolution struck
this country, the impact was overwhelming. “The resulting
cities were often ugly and inhuman, and clearly, they
were recognized as such.

Having never experienced well-rounded cities
(history has probably never recorded any) people turned

to the only other human settlement they knew of, the

82

agrarian or small town settlement. The economic

forces that overwhelmed and dominated the city were not
as prevalent in the country. The country was turned to,
because it appeared to be a clean slate wherein human
needs could be met freely and on a human scale. The

city could not offer this because it was already
committed to the economic institution, and was encumbered
with the massive and permanent artifacts reflecting and

necessary to its goals.
Conclusion

This chapter has broken down the value polarities
expressed in Chapter 2 and has shown that the preponderance
of values are negative and both explicitly and implicitly
directed at manifestations of the institutional
imbalance experienced in American cities. Specifically
it has been shown that Americans have been critical of
the inequities caused by an overemphasis of the values of
the economic institution.

In searching for an alternative to urban life,
people have chosen a life as close as possible to the
agrarian or pioneer life so well established at our
country's outset.

As was pointed out in the conclusion of Chapter
2, when strongly felt values are expressed by such a wide

range of cultural influentials, one can be sure that

83

such values are a strong part of our culture as a whole.
Being a strong part of our culture, it is likely that they
have influenced policy decisions at all levels, in this
case urban policy decisions. In the next three chapters,
the effect the above identified and analyzed value
configuration has had on policy important to the growth

and development of cities will be explored. Chapter 4 will
look at the effect these cultural values have had on land
use policy. Chapter 5 will concern itself with the effect
on housing policy and Chapter 6 will concern itself with

transportation policy.

FOOTNOTES

1. Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities 9; Tomorrow
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1965), p. 46.

 

2. Howard, p. 46.

3. Kenneth E. Boulding, “The Death of the City:
A Frightened Look at Postcivilization", in The Historian
and the City, ed. Oscar Handlin and John Burchard
(Cambridge: The MIT Press and Harvard University Press,
1963), p. 134.

84

CHAPTER 4

VALUE REFLECTIONS IN ZONING

Introduction

The previous chapters have made it clear that
every culture has predominant values as a basic component.
The values of a culture are many and varied, but there are
always predominating values where major artifacts are
concerned. This is true of the city. We have seen, in
this respect, that the predominant values toward the city
have been negative.

As with all cultures, values are passed on as a
part of the transmission of the whole of the culture. As
history has shown, predominant values are reflected at
different times, by different people throughout history.

This process is important: values are passed on,
they are reflected in how we respond to certain stimuli,
and they are reflected in the decisions we make, both at the
most elementary levels, and at the highest levels.

Despite the overwhelming influence these values have,
however, they are rarely verbalized or consciously
considered.

If it is true that Americans are generally

85

86

unfavorable toward cities, then this should be reflected
in the policy formulated for cities. Specifically,

the negative values and their positive counterparts

(the preferred alternative, that is) should be reflected
in even the most high level policy designed to deal with
urban problems. This chapter, and the following two,
are designed to explore this question. This chapter
deals with reflections of American values toward the
city in the most basic and far reaching urban land use
policy: zoning. There is no doubt that zoning has had a
significant effect on urban land use.

The following sections will explore the subject
of zoning in terms of its reflections of American urban
values, and the effects of these reflections on the city.
First the historical development of zoning as relevant
to this thesis will be explored. Then the purposes of,
and techniques employed by zoning will be explored and
finally, the effect this has had on the city will be

discussed.

Relevant History

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
the village and the farm were still the predominant
forms of human settlement in this country. The two-stOry
detached house was the predominant dwelling type, "...a

pattern still occasionally left untouched...and widely

87

copied or caricatured ever since."1 The late nineteenth
century saw a tremendous surge in urban growth and
consequently, a great deal of concentration in cities.
Row houses and densely built apartment developments were
the characteristic dwelling types at this time. The
early twentieth century saw the technological advancements
of the elevator and steel structure, and the dictates of
the economic institution increased densities and raised
buildings to new heights. Later years saw a reversal of
this trend with an emphasis on space and the dwelling
types which feed on space: the ranch house, and garden
apartments. Zoning played an important part in this
evolution.

Between 1913 and 1916, New York reacted to half
a century of industrial surge by enacting the first
zoning controls. Half a century later, most of America's
cities were zoned.

Laissez-faire was at its height. Andrew Carnegie
said at this time: "Few men have wished to know another
man more than I to know Herbert Spencer, for seldom has
one been more deeply indebted that I to him and Darwin."
The philosophy of Social Darwinism was clearly accepted
by America's elite. Secretary of War, Taft, gave a
speech at Yale in 1906 wherein he stated: "The tendency
in my own case, and I think in that of most graduates

of my time, was toward the laissez-faire doctrine...."2

88

In 1894 we are told by Seymore Toll, in his book

Zoned American, that the cross on top of the venerable

 

Trinity Church in New York was, after fifty years of
dominance, topped by the Manhattan Life Insurance building.3
This was an early artifactural symbol of the sudden surge
of power being felt by the economic institution. The
1811 Commission Plan of New York was another. It divided
the heretofore undeveloped portions of New York into a grid
of rectangles because, "...straight sided, and right
angled houses are the most cheap to build and the most
convenient to live in."4

The eruptive development of the skyscraper was
another sign that economics was running the city. The
Industrial Revolution had made it feasible via steel,
electricity, and the elevator. "In less than 10 years after
the Civil War, plans were afoot to quadruple what had
been the average sixty-foot height of the city's commercial
office buildings."5 Edward M. Basset, a forefather of
zoning, tells us that "the first skyscraper to be erected
in a block would cover the entire lot up to the roof and
open its windows on neighboring lots."6

Seymore Toll describes Fifth Avenue as "...of a
piece with the turbulence in the country at large—~soaring
hope, cruel exploitation of men and things, strident
materialism, large undisciplined energies...." He says

of New York that "...in none of this sometimes exotic,

89

always frenzied activity, is there a suggestion that the men
involved...thought about the public weal or even the owner
in the next block...Efihey were:]...completely oblivious
to all city planning values except the financial."7
Such massive efforts directed at self interest produced
a living environment barely within the limits of tolerance.
As Mumford in his book The City 1g History reveals: "Life
was actually in danger in this new urban milieu of
industrialism and commercialism and the merest counsel
of prudence was to flee...."8
The reactions to the excesses of the economic
institution were extreme and often violent. It was a
period, in many ways like our own, of reform and bloody
confrontation. The period of the early 1900's was one of
labor revolts and riots. "Most of these evils,” Toll
tells us, "of the opening years of the century smoldered
visibly in the cities. If there was to be reform, the
phoenix would have to rise there."9 Pure water, garbage,
waste, and sewage disposal, Mumford tells us, could not
depend upon private enterprise--the nineteenth century
bacame the century of municipal socialism.lo Zoning
emerged out of the cauldron stirred up in the battle
between the reformers and the elite of the economic system.
Zoning appeared at precisely the point at which
economic dominance was making its presence most felt in the

building of the country's most spectacular buildings and

90

the transformation of one of its most lavish streets,
Fifth Avenue. Louis Sullivan Was the skyscraper's master
and even he had reservations as a result of observing the
trend in New York, "...such buildings crowded together
upon narrow streets or lanes," he said, "...become mutually
destructive."ll

One year after a commission was created in 1913
to study the possibility of zoning for New York, legislation
was passed allowing cities to zone.12 On July 25, 1916
zoning became law in New York City.13 President Hoover
appointed the Advisory Committee on Zoning in 1921, and less
than a year later the Standard State Zoning Enabling Act
was drafted and passed. The first issue was published in
May, 1924. More than 55,000 copies were sold, a best
seller by anyone's standards, and within a year one quarter
of all the states in the Uhion had passed acts much like
the Standard State Zoning Enabling Act.14

Zoning and planning were twin issues in the
early days of their reform efforts. "To bring back
fresh air, pure water, green open space, and sunlight
became the first object of p1ann1ng...."15 This is,
just as might be expected when it is recalled that
"countryside life" was the main alternative turned to by
urban critics. Camillo Sitte, influential among the
planners of America, insisted on the hygenic function

of open space calling it "sanitary green“. Scientific

91

proof of the need for sun, light, air, and cleanliness
came with advances in biology.16 Zoning's role in
bringing this about was stated well by an early planner,
Benjamin Marsh: "The most important part of city planning,
as far as the future health of the city is concerned," he
said, "is the districting of the city into districts or zones
in which the buildings may be a certain number of stories
or feet in height and cover a specified proportion of the
site."17 Marsh was in effect citing the openness of the
small town-agrarian settlement as the answer to the urban
problems of the day.

Germany had zoning long before it was proposed in
America, and planners and reformers alike looked to
Germany as a model. There was a critical difference
between Germany and the Uhited States, however. As
Seymore Toll states: "One of the basic axioms of American
cultural history is stated as either a mistrust or hatred of
the city as an object and way of life....The German regards
his town as an organism, whose development both deserves
and needs to be controlled with the utmost thought and
care."18 America, in line with her negative attitude
toward the city as a living environment, chose to use
zoning to flee the city more than to repair it.

Leo Marx found that a strong literary theme in
American literature has been followed throughout our

history. The theme, as mentioned earlier in this thesis,

92

consists of: a disillusionment with the city, a retreat

to nature, followed by the sudden intrusion of civilization
and resulting in a reluctant but necessary return to the
city again. This same theme, Marx tells us, is repeated

in the American suburbanite's move from the work place to
his suburban retreat and then back to work again.19

Zoning appeared just when this fabled cycle was gaining
momentum in real life.

The suburban move was selective but strong.
"...Taxpayers welcomed this flight to the suburbs, it
provided a safeguard against intolerable congestion."20
Sociologist Charles Zueblin, in 1905, predicted that
"the future belongs not to the city but to the suburb."21
Residents of the colonial era lived close to the
countryside while still residing in the city, "the suburb
restored the dream of Jeffersonian Democracy,...the small
face to face community of identifiable people participating
in the common life as equals."22 Clearly America was
bound up in an intimate affection for her rapidly fading
rural cultural base. Yet cities were powerful magnets;
as the centers of the powerful economic system, they offered
independence, at the same time, however, they were by their
very institutional imbalance, undesirable living environ—
ments. In the suburbs people could "have their cake and
eat it too", and by the 1920's almost a third of the

metropolitan population resided outside cities in suburbs.

93

The meaning of this is clear when it is pointed out that, in
the Chicago area alone, several suburbs have either park
or forest in their names, and two have both.23

“Discontent is the precondition of reform. The
reformers who first wanted planning and zoning had their
portion of it. They well knew what the urban problems
were, the overcrowding, the destruction of important
amenities, the senseless growth."24 New York's example
caused zoning to spread much more rapidly than it would
have if it had started elswhere. Height was a key
concern. Invasion of different uses on one another was
another concern. As Bassett, an early zoning advocate,
points out, "...imprOper uses caused injury to homogeneous
areas...."25 Undue concentration was also high on the
reformer's list. To quote Bassett again: "It became apparent
that the remedy was not merely a limitation of height, but
also...setting back...so that each owner would divide
light and air with his neighbor."26 Also looming large in
the reformer's mind was the idea that more "New Yorks" were
not to happen. Decentralization was an issue. Bassett
"...believed in deconcentration--the wide distribution of
places of work and homes...."27 All of these issues
reflect a desire to return to the scale of agrarian
America, or at least come as close as possible. The
"return“ was legislated with a fervor unknown to most issues.

As Toll points out, the spread of such an intricate law

94

so rapidly is an incredible phenomenon.28 Consider for
a moment, however, our cultural values and this is
not so incredible.

In the outward growth of cities, zoning was in
particular favor. The emphasis was on the removal of the
economic uses from the residential environment. The
landmark case of The Village g§_Euclid y, Ambler Realty
92, was fought because a newly adopted zoning ordinance
prevented industrial speculation. Ambler, the plaintiff,
argued that the ordinance was being used to "embed a fly
in amber" by restricting the forces of urban growth.29
The reformers did not believe they could completely overcome
the forces of the economic system before this case was
heard. The first New York zoning ordinance did not have
separate residential districts because it feared that
the courts would not uphold them. "But the demand...
for the segregated detached, one-family house was so great
...that the courts recognized as valid the gradation of
residential districts according to the number of families
per unit building."30 Indeed, the Euclid Case upheld
zoning specifically because the court regarded the
intrusion of industry and apartments into single-family
zones as "...a public nuisance similar to the intrusion
of a tuberculosis sanitarium....The court said, 'a nuisance
may be merely a right thing in the wrong place like a pig

in the parlor instead of in the barnyard' and after

95

describing the noxious consequences of allowing an
apartment house in a single-family zone, it concluded,
'under these circumstances, apartment houses...come
very near to being nuisances.”31

Indeed, in the outlying districts where the
one-family house, the symbol of America's love for the
farm and the pioneer prevailed, the course of zoning
was not only smooth, but it led to a rising demand for
even stricter zoning over larger areas. Planners defended
this bias. Bassett claimed that the varying degrees of
density merely reflected the varying desires of people
to live near one another.32 Babcock assays the
situation quite well: "If in the beginning, zoning
owed much to the fears of Fifth Avenue merchants in New
York City that the garment industry would encroach on their
beautiful sidewalks, zoning can thank the residents of
the North Shores and Westchester of this country for its
remarkable survival."33

Today, the situation has stabilized. The anxiety
which once was held by most Americans concerning the
sanctity of their piece of heritage and retreat, (bound
up in lot and home) has now turned to smugness and self-
assurance or at the most, righteous indignation that it
should be violated. This may be assumed when we see-
statements such as the following by Dennis O'Harrow in

his Planning Advisory Service contribution: New Techniques

96

for Shaping Urban Growth: "The mixture of housing
between private single-family dwellings and multifamily
structures will remain about the same,..." he assures
us, "multifamily structures will be mainly in-town...
single-family houses will be suburban...."34 Clan
Crawford in his book Strategy_and Tactics ig_Municipal
Zoning further clarifies the current situation for us:
"In Westchester, in Connecticut, and on Long Island,
suburbanites...constantly fight to preserve them[:their
communities:]at zoning hearings where they oppose
commercial and industrial developments, apartments, and even
single houses on small lots."35

The very bodies which make many of the planning
and zoning decisions, the Boards of Zoning Appeal and
planning commissions, also reflect these values. To
refer again to Clan Crawford: “Most planning commissioners,
city councilmen and other non-professionals concerned with
the planning and zoning process have great preference for
low density developments. They like to see houses on large
lots, apartments limited to less than ten to the acre, and
commercial and industrial buildings on large landscaped
parks."36

Mr. Crawford forgets, however, that professionals
are not exempt from cultural values. There are professionals
who at least imply the second class nature of multiple-family

dwellings. John Rosenthal, in his Planning Advisory

97

Service Information Report, Planning for Apartments, gives

 

such an impression. He states that "a popular impression
exists that multiple-family structures have a detrimental
effect on the value of single-family residences. Such
commentary is often heard in public hearings.“37 He reflects
some of the same bias himself too: "There is no denying
the widespread appeal of the detached home for a host of
psychological, sociological, and practical reasons. The
single-family home on its own plot of ground provides
privacy, access to fresh air and sunlight, the potential
for self-expression, and it is said to be the best place
in which to rear children."38 In his conclusion he gives
a list consisting for the most part of American society's
tranditionally labled "misfits" as "suitable" for
apartments: "...A substantial portion of the population
can suitably live in apartments. These groups include
newly married couples; single and highly mobile individuals;
the elderly; the financially insecure: and the house
hater."39 Such views expressed in a publication relied
on by many cities for planning advice, indicates how our
cultural bias for suburban developments is reflected at all
levels.

This is further brought out in a Planning Advisory
Service publication on row houses. In this bulletin it is
pointed out that because row houses have existed mainly

in center cities, "modern" zoning ordinances do not

98

provide for them.40 It is pointed out that "the row house
has frequently been pictured as a type offhousing that
perfectly illustrates conditions of overcrowding, lack
of light and open space, and architectural monotony...."
The article warns that "questions such as, 'Is this good
housing or potential slum?‘ and 'Aren't these lots
smaller than anything we've permitted before?‘ will be
asked.”41 The distaste for the industrial city typical
of America is reflected here. The following statement
shows not only recognition of, and sympathy for such
concerns, but also a degree of concurrence. "They
(citizens) are understandably concerned that the endless
monotony of the row house as they may have seen it in a
few larger Eastern cities not be repeated in their
communities....The row house properly designed and
located does allow some advantages....A reasonable amount
of row housing can be absorbed beneficially, but
municipal authorities must be prepared to adopt and enforce
development controls that are someWhat more stringent than
those used for one- and two-family detached houses."42
Zoning then, was born out of a revulsion for the
city as it had deveboped in this country. And, reflecting in
part our cultural values, it soon became the tool and
weapon of the drive to have the city benefits of 1
economic opportunity, while retaining a semblance of the

environment known for its humanity, the small town-

99

agrarian life. The extent of this drive has reached
incredible dimensions, aided to a large degree by the
legal sanction of zoning. William Whyte makes the
thrust of this movement abundantly clear: "The boast of
an advertisement for Washington Square Village (a high
rise apartment complex) speaks volumes: 'Suburbia in

the heart of Manhattan'."43
Purposes of Zoning

The purposes of zoning reveal a great deal
about its concerns and emphases. The Standard State
Zoning Enabling Act states them as follows:

Section 3. Purposes in view-~such regulations
shall be made in accordance with a comprehensive
plan and designed to lessen congestion in streets;
secure safety from fire, panic and other dangers:
to provide adequate light and air: to prevent the
overcrowding of land: to avoid undue concentration
of population: to facilitate the adequate provision
of transportation, water, sewage, schools, parks and
other public requirements. Such regulations shall
be made with consideration, among other things, to
the character of the district and its particular
suitability for particular uses, and with a view to
conserving the value of buildings and encouraging
the most appropriate use of land throughout such
municipality.4

Williams, in his book Th§_Strugtu;e g; ggpgp
Zoning, provides a good synopsis of this rather involved
statement. He states the goals for planning and zoning
as follows:

1. Protection against physical dangers, particularly

100

fire and explosion.

2. Protection against common-law nuisances--noise
and vibration, air pollution, etc.

3. Protection against undue traffic, i.e.: Traffic
not directly serving the residents of the area.

4. Protection against ugliness ("aesthetic nuisances").
5. Protection against "psychological nuisances" based
on irrational dislikes, fear of the unknown, or
dislike of the "wrong sort of people".
6. Protection against congestion.
7. Protection of light, air, and privacy.
8. Provision of Open spaces.45
The intent of these purposes is clear. They are
aimed at the evils of the industrial city and reflect
our agrarian prejudices. The following section will

illustrate how the techniques used in zoning reflect

our cultural value structure.
Techniques of Zoning

The typical zoning ordinance establishes districts:
rules for the interpretation of district boundaries;
district regulations; provisions for non-conforming uses;
supplementary district regulations; administration
procedures, a board of adjustment, a schedule of fees;
provision for amendment; and a number of other miscellaneous
items. Our concern here will center on districting and
district regulations as these are the legal elements which

have the greatest impact on the institutions of the city

101

and their physical counterparts.

Districting

 

The model on which most districting is based
comes from the Standard State Zoning Enabling Act. The
purposes for districting are stated as follows:

Section 2. Districts--Por any or all of said
purposes the local legislative body may divide the
municipality into of such number, shape and area as
may be deemed best suited to carry out the purposes
of this act; and within districts it may regulate and
restrict the erection, construction, reconstruction,
alteration, repair, or use of buildings, structures or
land. All such regulations shall be uniform for each
class or kind of buildings, throughout each district,
but the regulations in one district may differ from
those in other districts.46

Basically, the districting concept attempts to keep uses
separated based on their degree of compatibility or
incompatibility

Early zoning ordinances reflected the desire to
provide a favorable atmosphere for the one family home
by using a zoning "pyramid" for districting. (See

Figure 4.1)

SINGLE FAMILY

 

MULTIPLE FAMILY

\
1 C \ COMMERCIAL
\

A M H L IGHT INDUSTRY
\ HEAVY INDUSTRY

Figure 4.1 Zoning Pyramid

102

This allowed the "higher" uses to "encroach" on
all uses below them, but did not allow any "lower" uses to
encroach on those above.

Current ordinances allow even more sanctity for
.single-family homes by not allowing them to appear in
commercial or industrial zones. At the same time, however,
industrial and commercial zones are protected by the fact
that this arrangement prevents houses from breaking up
large sites. This new arrangement may be pictured as a

square. (See Figure 4.2) This arrangement allows only

 

 

 

 

 

R-l SINGLE FAMILY

R-M MULTIPLE FAMILY
C COMMERCIAL

ML LIGHT INDUSTRY
MH HEAVY INDUSTRY

 

 

 

Figure 4.2 Current Districting Concept

minimal mixing between uses. Dennis O'Harrow admits

that current zoning does preserve the sanctity of the
detached home by placing it at the top and not letting
any other uses in, with the possible exception of
churches and elementary schools.47 Let us now go on

to examine the current trends in each of the various.
district classes themselves: residential, commercial, and

industrial.

103

The typical residential section consists of a
single-family district and one or more multiple-family
districts. Within each of these districts, uses are
allowed, according to their compatibility as listed

below.

R-l SINGLE FAMILY DISTRICT
Permitted Uses
1. Single-Family Dwelling
2. Church
3. Elementary School

R-2 MULTIPLE FAMILY DISTRICT
Permitted Uses

. Single Family Dwelling
. Church
. School
. Multiple-family Dwelling
. Private Club

mthH

The residential section, as the above history
would indicate, has been dominated by the single-family
district in almost every ordinance. "Single-family detached
dwellings are the predominant housing type in all regions
of the country except the heavily urbanized New England
and Middle Atlantic states."48 Lately even these areas have
succumbed. Single-family housing has dominated new
construction at least until 1960.49 Indeed, the trend
has been toward lower densities. Bassett in his book
Zoning, emphasizes not the optimum density, but the
lowest density the courts will accept as justified by
public welfare. "No prospect of trouble arises in
reducing the allowable number to three families per

acre. It is not difficult to show...substantial relation

104

to fire Letc.;]....Beyond that it is doubtful."50 The
trend in residential zones, therefore, has been toward
exclusiveness and low density. Only in the last few
years have apartments been built in large numbers.

The typical commercial section often has two
or more sub-districts within it, as the following example
demonstrates.

C-l NEIGHBORHOOD COMMERCIAL DISTRICT
Permitted Uses

Church

Multiple-family Dwelling
Grocery Store

Drug Store

Doctor's Office

Filling Station

mwwaH

C-2 CENTRAL COMMERCIAL DISTRICT
Permitted Uses

Church

Grocery Store

Drug Store

Doctor's Office
Department Store

Bank

Business Office

\IONUi-bwroI-J

The trend here is toward the suburban shopping center with
its own zone district. The center is usually one or two
stories surrounded by huge parking areas and often
landscaping.

Industrial sections are also divided up into two
or more sub—districts, and are allowed to contain a limited

number of uses, again based on "compatibility" as shown

below.

105

M-l LIGHT INDUSTRIAL DISTRICT
Permitted Uses
1. Filling Station
2. Auto Repair
3. warehouse
4. Farm Equipment Sales
5. Electronic Equipment Manufacture
6. Wearing Apparel Manufacture
MPH HEAVY INDUSTRIAL DISTRICT
Permitted Uses
. Filling Station
. Electrical Equipment Manufacurer
. Wearing Apparel Manufacturer
. Truck Terminal
. Steel manufacturer .
. Auto and Heavy Equipment Manufacturer

mtnéupaow

The trend in industrial districts is toward the spacious
and landscaped industrial park.

Planned unit developments are a recent innovation
which recognizes that different residential types and
certain commercial uses can be mixed successfully and
that the standard zoning envelope is not the only way to
regulate land uses. The technique shows great promise,
however, in many communities it is generally feared by
single-family home residents, and efforts are usually
made to require densities to be the same as the zone it
replaces. "Buffering“ the borders of such developments
with single-family homes and/or landscaping is often done
to appease bordering residents. In any case, our cities
have already been shaped by the single house on a single
lot approach. '

Performance standards are another break-through

for reducing the rigidity of zoning. With performance

106

standards, uses are separated based on the amount of smoke,
noise, etc., they are characterized by rather than the

use classification they fall into. Problems of
measurement and enforcement have slowed down the progress
of this technique considerably however.

From this brief glimpse at the trends in the
various zoning districts, it should be apparent that not
only has the urban home been given a small town-
agrarian setting, but industry and commercial areas have
also taken on the agrarian look. To accomplish this,

several tools have been used.

Controls Within Districts
Within each district a number of things are
controlled. The Standard State Zoning Enabling Act has
served as a model. In this model the following
appears:
Section 1. Grant of Power--For the purposes
of promoting health, safety or the general welfare
of the community, the legislative body of cities and
incorporated villages are hereby empowered to
regulate and restrict the height, number of stories,
and size of buildings and other structures, and other
open spaces, the density of population and the;
location and use of buildings, structures, and land
for trade, industry, residence or other purposes.51
The control of building height, area coverage, yard
dimensions, lot sizes, and buffer requirements are the

major tools used within districts for land use control.

This section will discuss each of these briefly and their

107

characteristic trends.

Buffers are designed to reduce the impact of
one use-district on another where they meet. There are use
buffers and landscape buffers. Use buffers function by
allowing only those uses which appear together on the
zoning hierarchy to come together in reality. Multiple—
family zones might be put between a commercial zone and a
single—family zone as a buffer. The logic here has been
criticized because it assumes that if a commercial area
is too much of a nuisance for one family, it is less of
one for five families.52 Nonetheless the method is
widely accepted and used.

The landscape buffer is more pOpular. Its
approach is to hide commercial and industrial uses behind
trees and a wide strip of grass. As Mary McLean states
it: ”The question...becomes this: what are the
characteristics of a planting strip that succeed in reducing
the effects of seeing a factory, a parking lot, an office
building, or some other non-residential use?"53 The
trend toward using landscapped buffers is increasing.

Height regulation has been used a great deal in
past years and it is subject to much emotional involvement.
Bair relates an incident where "...large lot single-family
detached types from an area three miles away rose in
embattled ranks to fight a proposed high-rise-—which none

of them could have seen--because it would be out of

108

character...or...people who live in high-rise buildings
might be different."54 The larger portion of our cities,
the suburban areas, are now strictly controlled so:
height, even in the case of commercial establishments.
Planning Advisory Service recommends a height of no more
than 35 feet for shopping centers in order that they
avoid appearing "intrusive".55

Area coverage or bulk controls are used to
avoid structures which cover more than a percentage
of the lot. The floor area ratio (FAR) is one method.
This technique reduces coverage by setting the building
dimensions as a fixed ratio of the lot area. The trend
is toward low coverage. The Planning Advisory Service
report on shopping cneters suggests a floor area ratio of no
more than 0.35, that is 35 square feet of floor area for
every 100 square feet of lot area.55

Yard requirements set minimum footages for the
distance between the front, side, and rear of a building
and the lot boundary. In line with the requirements
discussed above, larger yards are the trend.

Minimum site areas are another way of assuring
that plenty of space is available for building. Let us
again turn to the shopping center report for an indication
of the trend. ”...The standards for minimum site areas

have been steadily increasing since 1950....The zoning

109

ordinance should lead, not follow such trends.“57 The
philosophy espoused is: the more, the better.

The historical trends and techniques sketched
above have had a tremendous impact on the city as a whole.
The next section will discuss how zoning has effected the

city and its institutional structure.
Effect on the City_

The concept of districting (each pig in its own
pen) is a definite reaction to the exaggerated and
extreme mixtures found in the industrial city. The
solution seized was simple and direct. If cities were
suffering because of over mixture, why not separate the
three most commonly identifiable uses: residences,
commercial establishments and industrial uses? This
simplistic and drastic measure has clearly reduced problems
caused by extreme use mixtures, but it has in turn caused
other problems.

As Haworth states: "When each function is assigned
to its own district area...a large measure of excitement
and vitality is lost. Residential areas in part become
drab and lifeless.”58 Mumford underlines this point when
he suggests that the suburb not only pushed away the dirty,
busy, productive enterprises, it also refused its creative

enterprises.59

110

Districting was based wholly on the concept of
compatibility with little thought to the needs of the
city's various institutions to interact. The city is, as
defined here, a set of interacting and interrelating
institutions, and when these are refused their interactional
needs via districting, the city is less of a city. When
institutions which must interact are separated the result
is an increased need to travel, compartmentalized life,
institutional inefficiency, the need for more and
duplicated facilities, etc.

The height, yard, bulk, area, and buffer require-
ments which emphasize cushioning every element of the city
with so many feet of open space end up producing sprawl.
"There...seems to exist a virtually all-American feeling
that land is plenty and that everybody has or should have
access to a piece of his own...there is so much of it
that it might as well be squandered."6O Mumford reinforces
the above statement: "...Wasteful spacing has become a
substitute for intelligent physical design."61 Indeed,
new apartment developments, in order to gain admittance
to recently developed parts of our cities, now have
densities Often lower than those of two-family and even
one-family homes. The 30 foot lot of yesterday is an
"anachronism", single-family home lots today range from
50 to 100 feet in width, even for moderately priced

housing.62 The old 6,600 square foot lot of World War II

111

has grown to 9,000 square feet today.63

Such policies have, in addition to the effects
outlined under districting, the effect of destroying
the nature component of the human settlement and reducing
man's contact with, and awareness of nature. People are
locked in the sprawling city, and can, only with great
difficulty, experience nature directly. Although the
single-family home eventually has a lawn and a few trees,
the site is generally bull-dozed, flattened, drained, and
filled before the house appears. For example, hills in
the Los Angeles area are brutally shaved and terraced
for single-family homes. The result is an artificial
injection of trees and lawns, and the destruction of
all that was natural to the site: swamps, hills, brush,
animals, and other elements of nature in its original
state. Sprawl thus destroys and isolates nature, and
along with districting it aids in the poor interaction
between the city's institutions.

The question is thus this: In attacking the evils
of the industrial city, have we in fact created another,
possible greater evil? Mumford answers this quite well:
"What Francis Parkman had said of the westward march of the
pioneer was equally true of the march to the suburb: 'The
sons of civilization, drawn by the fascinations of a fresher
and bolder life, thronged to the western wilds in multitudes

which blighted the charm that had lured them.”64

112

Los Angeles is a good example of how these forces can
destroy both nature and create a city of extreme

ineptness.
Conclusion

Zoning is a clear and awesome example of how
America's negative bias toward the city, and her
preference for the small town-agrarian setting can be in part
reflected in a very basic and far reaching policy. In line
with the negative bias toward the city, it grew largely out
of a reaction to the overdominance of the economic
system in urban life. The simplistic solution chosen of
spacing and districting, and the emphasis placed on the
sanctity of the one-family home with its own plot of
ground clearly reflects the preference we hold for an
agrarian life-style. There is little doubt that our cultural
value biases have been reflected in this important urban
policy: in its history, its purposes, and its techniques.
The next chapter discusses the cultural value biases
reflected in another far-reaching policy: the FHA

loan insurance program.

FOOTNOTES

1. Norman Williams Jr., The Structurg_g§_Urban
Zoning (New York: Buttenbeim Publishing Corp., 1966),
pp. 60—61.

2. Seymore I. Toll, Zoned Amegican (New York:
Grossman Publishers, 1969). pp. 14-16.

3. Toll, p. 55.
4. Toll, p. 79.
5. Toll, p. 49.

6. Edward M. Bassett, Zoning (New York: Russell
Sage Foundation, 1940), p. 24.

7. Toll, pp. 73-77.

8. Lewis Mumford, The City i3 History (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1961), p. 492.

9. Toll, p. 27.
10. Mumford, p. 476.
11. Toll, p. 40.
12. Toll, p. 172.
13. Toll, p. 180.
14. Toll, p. 201.
15. Mumford, p. 475.
16. Mumford, pp. 475-476.
17. Toll, p. 124.
18. Toll, p. 135.

113

114

19. Leo Marx, ”Pastoral Ideals and City Troubles",
in The Fitness g§_Man's Environment, Smithsonian Annual II
(Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1968), pp. 122-
123.

20. Constance McLaughlin Green, The Rise g§_Urban
America (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1967), p. 133.

 

21. Charles Zueblin, A_Decade g§_Development (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1905), p. 169, cited by
Anselem L. Strauss, Images g£_the American City (Glencoe:
Free Press, 1961), p. 230.

 

22. Mumford, p. 500.
23.
Metropolis:

(Bellmont:

David Riesman, "Suburban Attitudes", in
Values ig_Conflict, eds. C.E. Elias, et. a1.,
Wadsworth Publishing Co., Inc., 1964), pp. 74-75.

 

 

24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.

31.

Toll, p.
Bassett,
Bassett,
Toll, p.
Toll, p.
Toll, p.
Bassett,

Toll, p.

199.

p. 25.

p. 24.
145.
193.
233.

pp. 63-64.

4.

32. Toll, p. 171.
33. Richard F. Babcock, The Zoning Game (Madison:

University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), p. 3.

 

34. Dennis O'Harrow, New Techniques for Shaping
Urban Expansion, American Society of Planning Officials
Planning Advisory Service, Information Report No. 160
(Illinois: American Society of Planning Officials, 1962),
p. 2.

35. Clan Crawford, Strategy and Tactics ig_Municipal
Zoning (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1969), p. 100.

 

36. Crawford, p. 99.

115

37. Jon Rosenthall, Planning for Apartments.
American Society of Planning Officials Planning Advisory
Service, Information Report NO. 139 (Illinois: American
Society of Planning Officials, 1960), p. 15.

38. Rosenthall, p. l.
39. Rosenthall, p. 35.

40. Frank S. So, Row Houses, American Society of
Planning Officials Planning Advisory Service, Information
Report No. 164 (Illionos: American Society of Planning
Officials, 1963), p. 13.

41. So, p. l.
42. So, p. 19.

43. William H. Whyte, "The Anti-City", in Mgg_§gg_
the Modern City, eds. Elizabeth Green, Jeanne R. Lowe, and
Kenneth Walker (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1963), p. 52.

44. Advisory Committee on Zoning, Department of
Commerce, "A Standard State Zoning Enabling Act Under
Which Municipalities May Adopt Zoning Regulations“, rev.
ed. (Washington: united States Government Printing Office,
1926), in Fred H. Bair and Ernest R. Bartley, The Text
gf_§ Mode; Zoning Ordinance (Illinois: American Society
of Planning Officials, 1960), p. 85.

45. Williams, p. 62.

46. Advisory Committee on Zoning, in Bair, Text,

p. 85.
47. O'Harrow, p. 9.
48. Rosenthall, p. 5.
49. Rosenthall, p. 9.
50. Bassett, p. 86-87.
85 51. Advisory Committee on Zoning, in Bair, 2253,
P. .

52. Herman Ranes, "The ABC's of Zoning", Planning,
May 5-9, 1963, pp. 58-59.

116

53. Mary McLean, Zoning Buffers: Solution 2;
Panacea?, American Society of Planning Officials Planning
Advisory Service, Information Report No 133 (Illinois:
American Society of Planning Officials, 1960), p. 12.

 

54. Fred H. Bair Jr., Height Regulations ip_Residentia1

 

Districts, American Society of Planning Officials Planning
Advisory Service, Information Report No. 237 (Illinois:
American Society of Planning Officials, 1968), pp. 3-4.

55. American Society of Planning Officials,
Shopping Center Zoning: Part II, American Society of Plan-
ning Officials Planning Advisory Service, Information

Report No. 129 (Illinois: American Society of Planning
Officials, 1960), pp. 32-33.

56. American Society of Planning Officials, p. 32.
57. American Society of Planning Officials, p. 21.

58. Lawrence Haworth, The Good City (Bloomington:
Indiaana University Press, 1963), p. 107.

59. Mumerd, p. 494.

60. Dr. G. A. Wissink, American Cities lg Perspective
(Assen, Netherlands: Royal Van Gorcum Ltd., 1962), p. 243.

61. Mumford, p. 507.
62. Williams, p. 82.
63. Wissink, p. 250.

64. Mumford, p. 491.

CHAPTER 5

VALUE REFLECTIONS
IN FEDERAL HOUSING POLICY

Introduction

Of all the artifacts in the urban milieu, housing
more than any other, is the greatest shaping factor.
Housing occupies more land than any other use, and other
uses often must adjust their character to the character
of the housing they serve. The nature of the housing in
a city, therefore, determines to a large extent the
nature of the city itself.

As was explained in the previous chapter, major
urban-shaping policy often strongly reflects basic
cultural values, even when such values dictate courses of
action detrimental to the city as a whole. The last
chapter dealt with the subject of the major land use control,
zoning. This chapter will delve into the affect our cultural
urban value structure has had on housing policy.

As with Chapter 4, one major "policy maker" will
be chosen for review. In this case, the Federal Housing
Administration (FHA) will be the subject of inquiry. FHA

has been chosen because, like zoning, it has been a policy

117

118

program and an urban shaper of great influence and
importance. The relevant history of FHA will first be
discussed. (Special emphasis will be placed on FHA's
policies toward single-family dwellings versus multiple-
family dwellings due to the obvious cultural implications.)
The purposes and provisions of FHA will then be briefly
sketched, and finally, the effect FHA has had on the

city will be discussed.
Relevant History

Americans have generally been a conservative
people, yet our cultural proclivity toward home ownership
has always made us go greatly into debt for a house, under
the unquestioned assumption that this is the "best" way to
live.

Before the depression, loans were handled entirely
by private lenders. Charles Abrams, in his book The,
Future 9: Housi , provides an apt description of the
lending conditions prior to FHA: “The mortgage system
prior to FHA had become an indefensible arrangement for
victimizing home-owners. It was characterized by short-
term security, high interest rates, a relatively narrow
market (chiefly institutional), and illiquidity."1 Terms
often ranged from seven to ten years with 35 percent down
payments required.2 The strength of our agrarian-small

town bias, however, was still undaunted. Home buying

119

during the twenties increased and values became inflated.
(See Figure 5.1)

The economic collapse of 1929 put millions of
people out of their homes. Indeed, before the depression,
900,000 units of housing per year were being built.

In 1934 only one tenth of this amount, or 90,000 units,
were constructed.3 (Figure 5.1) This disaster caused a
reaction in the Federal Government, first with Hoover's
Federal Home Loan Banks, set up to supply capital advances
to home loan institutions, and later, after Roosevelt

took office, with the Home Owner's Loan Corporation,
designed to put funds behind faultering mortgages. While
these and other programs were able to stop the massive
numbers of people who were losing their homes, it did

not result in a recovery. "Financial institutions handling
the mortgages were stabilized but they were still fearful
of making home loans for which they might not be repaid."4

The Federal Housing Administration was created
by the National Housing Act of 1934 and was designed to
encourage home building by insuring lenders for mortgages
on small homes, and to some extent, low rent housing
projects. In 1937 Section 207 insurance for multiple
family dwellings was extended to mortgage loans on rental
housing built for investment by private investors.5. This
was a change from the previous emphasis on low income

housing. FHA thus insures both rental and sales and rental

120

Thousands of
Dwelling units

 

 

 

 

1’ 600 fial Statts - Privately 6. Publicly Owned
1,400t.__. --- Sales-Type Starts
+0-0- chtal- ype Starts A A
1 200 +0-0- Publlcly OwnEd M»
. ”WA“
1,000 -1 I .'

 

. A /: \th
800 r
.00 7 \ A V

[\VALxr’lr ///\\‘\ A\ '
/ \
,. A , ----- x ,, \

 

 

 

 

 

OK

 

 

 

O 1 l l 1 l . . l M .4 J A
0‘ In C In C In 0 In 0 In C In 0 In
CD 0‘ O O H H N N m M Q' fl' In In
0 m 0‘ 0‘ 0" O‘ 0‘ 0‘ O‘ 0‘ m 0‘ 0‘ 03
H Pl H '4 a4 H a4 r4 H .4 a4 :4 r4 H

Figure 5.1 Total Permanent Nonfarm Dwelling units Started

aU. S. Department of Labor, cited by Charles M.
Haar, Federal Credit and Private Housing (New YOrk: McGraw-
Hill Co., 1960), p. 30.

bEarliest data available on sales type and rental
type starts are for 1900.

cEarliest data available on publicly owned starts
are for 1935.

121

units, "...but over the years the sales program has been by
far the largest...."6 (Figure 5.1)

Before going on, the particualr role played by
FHA should be clarified. Paul Wendt points out, in his

book Housing Poligyr-The Search for Solutions, that the

 

major thrust of pre-war (and to a large extent post-war)
government housing policies have been to promote greater
stability in the flow of residential mortgage funds. In
achieving this, government housing loan programs have been
implemented through four principle agencies:

1. Federal Home Loan Bank System (FHLB) established

- in 1932 to provide a reservoir of reserve credit
which would be available for savings and loan
associations and other institutions investing
mainly in private lenders.

2. Federal Housing_Administration (FHA) established
in 1934 to insure residential loans on new and
existing dwellings made by private lenders.

3. Veteran's Administration (25) authorized by the
Serviceman's Readjustment Act of 1944 to guarantee
private lenders against losses on housing loans.

4. Federal National Mortqage Association (FNMA) first
organized in 1938 as the "National Mortgage
Association of Washington" to aid in the establish-

ment of a secondary market for FHA-insured
mortgages.

FHA is, thus, one among four major housing programs designed
for people in the middle income ranges. Of all of these,
however, it has consistently been the most prominent.

By reducing down payments and extending loan
periods, FHA has made homeowners out of many persons whose

incomes would never have allowed it otherwise. "Home-

122

ownership was expanded by letting the 'owner' become more
of a renter."8 The original program allowed for the
insurance of mortgages up to 80 percent of value, 15 percent
more than the best conventional loans allowed. Down-
payments were 20 percent, reduced from the 35 percent
charged by private lenders before. A maximum limit was
put on the total amount to be insured to keep richer
classes out of the program. The borrower then paid an
insurance premium of one-half of one percent of the out-
standing loan balance, and the lender was then insured
against loss. Maximum interest rates of 4 to 5 percent
were set, and the length of the mortgage was established
at twenty years. This package was irresistible to the
American public.

FHA loans have generally become easier to obtain
for single-family homes over the years. The following is
a synopsis of some of the major changes FHA has made since

1934.

1934: 80 percent of value guaranteed with an interest
rate at 5 percent and 20 year terms.

1938: 90 percent of value guaranteed and terms
increased to 25 years.

1948: Guarantee on the first $6,000 raised to
95 percent. Terms increased to 30 years.

1950: Korean War cauSed credit tightening resulting in
term reduction to 25 years. ‘

1954: Guarantee of 90 percent on first $9,000. Term
returns to 30 years.

123

1957: Guarantee raised to 97 percent of first
$10,000 with a maximum interest of 5.25 percent.

1961: Term increased to 35 years.

1965: 100 percent guarantee on first $5,000 and 90
percent on next $5,000 for veterans only.

1966: 1965 veteran benefits extended to non-veterans.
1968: Maximum interest raised to 6 3/4 percent.9
Generally, then, FHA benefits to their largest "customer",
the home-buyer, have become better as the years have passed.

The immediate effect of FHA housing programs was
a doubling of housing starts from 1935 to 1939 over the
previous five years. In fact, before World War II,
between 1938 and 1941, FHA was insuring 35 percent of all
recorded loans on housing.10 During the war years this
rose considerably, because all new private residential
construction was under material and priorities control
administered by FHA. An acute need for rental housing
developed at this time, and an emergency measure, Section
608, was devised to meet the emergency. Section 608 gave
an extremely liberal loan package for rental housing.
"...In the later post-war period, a major unprecedented
contribution to the relief of the housing shortages was
made...." by Section 608 efforts.ll Since world War II,
FHA has insured between 25 and 35 percent of all new
private housing starts.12 Paul Wendt describes the post-

war housing policy as keyed to the following principles:

124
1. Primary reliance upon the stimulation of privately
owned and occupied single-family homes.
2. Federal insurance and guarantee of loans to encour-
age the granting of loans on general terms by

private lenders.

3. Specific interest rate subsidies for veteran
groups.

4. The provision of publicly owned housing at
subsidized rents for low income groups occupying
substandard housing.

5. Federal loans and grants for urban renewal and
slum clearance.

It can be seen then, that U. 5. housing policy began to
move into low income areas during this post—war period,
but remained largely favorable to the middle income home
owner.

FHA's operations also expanded. Section 803
provided for war workers during the 1950's. Section 213
was added for cooperative housing. Section 220 was
enacted to provide for the rehabilitation and construction
of apartments in urban renewal areas. Section 221 was added
for non-profit organization housing, and Section 231 was
added for the housing of the elderly.14

Government guarantees have helped stimulate nearly
a quarter of all new housing starts during the period
between 1946 and 1967. The complete effect, however, has
been even greater, as FHA standards have forced non-insured
loans to approximate FHA in their offerings.15 '

In terms of the analytical framework used in this

125

thesis, FHA's provisions are a continuation of the

zoning case. The overly dominant economic institution
affected the family institution adversely by making housing,
its major artifact, hard to obtain or undesirable. Our
cultural value for ownership made people take financial
risks, and the emergency of the economic collapse of 1929
caused the Federal Government to react. Given our
cultural values, the "correct” action was obvious: Take
the loan risk away from the lending institutions so that
they would offer favorable loan packages. Give the
average citizen the best kind of dwelling our culture
knows, the single-family home, and allow him to make an
inexpensive escape from the unnatural and inhuman city.

As a separate part of this “history", the
following section will discuss an issue very germane to this
thesis, the question of the emphasis given to single-family
dwellings versus multiple—family dwellings.

Single-Family versus Multiple-Family
Dwelling Provisions

Important to the development of this thesis is
the degree to which prominent housing legislation has
reflected the dominant value structure influencing our
perception of cities. We have already seen how this
value structure, strong and transmitted since the early

eighteenth century, has come to affect major land use

126

policy. In this discussion concerning FHA's emphasis

on single-family homes versus apartments, it will be made
clear how our strongly felt cultural values have been
reflected in housing policy. First the publicity given to
each will be discussed, then a statistical comparison of
the dominance of each of the two programs will be presented
and, finally, the immediate reason for the particular
emphasis revealed will be explained in terms of the degree
of advantage one form has had over the other where their
program provisions are concerned.

To begin with, the Veterans Administration
housing program, closely related to FHA but not discussed
in this chapter, has been offered for home ownership_ggly.
The bias of this program is clear, and its influence hag
been great.

The publicity given by FHA to the various programs
has been clearly one-sided, in favor of the one-family
owned home. This corresponds with what has been unofficial
government policy for years however. Almost every one of
our presidents has, at one time or another, given whole-
hearted endorsement of the homeowner. President Hoover,
for example, once said that "the present large proportion
of families who own their own homes is both the foundation
of a sound economy and social system and a guarantee that
our society will continue to develop rationally as changing

conditions demand."16 Other more liberal presidents have

127

made similar statements.

FHA has made their seal liberally available for
builders who display it on posters and advertisements
and in so doing, "...imply that FHA insurance is a
guarantee against loss to the homeowner too.“17 The bias
is even clearer when we are reminded by Charles Haar of the
still to be heard FHA related phrase, "'it's as cheap as
renting'".18 “Wittingly or unwittingly,” Abrams states,
"it[:FHA:]has become identified with a home ownership
ballyhoo more persuasive than the voice of the most
gifted home hawker. Thousand of citizens who_should be
tenants are being influenced to buy...."19 FHA has
actually joined with builders, lumber interests, and
chambers of commerce in home owning drives. Into the
field, they have put salesmen to aid in local campaigns.
Literature on the virtues and "ease" of home owning
abound, much of it either printed, endorsed, or distributed
by FHA. Posters and better selling campaigns have been
endorsed by FHA. Movies and expositions have also been
part of FHA's home buying efforts.20

No publicity has been given to the risks of home
buying, however, and the general rule that a person should
spend no more than two times his annual income for a home
has been greatly exceeded with FHA's blessing.21 FHA's

publicity efforts have clearly been aimed at increasing

128

home owning, and even, in many cases, toward convincing
people not to rent.

Charles Haar tells us that "...the government's
own help, through its insurance programs for building
single-family homes for sale has drastically reduced
the demand for rental housing."22 And indeed the statistics
bear this out.

In 1956, the proportion of non-farm households
owning their own homes was 60 percent.23 The proportion of
rental units during the period since FHA and VA has been
lower than during any similar period since the turn of the
century.24 This apartments versus single-family hOmes
story is told quite well in Figure 5.2. Forty three out
of every one hundred new dwelling units built in 1927 were
for rent; in 1955, only nine out of every one hundred
dwelling units were built for rental, an 80 percent decrease.25
The FHA's program for rental housing (Section 207) has
represented 58 percent of all mortgages for rental housing,
yet it has constituted only 10 percent of FHA's business.26
The above statistics tell a great deal about FHA's direct
influence, but what follows is especially enlightening.
Between 1935 and the end of 1966, FHA has insured 1.1
million rental units.27 The Section 608 rental housing
program for rental housing, an extremely attractive program
and §§_i5§_peak only between 1948 ggg_12§g, produced

400,000 of those 1.1 million units.28 Section 608 was

129

 

   
  
  
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thousands
of Uhits
700
600 __ A. All Types of Dw0lling Units 1
500 1- [~\
Conventional I
400 ' ,x’X loans I
300 1- ”] \ I '1
200 FHA and VA .1
loans
100 a
0 1 1, L 1, 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
700 P
600 r 8. Units for Owner 'Occupancy 1 ‘
/
500 L ,w/ _
. F x’
400 - Conventional I ‘
4 loans
300 '- // I 'l
__,__...I’ \ I FHA andVA
200 ,z’ [I loans ‘
100 . \\ / .
\ .1
0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 H" L 1 1 1 1 1 1
300
_ C. Rental Units .1
200 FHA and VA
100 s Coventionalloans M
0 1W” T'T’Dxi-

 

1935 '37 '39 '41 '43 '45 '47 '49 '51

Figure 5.2 Number of New Nonfarm Dwelling Uhits Financed
with Conventional and with FHA-Insured and VA-Guaranteed
Loans--1935-l951

aLeo Grebler, Role 9; Federal Credit Aids lg
Residential Construction, Studies in Capital Formation
and Financing, Occasional Paper No. 39 (New York:
National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc., 1953), p. 19.

130

dissolved in the early 1950's due to a scandal.

Section 213, for cooperative housing, began in
1950 and has never been consistent. The Section 220 program
for urban renewal apartments, and the program for housing
the elderly, Section 231, have been small in comparison
to Sections 203 (single family), 207 (rental) and 608
(rental).29 More than just publicity has been behind this
disparity. The comparison of these three programs, which
follows, reveals a great deal.

When a person goes to buy a house, and wants to
finance via FHA, he must do the following: he must
release a fixgg_percentage of the total cost of the house,
as a down payment; the house cannot exceed a specified
maximum price: he pays the loan off at an amount not exceed-
ing a fixgg maximum interest, for a period of time not
exceeding a fixgg number of years; and he pays a fixgg_
insurance premium of one-half of one percent of the unpaid
balance. The only other time he must deal with FHA is if
he should fail to make a payment.

The rental program is quite another story.

Only the attainment of the 207 program and the short lived
608 program will be considered here because these are the

only ones which have been of any significance. As

Paul Wendt points out, "Investors and private lenders-have
been reluctant to take advantage of loans under Section

220 and 221, and the administrative difficulties of gaining

131

FHA approval for such loans have been a further
limitation of volume."30

Section 207 loan provisions have reflected a
conflict of interest between FHA and the investor. The
investor, according to the dictates of the free enterprise
economic system, has been interested in a well defined
program requiring minimum equity, maximum corporate cash
earnings, quick cash distribution with minimum tax loss,
and minimum administrative constraints. FHA, in its role
as an agent of the governmental institution, has sought
to serve the best interests of the family and the economic
institution as a whole. In the case of sales housing, the
benefits of FHA are passed on directly to the family; in
the case of rental housing, the benefits must be passed on
through an investor. In order that families are best
served, FHA has felt that "constant vigilance and strict
regulation are required to insure that benefits will not
be absorbed before they reach the intended beneficiary."31
Rental housing, thus depends on administrative discretion
far more than on statuary law.

The fixgg_items in FHA's rental program are:
the loan-value ratio, total amount of mortgage allowed
per project, total amount of mortgage allowed per room,
and the maximum interest rates. "Virtually everything

else of importance is left up to the FHA Commissioner."32

132

Actually, FHA's controls over rental housing extend
beyond those put on even a public service commission,
especially when it is considered that public service
commissions are given a government controlled monopoly
and apartments are left to fend for themselves in a highly
competitive market.

FHA's commissioner controls the maximum rate of
interest to be charged. He also regulates the mortgage
as to changes in capital structure, rate of return and
method of operation. Rents are limited so that they are
not lower than needed to pay for the loan and not higher
than necessary to serve families with moderate incomes.
Profits are regulated such that they will not exceed the
fair market value of the land prior to improvement.
(Home buyers are allowed to ggll_at whatever the market
will bear and they may £§g§_at any price too.) FHA also
requires that it be given preferred stock ownership with the
power to unseat directors on its own determination of
breach of contract. Investors, usually interested in
redeeming their original investment as rapidly as
possible without a tax loss, must put 30 percent of their
equity into irredeemable common stock as insurance. A
maintenance fund muSt be put up. (The investor usually
wants to reduce his equity cash stake; FHA regards high
equity as insurance of soundness. Thus, the most important

element an investor considers, the amount of required

133

equity, is left up to the FHA commissioner.
The result of all this is much uncertainty
where little uncertainty can be tolerated. And these
are not all of the controls FHA has over the project
builder. The following passage from Louis Winnick's book
Rental Housing--Opportunities for Private Investment, gives
a good portrayal of the situation faced by the apartment
investor as opposed to that faced by the home buyer:
Investor distrust takes the form of policing
almost every action of importance to the operator of
the property. This supervision has no parallel in
the single-family home ownership program even though
the amount of FHA's contingent liability for such
programs is vastly greater. The FHA, for example,
does not watch over the home owner to make sure he
is adequately maintaining his property. The owner
does not have to make advance deposits into a replace-
ment reserve fund. His maximum allowable mortgage
repayment term requires a significantly slower rate of
initial amortization. He is unrestricted as to
"profits"....He is not burdened with FHA as a preferred
stockholder. And in case of default his responsibilities
are much less carefully defined, if in fact any exist.33
The mortgage terms under FHA for apartments, although they
have been getting more liberal, require too much cash
equity, red tape, rent limitations, and other regulatory
controls to be attractive. And those who fail to meet
these requirements may be prohibited from all further
participation.
This is not all, however, the markets for
multiple-family and sales housing must also be considered.

In the case of sales housing, once sold, the possibility

of depressed value or loss is passed on to the buyer.

134

Capital for rental projects, on the other hand, becomes
tied up, and the possibility of risk is thus greater.
Charles Haar lists the risks of rental housing as including
the following:

1. Long term investment risks.

2. The non-liquidity of the real estate asset.

3. Deteriorating municipal services.

. Threat of rent control (beyond FHA's).

4
5. Growing blight in center cities.
6. Increased real property taxes.

7

. High construction costs.
8. unique maintenance costs.34
The risks of rental housing since FHA have been so great,
in fact, that in the early days of Section 207 most of the
applications for FHA insurance were "...simply efforts
to bail out land or were so suspect otherwise as not to
merit governmental approval."35

FHA and the no down payment VA program have so
altered the market, in fact, that owning is often cheaper
than renting. Indeed, Winnick tells us that "in a colony
of identical homes, half for sale and half for rent, it
is almost certain that...the monthly rental would exceed
monthly cash outlay for ownership at the mortgage terms
available...."36 Considering the risks, the market, public-
ity, and the FHA programs, apartment investment is usually

not apt to give returns commensurate with sales housing.

135

Section 608, a thirty year, low or no equity
mortgage program designed to provide war housing for
defense workers and veterans was the only truly successful
rental program FHA has ever handled. It was enacted in
1941, but its effective life was between 1947 and 1951.37
"In the two years, 1950 and 1951, more apartment units were
built under 608 than by life insurance companies, limited
dividend corporations, semi-philanthorpic organizations,
and consumer cooperatives in the country's entire history.38

A scandal broke, however, when it was learned that
FHA had guaranteed Section 608 loans on 700 projects
running into millions of dollars over the costs of the
projects themselves and leading to unreasonable profits.
The 608 program was dissolved via Congress and 207 programs

were so altered as to discourage investment.39
Purposes of FHA

FHA's general purposes include the following:

1. Retain lender confidence in mortgage loans.

2. Stimulate house buying via liberal loan provisions.

3. Stimulate housing construction employment.
In the case of multi-family housing, the following purposes
might be added:

Protect contingent liability for the mortgage and
the renters by:

1. High equity.

136

2. Rapid loan amortization.

3. Sound, well constructed projects.

4. Adequate maintenance.

5. Providing sufficient rental housing at minimum ren

rents.4O

Provisions

 

The following sections are administered by FHA.
Because the provisions for Sections 203, 207 and 608 have
already been discussed, and because the other sections
under FHA have been relatively minor in their total
influence, each section will only be briefly described here:

Section 203: This is the original FHA program. It
allows a person to buy a dwelling with from one to four
units for a low set down payment at a fixed maximum
interest, as long as he pays an insurance premium of
one-half of one percent of the unpaid balance over a
fixed maximum term, and as long as the house is not
valued at over a certain maximum.

§§g§i§p_2015 Added in 1937, this section allows a
person to build a "project" of over 8 units for a

down payment determined by FHA at a maximum set

interest rate, and at a set insurance premium, as long
as the project does not exceed a total overall cost

and a total cost per room. Both are fixed. In addition
to this he is subject to several other administrative
controls, all discussed in a previous section of this
chapter.

Section 213: A recent provision designed to stimulate
the building of cooperatives.

Section 220: Set forth in the 1954 housing act for the
purpose of aiding apartment construction in urban
renewal areas.

Section 221: Designed to stimulate the building of
apartments by cooperatives.

137

Section 231: Designed to stimulate the building of
housing for the elderly.

Effects on the Cipy

FHA has certainly done a great deal of good in
terms of several immediate problems. By controlling that
portion of the economic system concerned with housing people
at a profit, it has served the needs of an institution
primary to any culture, the family. The major and
indispensable artifact of the family is the house, and FHA
has helped to house millions in a manner they never could
have afforded otherwise.

But there is more to the story than this, for the
major artifact of the family is also the major artifact
in the city. Any such broad ranging policy concerning
housing, therefore, is bound to have a strong effect on
the city as a whole.

FHA has had some detrimental effects on the city
Similar to those found with zoning. Zoning has provided
the lgggl_means to fill our cities with the space consuming
single-family house, and FHA made it financially feasible.
By making it extremely easy for people to satisfy their
culturally defined desires for housing, FHA has subsidized
the single-family home and helped reduce the investment
potential of other forms of housing, in particular, the

apartment. FHA has even influenced zoning standards.

138 '

FHA has set minimum lot areas, lot coverage standards,
yard measurements, and many other design criteria for both
single-family houses and apartments insured by them. The
tendency has been toward an increase in lot sizes and area
requirements. The effects of this sprawl inducing policy
on the interactional needs of the city's institutional
complex has been amply discussed in Chapter 4 on zoning.

In addition to sprawl, FHA has also been contri-
butory to the general flight from the central cities. The
National Commission on Urban Problems reported in 1968 that
"there was evidence of a tacit agreement among all groups--
lending institutions, fire insurance companies, and FHA--
to block off certain areas of the city with 'red lines'
and not to loan or insure within them."41 The suburbs are
"...where the vast majority of FHA homes have been built."42
As the people have left, the tax money collected from them
has also left, resulting in the general decline of whole
areas. The loss of governmental services, or at least
their unequal distribution, has left the central areas
with an incomplete and unbalanced institutional arrangement.
The basic needs of the people (employment, supplies of
needed goods, services, etc.) are thus unmet. The density
of these areas remains and the quality of life deteriorates.

Lewis Mumford describes the paradox quite well in
his book The Urban Prospect: "Public policy in the

united States is both contradictory and self defeating.

139

Instead of lowering central densities, most urban renewal
schemes...maintain...or create higher levels (of density)
than they replace. But home loan agencies, on the other
hand, have been subsidizing the wasteful, ill-planned
single-family house, on cheap land, ever remote from the
center of our cities, a policy that has done as much to
promote suburban drift as the ubiquitous motorcar."43
(Chapter 6 deals with the "motorcar”.) In general then,
FHA has both aided the family, and on the other hand,
helped cause the institutional ineptitude of today's

sprawling city.
Conclusion

This chapter has shown how a major urban housing
policy body, FHA, has largely reflected the negative
urban bias Americans have been shown to consistently hold
in Chapter 2. Also reflected in FHA's policies has been
a tendency to choose, as an alternative to the industrial
city's high density housing, a housing pattern more
characteristic of our highly idealized small town-
agrarian past, a tendency also shown to be strong in our
cultural history in Chapter 2.

Apartments have, through "guilt by association",
been identified with the tenement dwellings of the
industrial city. Single-family homes have, of course,

been strongly identified with the agrarian-small town

140

life so preferable to the great people in our past. By
giving preference to this type of dwelling as best for an
urban existence FHA has partly served to mirror both the
negative values toward cities Common to American culture and
the positive values we have exhibited toward the small
town-agrarian life.

The fact of this "automatic“ value reflection is
important. It shows how detrimental simply accepting our
value system can be. FHm.has obviously contributed to
the detrimental effect on the need fer interaction in the
urban institutional structure. FHA's policies have been
shown to contribute both to the decline of the central
city and the rapid spread of megalopolis. Chapter 6
will deal with the final urban policy to be considered
in this thesis, the National Defense Highway Program.

FOOTNOTES

1. Charles Abrams, The Future g; Housing (New
York: Harper Brothers, 1946), p. 223.

2. National Commission on Urban Problems, Building
the American City (Washington: United States Government
Printing Office, 1968), p. 94.

3. National Commission on Urban Problems, p. 94.

4. National Commission on Urban Problems, p. 94.

5. American Institute of Architects, Rental Housing
under FHA--608 (New York: American Institute of Architects,
1950), p. 3.

6. Glen Beyer, Housing and Society (New York:
Macmillan Co., 1958), p. 457.

7. Paul F. Wendt, Housing Poligyr-The Search for
Solutions (Berkeley: university of California Press, 1962),
p. 172.

8. National Commission on Urban Problems, p. 99.

9. National Commission on Urban Problems, p. 96.

10. Wendt, p. 176.

11. American Institute of Architects, p. 3.

12. Wendt, p. 176.

13. Wendt, p. 204.

14. National Commission on Urban Problems, pp. 98-99.

15. National Commission on Urban Problems, pp. 95-96.

16. Abrams, p. 37.

17. Abrams, p. 37.

18. Charles M. Haar, Federal Credit and Private
Housing (New York: McGraw-Hill Co., 1960), p. 199.

141

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.
For Private
p. 51.

24.
Residential

142

Abrams, p. 224.
Abrams, pp. 224-225.
Abrams, p. 226.
Haar, p. 199.

Louis Winnick, Rental Housingr-Qpportunities
Investment (New York: McGraw-Hill Co., 1958),

 

Leo Grebler, Role g§_Federal Credit Aids ip_
Construction, Studies in Capital Formation and

Financing, Occasional Paper No. 39 (New York: National
Bureau of Economic Research, Inc., 1953), p. 27.

25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.

Haar, p. 19.

Beyer, p. 458.
National Commission on Urban Problems, p. 98.
Winnick, p. 194.
Beyer, p. 458.

Wendt, p. 219.
Winnick, p. 172.
Winnick, p. 176.
Winnick, p. 183.
Haar, p. 193.

Abrams, p. 235.
Winnick, p. 64.

Haar, pp. 194-195.
Winnick, pp. 194-195.
Wendt, pp. 215-216.
Winnick, p. 175.

National Council on Urban Problems, p. 101.

143

42. National Council on Urban Problems, p. 99.

43. Lewis Mumford, The Urban Prospect (Harcourt,
Brace and WOrld, Inc., 1968), p. 102.

CHAPTER 6

VALUE REFLECTIONS
IN FEDERAL TRANSPORTATION POLICY

Introduction

The final major policy area to be discussed is
transportation policy. It has already been demonstrated
how zoning, the major land use element, has reflected a
negative value bias in its emphasis on the spacing of
uses and the sanctity of the single-family home. It has
been demonstrated, also, how the major housing policy of
FHA has favored the single-family home and thus fits into
the cultural value picture painted in Chapter 2.

Now it is time to enter into a discussion of the
all important linkage factor in the city's institutional
life, the transportation network. The nature of this
network largely determines the extent to which a city
may function as an entity, an entity, as defined in this
thesis, of institutions. In terms of Chapters 4 and 5,
transportation must both link and complement the zoning and
housing elements of the city.

The Interstate Highway program will be the
specific transportation policy dealt with here. As with

FHA and zoning, the Interstate System of highways has been

144

145

a formidable shaper of the city both as an artifact and an
institutional entity. The Interstate Highway system has
been and is a truly stupendous undertaking and has served
to shape our cities perhaps more strongly than any other
policy. An historical investigation will be the first
facet covered. Pre-auto transit will be quickly summarized,
followed by a summary of the development of highway policy.
Special attention will then be given to the neglected
alternative of mass transportation. The discussion will
then go on to review the purposes and provisions of
Federal highway legislation and will end with a discussion
of some examples of how the negative urban bias of

transportation policy has effected the city.
Relevant History

As our individualistic and laissez-faire history
would lead us to expect, the Federal Government has only
entered the area of transportation reluctantly and when the
need was clearest. The Federal Government's attitude
toward urban transportation has followed a three stage
development: (1) Laissez-faire, (2) Highway and street
aid only, and (3) The beginnings of mass transportation aid.l

In the early days of laissez-faire during the
1800's cities either had no intracity public transportation
or they relied on brightly painted omnibuses (small

horse driven open air "buses"). This form, of course,

146

did not have any significant urban shaping qualities. The
railbound horsecar, introduced in the latter 1800's

allowed about two miles expansion due to its ability to

go two miles in thirty minutes. The cable car, introduced
soon after the horsecar, allowed an additional four or

five miles expansion. The contemporaneous streetcar
covered this territory in a more efficient and economical
fashion, however, and soon became the preferred form of
transit. Even this form was subject to challenge, however,
and the development of the subway and elevated complemented
by the steam train pushed the city out even further.2

For a good part of America's urban history, cities
were shaped by public transportation more than any other
factor. With the sudden influx of immigrants and the
rapid industrialization of the city, the rich made their
"cultural mecca" to the country. The dominance of public
transport could be seen in the star fish pattern of the
city, the arms being shaped by the lines of subways,
elevateds, and most of all, streetcar lines. Farming
could often be seen carried on between the arms of the
"star fish" (See Figure 6.1)

The street railway, or streetcar, was big business
at this time. Streetcar lines often speculated in land
leading to amusement parks and cemetaries3 where people
spent their weekends. "Popular enthusiasm for the

electric streetcar was feverish. Civic pride...demanded

147

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 6.1 City of the Nineteenth Century

aVictor Gruen, The Heart 9; Our Cities (New YOrk:
Simon and Schuster, 1967), p. 269. '

148

electric streetcars as visual evidence of their progressive
spirit.”4

The street railway companies were, however,
heading for inevitable trouble. As smaller companies were
bought out by larger ones, there was a tendency not to
do away with the debts they incurred. This was workable
as long as these moves insured greater monopoly, and the
financial situation remained stable. A series of panics
began to cause several companies serious problems, however,
and by 1910 many companies were already in serious trouble.
Then came the automobile and the popularity of this new
form of transportation combined with the street railway's
financial burdens spelled ultimate disaster, unless aid
could be summoned. Many companies tried switching to
buses, but to little avail. "Government policy encouraged
the automobile and high pressure automotive advertisement
spread the word."5

President Wilson established a Federal Electric
Railway Commission who studied the railway problem and listed
the following as problems: (1) Overcapitalization,
(2) Neglect to amortize excess capitalization, (3) Failure
to amortize normal accrued depreciation, (4) Payment of
unearned dividends and neglect of ordinary maintenance,
(5) Overbuilding, and (6) Uniform five cent fare. No
help was forthcoming from the Federal Government, however,

and by Ju1y, 1920, 116 companies were in receivership.6

149

The automobile, an unmentioned part of the business-like
report of the President's commission, was to spell the
ultimate demise of the street railway and other forms
of mass transit. The freedom of movement afforded by the
automobile allowed greater expansion, and filled in the
spaces between the arms of the "star fish” with single-
family homes. (See Figure 6.2)
It was approximately at this time that the
Federal Government began a long and involved policy
of aiding street and highway construction. The Federal-Aid
Road Act of 1916 was the first step in this direction.
The act was primarily for intercity roads, however,
as places of Over 2,500 persons were exempt from aid
except for areas where houses averaged two hundred feet
apart.7 The reasons for this urban neglect are rather
simple. First of all, highways were originally under the
jurisdiction of the Department of Agriculture. Also
there was the fact that rural roads were very poor, and
cities had no idea what they were to experience with the
coming of the automobile. Even with the policy in favor
of intercity roads, this step was a major factor in the
increased usage of the automobile.8
The depression saw more Federal aid to streets
and highways in the form of the Emergency Relief and-
Construction Act of 1932 and the Hayden-Cartwright Act of

1934. Both specified funds for roads in cities, but

151

their actual aim was the relief of unemployment.9

Near the end of the thirties, however, urban
areas began to feel greater demands upon their highway
systems due to the great suburban trends already
discussed in Chapters 4 and 5. George Smerk, in his book,
Urban Transportatiog, cites FHA and the unaided and
weakening mass transit industry as important factors in
this move.10 A 1939 report of the Bureau of Public Roads
stated that it favored a system of direct interregional
highways allowing access through and around cities as §h§_
solution to the traffic problems in the spreading cities.
Shortly thereafter, Federal interest in such a solution
was further evidenced in a Presidentially assigned
committee established for the purpose of proposing a
system of highways for national defense and interregional
transportation.11

It was not until 1944, however, that the Federal
Government first acted with money and programs aimed at
the construction of highways in cities. The Federal-Aid
Highway Act of 1944 gave effect to the 1941 recommendation
for limited access highways. The National System of
Interstate Highways was formally designated in 1947 and the
President's Advisory Committee recommended that the
Federal Government take major responsibility for the_
completion of the system. Thus with mass transit in a

moribund state, the 1944 Federal-Aid Road Act put the

152

Federal Government on a firm path of highway support.
The act offered $225 million for projects on the
Federal-Aid Highway System; $150 million for projects
on secondary and feeder roads; and $125 million for
Federal-Aid Highways in urban areas, per year. Fifty
percent was to be paid by the Federal Government and
fifty percent by the States. Right of ways were aided
on a one third Federal, two thirds State basis. Forty
thousand miles of Interstate Highways were designated
for the purpose of connecting metropolitan areas,
cities, and industrial centers.12
This act was an important move. But the
question remains: Why did it take so long for the
government to act? The suburban movement was already
well under way, spurred financially and legally, as we
have seen, by FHA and zoning. Urban areas were served by
the Federal Government in previous acts only in a
marginal sense. Why was transportation policy ten to
twenty years behind?
Norton, in his book, National Egansportation
Policy, supplies an answer:

In the years before 1945, little or no thought
was given to the urban transportation problem...the
problem barely became apparent by 1930, and during
the years of the depression, from 1929 to 1947 the
state of public affairs did not allow any realistic
approach to the problem. Secondly, the war and
immediate postwar years, 1942 to 1947, were hardly
conducive to long-range planning...the city and the

automobile were accommodated to each other in a
catch-as-catch—can fashion.13

153

Circumstance thus accounts for the delay in transportation
policy. Provision of housing and regulation of land use
were of primary concern, transportation was left to
chance until the need was great.

Once started, however, this "afterthought" was.
seized upon with great zeal. An early planning
commission report from Los Angeles, for example, demonstrates
this fact. In reference to highways it says: "We must
not let this interest wane-~we must not allow this
potential support to disappear--we must take heroic measures
to solve this increasingly important transportation
problem."14 Freeways are emphasized in this report
as 32; solution to the congestion caused by dispersal.
“...We must employ facilities which are deliberately
designed for the decentralized community, but that
design does not need to increase the destructive aspects of

decentralization."15

Clearly, the limited access highway

was accepted as an answer to the traffic and transportation

problems caused by dispersion, and as a means to retain

and further dispersal policies. "An important result of

the act of 1944 was that it set the pattern for Federal

aid to urban transportation on a highways only basis...."16
The most significant move made by the Federal

Government for aiding people in getting from their

"country homes" in the suburbs to their employment in

154

the "city” came with the Federal—Aid Highway Act of 1956.
This act put the country on a major course to constructing
the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways
(the Interstate System) to meet the needs of 1975.17
"This act has been dramatically touted as the greatest
program of public works since the Great wall of China."18
The system will connect forty-two state capitals
and 90 percent of all cities with more than 50,000
persons. Six thousand seven hundred miles of planned
access highways were slated for urban areas.19 The old
Federal-Aid Highway System was given $125 million for the
fiscal year ending in 1957, $850 million for 1958, and
$875 million for 1959. Of this total, 25 percent was
designated for extensions of these into urban areas. The
Interstate System was quite another story. One billion
dollars was designated for fiscal 1957, $1.7 billion for
1958, $2 billion for 1959, $2.2 billion for 1960 through
1967, $1.5 billion for 1968 and $1.25 billion for 1961.
See Table 6.1 for a complete listing through 1963. The
mileage on the system was increased 1,000 to 41,000 miles.
The Federal share was increased to a tempting 90 percent.
The States, thus, only had to put forward 10 percent.20
Fully 38 percent of these Federal funds were
spent in urban areas from 1956-1959.21 Figure 6.3 shows

the general Federal spending trend. Figure 6.4 indicates

Table 6.1 Federal Aid Authorization by Type of Road

155

System, 1946-1963 (in thousands of dollars)

 

 

 

Fiscal Federal- Second— Urban National Total
Year Aid ary and High- System of
Highway Feeder ways Inter-
System Roads state
Highways
1946 225,000 150,000 125,000 500,000
1947 225,000 150,000 125,000 500,000
1948 225,000 150,000 125,000 500,000
1949 —- -- -— ~—
1950 202,500 135,000 112,500 450,000
1951 202,500 135,000 112,500 450,000
1952 225,000 150,000 125,000 500,000
1953 225,000 150,000 125,000 500,000
1954 247,500 165,000 137,500 25,000 575,000
1955 247,500 165,000 137,500 25,000 575,000
1956 315,000 210,000 175,000 175,000 875,000
1957 371,250 247,500 206,250 1,175,000 2,000,000
1958 382,500 255,000 212,500 1,700,000 2,550,000
1959 393,750 262,500 218,750 2,200,000 . 3,475,000
1960 405,000 270,000 225,000 2,500,000 3,400,000
1961 416,250 277,500 231,250 2,000,000 2,925,000
1962 416,250 277,500 231,250 2,200,000 3,125,000
1963 416,250 277,500 231,250 2,200,000 3,125,000

 

3U. S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Public

U. S.

Roads, Highway Statistics-—l959 (Washington, D.C.:
Government Printing Office, 1960), Table FA-200, pp. 143—
144, cited by George M. Smerk, urban Transportation: The
Federal_Role (Bloomington: Indiana university Press, 1965),
p. 134. *

156

Millions
of Dollars

2900

2700

2500

2300

2100

1900

1700

1500

1300

1100

900

700

500

300

100

 

 

 

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State-Federal Support P/

 

/

 

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1940 1945 1950 1955 1960 1964

Figure 6.3 Financing of urban Highways

aWilfred Owen, The Metrppolitan Transportation
Problem (Washington, D. C.: Brookings Institution, 1966),
p. 57.

157

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158

how this has affected individual consumer expenditures.
In 1909, public carriers commanded thirty-three cents of
every dollar; by 1963 this was down to four cents.22

The policy of aiding urban limited access highways
is an important one. It indicates the Federal Government's
willingness to support and further people's desire to escape
the city. In that way it reflects a tendency to condone,
sanction negative urban values so prevalent in our country's
cultural history. The automobile promised opportunity to
escape the city. Public carriers represented and required
a degree of urban concentration. Concentration was
associated with the industrial city, and dispersion with
the country. In view of our cultural values, the choice
was clear. We have seen that the means for moving
automobiles was given great support. In order to put this
into perspective, the Federal Government's support of mass
transportation will be considered next.

The present stagnant condition of mass transpor-
tation is quite a change from the days when "...street
railway securities were among the bluest of blue chips."23
Despite the desperate condition of most transit
companies, the Federal Government gave no aid at all
(up to 1961), even with the pouring of so much money
into the highway. Transit service had suffered from a
half century of neglect--both economic and technological.24

Between 1920 and 1950, rapid transit construction had

159

halted almost completely. New transit projects have been
financed by municipally owned companies for the most
part. Tire and fuel shortages during World War II helped
rejuvenate the rapid transit companies, but when this
"fortuitous crisis“ ended, rapid transit declined rapidly
once again.
Smerk describes the current situation quite well:
In its present state, the urban transportation
industry is generally incapable of appealing to a
sufficiently large proportion of the traveling public
to act as an agent of urban decongestion. Buses
wallowing in rush hour traffic are simply too slow
and uncomfortable...grade separated transit projects
are too expensive....Street congestion or worn out
equipment soon discourages the transit rider and
persuades him to use his own automobile even though
it adds to congestion on the streets and is a
drain on his pocketbook.25
Senate Report 445, National Transportation Policy,
often referred to as the Doyle Report, was an early critic
of Federal policies. ”Our investigations of deteriorating
commutation service...reveals conclusively that the most
important forces affecting these services are external...
and largely beyond their control...." One of the major
reasons for railway decline is listed in this report as
”the great increase in Federal funds expended for urban
capital improvements such as highways....”26 The Doyle
Report found further that action to save transit had
been forthcoming by cities and states but that Federal

actions had consisted of limitations on passenger fares,

facilitation of train service discontinuation via the

160

Transportation Act of 1958 (116 trains were discontinued
between 1958 and 1961), and a loan program, under the
same act, which, because of the already shakey state of
commuter service, was used mainly for freight service.27
As is suggested by Smerk, "perhaps most
damaging has been the Federal policy of appropriating
funds for highways only." Cities desiring to improve
their transportation system would have been foolish to
entertain an unaided mass transit program in view of
the offerings of the Federal Government's 90 percent-
10 percent highway package. Highways were, in fact, often
built along side of mass transit lines. This happened to
the Illinois Central Railroad which has lost half of
their commuters in just twenty years. The Chicago and
North Western Railroad showed a profit after refurbishing
its equipment, but construction of the Northwest
Expressway put them right back into the red.28 Federal
Government policy, then, has had a tendency to counter
the efforts of all but automobile oriented transportation.
Aid to mass transportation has occured only
recently. "The concept of mass transportation was
rescued out of the cobwebbed attic of old urban
technology, where it had been laid to rest, practically
forgotten, by the enthusiasm over the automobile."29
In 1960, the united States Department of Commerce and the

Housing and Home Finance Agency (HHFA) called for better

161

coordination of all the elements of planning, including
that for mass transportation. It suggested that funds be
allocated for, among other things, metropolitan planning.30

A response was made in the Housing Act of 1961
which specified that mass transportation planning be a
part of urban planning. Section 103 allocated a total of
$4 billion maximum for all the act's provisions, of which
$25 million was allocated for mass transportation
demonstration projects and loans.31 In all, the
appropriations under this act were largely experimental
where mass transit was concerned.

In the "Joint Report to the President by the
Secretary of Commerce and the Administrator of the
Housing and Home Finance Administration", actual grants
were, for the first time proposed on a two thirds-one
third basis. The recommendations of this report were sent
by President Kennedy to Congress in the same year. In
1964, the Urban Mass Transportation Act of 1964 was
passed. This act continued the limited demonstration funds
and loans for capital equipment started in 1961, and it
went further by extending grants for two thirds the cost
of new equipment and facilities. The act allowed
$75 million for fiscal 1965, $150 million for 1966, and
$150 million for 1967.32 Smerk assays this jesture'
quite well: "The task of providing necessary mass

transportation in our cities is a formidable one. It

162

is estimated that approximately $10 billion must be
spent...in the next decade; $375 million will not go
far...."33

Clearly, the appropriations for mass transportation
have been too little, too late. When compared to the
massive effort put forth for highways, there is very
little the small appropriations for mass transit can do for
the city. The years of neglect have been years of tremendous
growth; our cities have literally been shaped by policies
not conducive to mass transportation. When mass transit
needed help, the Federal Government made no moves, when
highways were in need, the Federal Government moved with
great zeal.

A number of things have accounted for the
legislator's blindness to mass transportation. Voters,
for example, usually drive; rural factions are better served
by highway; the Bureau of Public Roads has ranked high in
the Federal hierarchy, etc. The primary reason was
understood by Adna Weber many years ago however. In the
late nineteenth century she wrote that ”...the American
penchant for the cottage is the cause, and the trolly
car the effect."34 Truly, the streetcar was more a means
for escape than a vehicle for the futherance of the urban
entity we have known. The highway was even better suited
for escape, and so, reflecting our negative urban values,

so basic a part of our culture, we allowed our policy

163

toward cities to hasten our escape.

A pamphlet put out by the California Division
of Highways exemplifies the above contentions quite
well. The pamphlet is entitled "How Los Angeles Was
Unified by Freeways", and it characterizes the freeway
dominated city of Los Angeles as "...polycentric, with
multiple goals and attitudes. In a city of rebellious
individualists, most were too impatient to shape their
own image of the future to fit docilely to anyone else's
scheme." Planning for freeways it says "...is far more
minimal than the all encompassing planning done in
many countries to affect citizen's lives."35 The
implications toward mass transit are clear. The freedom
and individualism associated with small-town Jacksonian
Democracy is well related to freeways as a mode of
transportation.

The negative urban value structure of our
culture comes out quite clearly in the caption under
two pictures appearing early in the pamphlet. One
picture is of an old four floor walk-up with an old car
parked in front of it. The picture to the left of this
shows a girl of three or four on a tricycle in front of
a well-trimmed single family home. The captions read:
"LEFT: Dense crowding typical of Eastern cities, as in this
type of apartment, is rare in Los Angeles. RIGHT: Far

more typical is single-family dwelling with yard and

164

driveway."36 It is emphasized that the private car, allowing
freedom of choice and movement, permits this.

The freeway was seized upon as a means for
complementing the already agrarian tendencies in housing
and zoning. The plight of mass transportation was ignored
because it did not offer the same degree of escape from
the city as did the automdbile. There was no need to
consciously weigh the pros and cons of mass versus
individual transit, a culturally established reaction was
already well set, and influenced the choice made.

In the next two sections, the purposes and

provisions of Federal highway policy will be reviewed.

Purposes

Unlike zoning and FHA whose purposes have been
well articulated, the purposes of the Federal-Aid Highway
System and the Interstate System have only received
cursory attention.

The following may be interpreted as the purpose
for the construction of the Federal-Aig_Highway System.
The 1944 act indicates that its purpose is the “...post-
war construction of highways and bridges, to eliminate
hazards at railroad grade crossings, to provide for
immediate preparation of plans, and for other purposes."37
Without any elaborate justification, then, this act

simply states that it is to provide for highway construction

165

and planning.
The purpose for designating an Interstate
System of highways is stated in Section Seven of the
1944 act. The purpose of the section is "...to authorize
appropriations for continuing the construction of
highways: to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1954 to
provide for additional revenue....“ Again the purpose
is stark in its simplicity, the only additional purpose
stated is that the roads shall be for the national
defense, supposedly to move war vehicles in case of war.38
These purposes, unfortunately, are not very
fully expressed. This is not a particularly severe
disadvantage for this thesis, however, because the
important question is, what were the highways used for.
The answer to this question is clear. They were used in
part as a solution to the traffic problems incurred by the
automObile oriented suburbs which served to complement the

American negative urban bias.
Provisions

Although several features of the 1944 and 1956
act have already been discussed, the major provisions of
all the major highway acts will be reviewed here to

clarify and emphasize their main provisions.

166

Highway Act of 1944

This act was drawn up as an amendment and supplement
to the 1916 Federal-Aid Road Act, and was designed to
"authorize appropriations for the post-war construction
of highways and bridges, to eliminate hazards at railroad
grade crossings, to provide for the immediate preparation
of plans, and for other purposes.“

under this act, a total of $1.5 billion was
appropriated at $500 million for each of three successive
post war years. $125 million was allocated for
urban highways. A federal share of 50 percent was to
be complemented by 50 percent from the State for the
highways themselves and a one third Federal, two thirds
State share for right of way acquisition.

Finally, this act also stated that a National
System of Interstate Highways of not over 40,000 miles

be designated.39

Highway Act of4l956

This act was passed as an amendment and
supplement to the Federal-Aid Road Act of 1916 for the
purpose of continuing construction on highways, and as
an amendment to the Internal Revenue Code of 1954 for tax
purposes.

under this act, the Federal-Aid Road Act was given

authorized appropriations of $125 million for 1956,

167

$850 million for 1957, and $875 million for 1958.
Forty-five percent for primary roads, 30 percent for
secondary roads, and 25 percent for extensions into urban
areas was allocated. The same fifty-fifty share designated
in 1944 was held to for highways, the one third-two thirds
provision was held to for right of ways.

The Interstate System was also designated in
this act and its name was established as the "National
System of Interstate and Defense Highways". Appropriations

for this system were as follows:

$1,000,000,000
1,700,000,000
2,000,000,000
2,200,000,000
2,200,000,000
2,200,000,000
2,200,000,000
2,200,000,000
2,200,000,000
2,200,000,000
1,500,000,000
1,025,000,000

for
for
for
for
for
for
for
for
for
for
for
for

fiscal
fiscal
fiscal
fiscal
fiscal
fiscal
fiscal
fiscal
fiscal
fiscal
fiscal
fiscal

year
year
year
year
year
year
year
year
year
year
year
year

ending
ending
ending
ending
ending
ending
ending
ending
ending
ending
ending
ending

1958
1959
1960
1961
1962
1963
1964
1965
1966
1967
1968
1969

The Federal share was increased to 90 percent,
leaving only 10 percent for the States to pay. Finally,
the mileage in this act was increased to 41,000 from

40,000.40

Highway Act of_;g62

This act provided that after ggly_l, $265, the
Secretary would approve no projects for cities of more
than 50,000 persons without comprehensive planning

considering other forms of transportation.41

168

Highway Act of 1966
Here, a specific clause was added to the Highway

Act banning the use of trust funds for beautification or

motor vehicle safety programs.

Highway Act of l968

This act added 1,500 miles to the Interstate
system, making the total 42,500 miles. Freeways were
ordered constructed in Washington, D. C. Finally,

‘ $5,000 over appraised value was allowed for compensation

for acquisition of property.
Effect on the City

Now that the Federal Government's highly automobile
oriented transportation policies have been discussed, and
their connection with our strongly held negative urban
bias has been asserted, the question remains: How has
this affected the city? Policies which simply carry out
our cultural biases toward the city are not to be considered
undesirable. The question to be considered is, how have
they affected the operation of the city?

With 45 percent of our highway funds for planning
and implementing the Interstate Highway system allocated
for cities, it would be nice to report success.
"unfortunately this is not completely possible. The fact

seems to be overlooked that, over time, the supply of a

169

facility will create a demand for its use."44 "The basic
function of urban transportation," the Doyle Report states,
"is to move people, the basic function of cities is to
provide a place for people to live and work with comfort
and convenience. We have tended to lose sight of these
fundamentals in the automobile age...."45 The Congress
Street Expressway in Chicago, for example, was designed
to handle 6,000 vehicles per hour. At one quarter or one
third of its capacity, the rapid transit facility in its
median strip clearly surpasses the expressway in persons
carried with only two tracks to the expressway's
sixteen lanes.46

Indeed, government transportation policy often has
been to the detriment of urban areas. Highways are
always congested at their most needed times, and they
deposit much more traffic at the city's center than it can
handle. Smerk makes this rather blunt statement about the
government's transportation policies: ”If the Interstate
System does not turn out to be an extraordinary benefit,
it should definitely be classified as man's most

appallingly wasteful project,"47

Indeed, while the Federal
Government's transportation policies have, no doubt, had

a beneficial side, the costs to the city have been rather
great.

The costs in terms of space have been significant.

170

Highways are prime contributors to the dispersion of our
cities. By making relatively cheap land suddenly
accessible, highways encourage speculation and wasteful
land utilization. For example, Route 128, a sixty five
mile circumferential highway, ten miles from the center
of Boston, was constructed on rural land which had been
ignored for over 300 years. Yet before the highway was
even completed, over forty industrial plants costing

48

$100 million were under construction. We are converting

rural land such as this at a rate of one million acres

per year .49

The automobile itself is an extremely flagrant
space waster. "In most cities," the Doyle Report explains,
"traffic congestion is not improving but worsening. It
is becoming clear that progress cannot be made by using
private automobiles for metrOpolitan mass transportation."50
Automobiles carry on the average 1.2 to 1.7 persons. They
take up three hundred square feet when stored at home and
three hundred square feet when stored at their destination.
Six hundred feet of space is required along the way and
two hundred feet is required where it is sold51 See
Table 6.2 for an indication of how efficient the various
modes of transportation are.

Lewis Mumford is especially critical of the space

consumed by the highways themselves, and the parking

required to store them. Of Los Angeles he says, "In the

171

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172

interest of unimpeded traffic flow[:land is wasted:]....
Saving time by squandering space is hardly a public

economy."52

In the Doyle Report, the Chief of Los Angeles
Traffic reports that fully eighty acres of land are'
consumed by one freeway interchange. Each mile of the
freeway engulfs thirty acres. Los Angeles, the city of

the freeway, is apportioned as follows:53

Streets, freeways and service 28%
Off-street parking and loading 38%
Sub-total rubber tired transportation 66%
Public buildings 5%
Private buildings 28%

Cities have adjusted to the automobile by "...throwing the
doors wide open to[:it:]...; by bringing freeways and
expressways right into the city...; by providing...parking
...: by widening streets, and by generally promoting urban
sprawl." The following statement by Victor Gruen sums the
result up quite well: "...some of our downtown areas seen
from the air seem tremendous parking lots, made inefficient
by the few remaining buildings which interrupt them."54

The ability of the city's institutions to interact
under such circumstances is extremely difficult. "By
allowing mass transportation to deteriorate," Lewis
Mumford emphasizes, ”and by building expressways out off
the city and parking garages within,...our highway
engineers and city planners have helped destroy the

55

living tissue of the city...." "The suburbs can

hardly perform the economic or cultural tasks typical

173

of most core areas...."56 The separation of work from home
and the time it consumes is another way the institutional
fabric of the city has been harmed. Because Chapters

4 and 5 have already discussed this aspect of sprawl and
separation, further elaboration will not be attempted.'

Although the automobile often seems like an
inexpensive mode of transport, it clearly is not. Table 6.3
demonstrates this fact amply. The individual pays dearly
for the luxury of an automobile. Congestion hurts
business too. The viability of the downtown is undermined
when businesses leave due to congestion. Traffic jams, it
has been estimated, cost the nation $5 billion per year
in lost time, wages, fuel, vehicle depreciation, lower
sales, and lost taxes.

The highways themselves are expensive too. The
total cost of the Interstate System when completed will be
$41 billion with 45 percent of this cost urban, a full
$18.45 billion. Wilfred Owen provides some interesting
cost figures: Th£§§_mil§§_of Central Artery in Boston
cost $125 million. The first section of elevated
expressway cost $57 million. Ten miles of the Hollywood
Freeway cost $55 million. Eighp_milp§_of Chicago's
Congress Expressway cost $50 million. The first
twenty-fop;_milgg_of Detroit's expressway system cost over

$200 million, and these figures are not atypical. The

174

Table 6.3 The Cost of Getting to Work

 

 

Annual Commuting Expense in Dollars and Percent of Income

 

 

 

your by foot by bus by train by taxi by car
income ($100) ($205) ($320) ($455) ($518)
$ 6,000 1.67% 3.42% 5.33% 7.58%» 8.63%
$ 8,000 1.25% 2.56% 4.00% 5.67% 6.48%
$10,000 1.00% 2.05% 3.20% 4.55% 5.18%
$12,000 .83% 1.71% 2.67% 3.79% 4.32%
$14,000 .71% 1.46% 2.29% 3.25% 3.70%
$16,000 .63% 1.28% 2.00% 2.84% 3.24%
$18,000 .56%. 1.14% 1.78% 2.53% 2.88%
$20,000 .50% 1.03% 1.60% 2.28% 2.59%
a

**, in Readings ip_Urban Transportation, ed.
George M. Smerk (Bloomington: Indiana university Press,
1968), p. 85.

175

total cost of Los Angeles' freeways has been projected

at $2 billion. "The dilemma of Los Angeles,“ says Owen,
"is that traffic continues to outstrip the rapid pace set
by road builders."58

Although the highways were provided on the 90
percent Federal, 10 percent local schedule, it must be
remembered that the maintenance and control of these roads
is purely a local and State responsibility.

Nature and environment have suffered too. As was
mentioned before, one million acres of land are taken
up each year in urban sprawl. Smog caused by automdbiles
is destroying both animals and plants. Wildlife suffers in
both their encounters with the automobile, and the
destruction of their habitats. (The 1964 Mass Transit
Act required that all projects meet air pollution standards.
How ironic in view of the fact that the automobile, so
favored by Federal policy, is the prime contributor to
air pollution.)

Man too has suffered. A half a million people
have been killed in motor vehicles on city streets since
the turn of the century.59 Highways also displace and
destroy people and neighborhoods and are instrumental in
the formation of slums.6O

These, of course, are only a few examples of the
effects the automobile oriented Federal transportation

policies have been instrumental in bringing about. They

176

have been presented to emphasiZe that the policy of
"highways only" preserved by the Federal Government has
indeed been destructive of urban needs. These examples
should demonstrate that when negative urban values are
allowed to be reflected in major urban policy they can be
harmful. This is especially true of our society, which is

predominantly urban.
Conclusion

Again we have seen a major policy area formulated
with little thought as to what it meant to the needs of
the functioning urban entity; formulated with no
thought as to the degree to which it might be reflecting
values capable of reducing the ability of the city to .
function as an entity. Smerk demonstrates this point

quite well:

U. S. transportation policy, as well as many
other aspects of Federal policy has been plagued for
years by lack of coordination. It is almost incon-
ceivable, for example, that the Interstate Highway
program could have been formulated and undertaken in
view of the proposed expenditure of tens of billions
of dollars over a period of less than two decades,
without a rigorous analysis of the effect such a
program would have on non-highway-oriented modes of
transportation. Yet, this is exactly what happened.
Likewise, there was no thought given to the impact of
_Federal transport programs--principally highway
programs--on urban areas. It was as if the various
Federal programs carried on quite separately with none
expected in any way to affect the others. '

Such lack of coordination is not an accident. Highways

in the city were pursued because they complemented the

177

already established policies of the Federal Government
to encourage as many people as possible to choose a
life style centering around the single-family home; a life
style reflecting a culturally biased distaste for the
cities we have known in history, and a preference for the
most humane alternative we were aware of, that surrounding
the small town-agrarian life.

The purpose of this chapter has been to show
how Federal transportation policy has complemented our
cultural values, and how, as a result, our cities have
suffered in their ability to function as urban entities.
The next, and final chapter, will suggest changes for

the planning process and urban policy.

FOOTNOTES

 

1. George M. Smerk, Urban Transportation: The
Federal Role (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965),
p. 119.

2. Smerk, Federal Role, p. 18-28.

3. People often traveled to cemetaries at this
time both to pay their respects to late relatives, and as
a means of escaping the city.

4. George M. Smerk (ed.) Readings ip_Urban
Transportation (Bloomington: Indiana university Press, 1968),
p. 7.

5. Smerk, Readipgs. p. 63.

6. Smerk, Federal Role, p. 46.

7. Wilfred Owen, The Metropolitan Transportation
Problem (Washington: The Brookings Institution, 1966T,

p. 52.

8. Smerk, Federal Role, p. 30.

9. Smerk, Federal Role, p. 124.

10. Smerk, Federal Role, p. 125.

11. Owen, p. 53.

12. U. 8. Public Law 521, "The Federal Highway
Act of 1944", 78th Congress, cited by Smerk, Readings.
pp. 223-224.

13. Hugh S. Norton, National Transportation Policy:
Formation and Implementation (Berkeley: McCrutchan
Publishing Corp., 19661. p. 76.

14. Regional Planning Commission, County of Los
Angeles, Freewagsfor the Region (County of Los Angeles:

The Regional Planning Commission, 1943), p. 3.

15. Regional Planning Commission, County of Los

Angeles, p. 26.

178

179

16. Smerk, Th2 Federal Role, p. 126.

17. Owen, p. 54.

18. Smerk, Ih§_Federal Role, p. 131.

19. Owen, p. 55.

20. U. S. Public Law 627, The Federal Highway Act
3§61956, 84th Congress, cited by Smerk, Readings. pp. 235-

21. U. 8. Senate, Committee on Commerce, National
Transportation Policy (Washington: united States
Government Printing Office, 1961), p. 591.

22. Owen, p. 70.

23. Smerk, Tpp Federal 3912, p. 44.

24. Owen, p. 4.

25. Smerk, The Federa1_§plpb p. 54.

26. U. S. Senate, Committee on Commerce, pp. 552-
553.

27. U. S. Senate, Committee on Commerce, pp. 572-
578.

28. Smerk, Federsl_Role, pp. 56-57.

The
29. Smerk, The Federal Role, p. 140.

30. Housing and Home Finance Agency, and U. S.
Department of Commerce, "Joint Policy and Proceedural
Statements on Improved Coordination of Highway and General
Urban Planning", in Smerk, Readings. pp. 251-256.

31. U. S. Public Law 87-70, ”Housing Act of 1961",
87th Congress, cited by Smerk, Readings, pp. 257-265.

32. U. S. Public Law 88-365, "urban Mass
Transportation Act of 1964", 88th Congress, cited by
Smerk, Readings, pp. 311-314.

33. Smerk, Federal Role, p. 176.

34. Adna Eh Weber, The Growth p§.Cities ip_the
Nineteenth Century (New York: Macmillan Co., 1899),p. 469.

180

35. California Division of Highways, How Los
Angeles Was unified py Freeways (Sacremento: Department
of Public Works, n.d.), pp. 3-4.

36. California Division of Highways, p. 2.

37. U. 8. Public Law 521, cited by Smerk, Readings,
p. 232.

38. U. S. Public Law 521, cited by Smerk, Readin s,
p. 233-2340

39. U. S. Public Law 521, cited by Smerk, Readings,

40. U. S. Public Law 627, cited by Smerk, Readings,
pp. 234-236.

41. U. S. Public Law 866, "The Federal Highway
Act of 1962", 87th Congress, cited by Smerk, Readings,
pp. 236-237.

42. U. 8. Public Law 574, "The Federal Highway
Act of 1966, 89th Congress.

43. U. S. Public Law 495, “The Federal Highway Act
of 1968, 90th Congress.

44. Smerk, The Federal Role, p. 74.
45. U. S. Senate, Committee on Commerce, p. 596.

46. Smerk, The Federa1_Role, p. 74.

 

47. Smerk, The Federal Role. p. 131.

48. Owen, p. 46.

49. U. 8. Senate, Committee on Commerce, p. 586.
50. U. 8. Senate, Committee on Commerce, p. 592.

51. Victor Gruen, ”No More Offstreet Parking in
Congested Areas", in Smerk, Readings, p. 80.

52. Lewis Mumford, The City In History (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 19617, Graphic Section III,
Plate 48.

53. U. S. Senate, Committee on Commerce, p. 592.

54.
55.
56.

57.
Williams of

58.
59.
60.

61.

181

Gruen, in Smerk, Readipgs, p. 80.

 

Mumford, p. 510.
Smerk, The Federal Role, p. 79.

Harrison A. Williams, "Statement of Senator
New Jersey, 1962, in Smerk, Readings, p. 70.

Owen, pp. 45-48.
Owen, p. 3.
Smerk, The Federal Role, p. 78.

Smerk, Readings, p. 251.

CHAPTER 7

SUGGESTIONS FOR THE
PLANNING PROFESSION

Introduction

The major purpose of this thesis has been to
determine how Americans have valued their cities, why
they have valued them so, and to explore how these values
may have been reflected in urban policy. The past six
chapters have endeavored to achieve this purpose. A
question of great importance remains unanswered, however.
This is the question of what actions the urban planning
profession can take, and what changes can be made in the
policies reviewed to deal effectively with culture, values,
and the requirements of our cities as sets of institutions.
The scope of this thesis does not allow a detailed discussion
of all of the aspects of this question. There is, however,
a need for some general suggestions and proposals
describing possible actions and areas for further
research. This is the purpose of this chapter.

To begin with, a short review of American values
toward the city will be made. Then, a discussion of some
possible actions and studies the planner could pursue in the

course of the planning process, will be undertaken.

182

183

Following this, some suggestions will be offered concerning
the planning profession's role in Federal and State
legislation. Finally some suggested changes in the major
policy areas used as examples in this thesis (zoning,

FHA, and Federal highways) will be put forth.
The American and the Cipy_

The American has been attracted to, yet repulsed
by, the cities he has known. An important question
arises, however, as to whether this dislike has been
directed at cities pp; pp, or one particular type of city.
Has the flight to the suburbs indicated a complete rejection
of all aspects of urban life? The answer to this question
is quite clear when one considers the thrust of most urban
criticism, as was done in Chapter 3. People have not
disliked cities per se, but rather the type of cities we
have tended to produce in the country both during the period
of rapid industrial urban growth and to a large extent
today. The city people have disliked is that which has
favored economic values over all others: "...The environment
most city dwellers have confronted is the product of forces,
largely economic, over which they exert virtually no
influence....”1' The standardization and specialization of
the environment created has "...reached a degree unprece-
dented in history."2 In emphasizing one institution

over others, the needs usually met by these other

184

institutions are inadequately served. This is what has
made people reject cities in this country. Americans
have not rejected the city as a general form of human
settlement.

The influence of economic values has been greatest
at the city's center; therefore, when the opportunity
arose for escape, the trend was toward producing an environ-
ment at the fringe, exactly opposite to the excess density
and mixtures of the center city. "...This suburban image,"
Edmund Bacon says, "came about...because valid dissatisfation
with life in the city led to uncritical acceptance of the
idea that the nearest thing to the exact opposite...was...
best...that the more space around each home the higher the
state of culture it represented."3 People have confused
density with congestion4 and have felt that in order to
get rid of the latter, the former must go too.

The factthat people have not rejected cities per
se is amply demonstrated in the fact that few would leave
it entirely. Economic, convenience, and social considerations
have kept people in or near cities. Harlan Douglas describes
the suburban move as "...the city trying to escape the
consequences of being a city while still remaining a
city: urban society trying to have its cake and eat it
too."5 The city has been positively valued for its economic
opportunity and to some extent, it social variety. It has

been negatively valued, however, for its overdominance of

185

economic values. People have sought to reduce this
imbalance by turning to a varient of the small town-
agrarian ideal; the suburb has been the result.

The policies and tools developed in recent years
to deal with the city have reflected this "reactionary"
trend. Zoning, FHA, and Federal transportation policy have
brought the city from one extreme to the other. From a
city of overcrowding and extreme mixture, they have helped
create a city of extreme spacing and rigid separation. In
their effort to make the city better these policies have
created new problems; problems which cause such great men
as Lewis Mumford to refer to the openness and low
density of the FHA single-family home as "...another
name for social and civic disintegration...."6 Problems
which cause him to criticize current transportation policies
are lengthening distances, slowing travel, and dispersing
facilities once close at hand.7

The planning profession has, of course, already
done much toward improving the interaction and
interrelationship between urban uses. The profession has
fought for metropolitan government, which would allow
adjacent cities to be governed as regional entities.
Planners have introduced such zoning concepts as planned
unit development and performance standards to help allow
for a freer use of space and a beneficial mixture of

uses; mass transportation has been the dream of many

186

planners for several years. The list could go on, but
the important thing to consider is that much more needs

to be done.

The Planner's Role

Current day planners follow a varient of the
process indicated in Figure 7.1 in carrying out their
planning responsibilities. The following paragraphs will
review this process and suggest some changes which might
improve it in light of the problems discussed in this
thesis.

Currently, background studies (the first stage in
the process) deal with the city's history, its growth, its
problems, its place in the region, its general social and
economic makeup, and its general assets and liabilities.
These studies are used primarily as a quick reconnaissance
to give the planner an idea of what he is dealing with
and where he must concentrate his efforts.

Perhaps it would be useful to relate major policy,
such as FHA, zoning, and Federal aid to highways, to the
history and development of the city under consideration.
This would serve as a basis for determining how these
policies have been beneficial or detrimental to the city
and would help in determining what policies the city"
should pursue in the future, and how the city might act

to modify Federal policy.

187

 

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188

Related to the issue of background information,
but not necessarily a responsibility of the planning
profession alone, is a need for studies which explore the
exact types of environmental factors found to be pleasant
or unpleasant in our culture over time. Here is where
the help of the urban sociologist, historian, or scholar
in American literature might be enlisted. What is needed
is exemplified in the following suggestion by Leo Marx:
“...the literary landscape can help sort out, clarify, and
reorder the principles which guide (or should guide)
planners."8 He suggests that we take a thorough, precise
and analytical inventory of the satisfactions that men have
derived or claimed to have derived from various features of
the landscape.9 Planning professors in our universities
could make these needs known to interested faculty in
other departments to stimulate the needed research. Such
information on our "cultural-environmental preferences"
would be highly useful for the purpose of interpreting
the meaning and significance of information derived from
background studies, and in other phases of the planning
process to be discussed later in the chapter.

The second stage in the planning process
(data inventory) usually involves some or all of the
following studies. The city's natural resources are~
inventoried: its economic base is delineated: population

numbers and characteristics are studied; land uses are

189

inventoried: transportation facilities are studied; and
community facilities are studied.

An additional useful study, in this area, might
be a study of people's attitudes toward various
environments of their own city and the kinds of things they
like and dislike about different aspects of American
cities in general. This would differ from the previously
mentioned study in that it would involve interviews with
the citizens of the actual city or cities being planned
for. The previously mentioned study complements this study,
but concentrates on an historical analysis of environmental
preferences for our culture as a whole. The use of
photographs would be helpful in portraying various aspects
of urban settings. Sociologists could be enlisted for
assistance in constructing meaningful questionnaires. The
historical information derived from the research into our
"cultural-environmental preferences" (suggested in the
previous section) would also be useful here.

Research is needed in the area of developing
studies designed to measure and evaluate the interaction
carried on between the city's various institutions. If the
concept of the city as a set of interrelating and inter-
acting institutions is accepted, there is a need for
ways of determining the interactional needs of these-
institutions. How much, for example, do the various

aspects of the family need to interact with government,

190

education, etc. Ways of measuring such needs have not been
developed. Further research is needed in this area. Once
such studies are developed, they should become an integral
part of this phase of the planning process.

The third stage of the planning process is the
analysis and synthesis stage. Here, previously collected
data is analyzed and put into meaningful context.

Forecasts are also made at this stage.

Enlisting the aid of urban social scientists,
historians, literary scholars, and/or their research could
prove useful at this stage for gaining insight into the
previously suggested attitude survey and in interpreting
the cultural significance of the backgound studies and the
studies of population, land use etc.

The goals stage is usually the stage where citizen_
participation is first solicited. (This stage is usually
associated with policy planning) Based on the problems
uncovered in the studies done in previous stages, citizens
are asked to voice their opinions on the type of city
they desire, and the goals they would like to pursue.

Four basic alternatives are usually offered: (1) Sprawl,
(2) Compact development, (3) Corridor development, and
(4) Satellite development. Once popular opinion has been
polled, goals are formulated which show promise of
solving major problems and complementing the alternatives

preferred by the people.

191

. At this stage, greater emphasis needs to be put on
communicating to citizens, the role their culture
plays in the way they view different urban environments.
Information derived from the studies of ”cultural-
environmental preferences", the city's attitude survey, and
studies of the interaction requirements between the city's
various institutions should be communicated to people via
newspapers, radio, television, and pamphlets. A greater
range of alternative urban environments needs to be
developed which emphasizes the degree to which they comple-
ment the peculiarities of our culture, and the requirements
of the city's institutions.

By referring to background studies which reveal

the ways in which past urban policies and growth trends have

affected the city, and the part played by our cultural values

in this process, the planner will have a better chance of
enlisting informed choices. Lewis Mumford provides an
eloquent description of what might be considered the
profession's role at this stage:
...Cultural flood control...calls for the
erection of embankments, dams, reservoirs, to even out
the flow and spread it into the final receptacles, the
cities and regions, the groups, families and personal-
ities who will be able to utilize this energy for their
own growth and development.10
At the design stage, the goals and objectives
formulated in the previous stage are translated into actual

physical growth alternatives. If the goals and objectives

192

chosen earlier adequately reflect both our cultural values
and the requirements of the city as an institutional
entity, then alternatives, which also reflect these
considerations, should be a natural next step and would
use much of the same information.

In putting forth goals and alternatives which seek
to consciously control our cultural values and the
institutional elements of the city, the profession
will at the same time be helping people to grasp the
idea that they can have control over their environment:
that institutions are not in themselves ultimate; and
that our cultural values can be expressed while still
maintaining a viable, functioning urban entity. The
major policies discussed in this thesis, it has been
shown, have tended to blindly reflect the negative urban
values prevalent in our culture and our preference for the
samll town-agrarian ideal. By consciously considering
this aspect of our culture and by relating it to the
requirements of a more functional city, more intelligently
conceived policies, goals, and alternatives may be produced.

In the implementation and administration stages
(the final stages in the planning process) the planner
utilizes such techniques as zoning, subdivision regulations,
capital improvement schedules, and urban renewal to realize
goals and alternatives. These techniques should not

violate the requirements of the functional city, as they

193

often do. They should not defeat or reduce the value of the
goals and alternatives chosen in the planning process.
A complete discussion of these considerations, as they
influence the various implementing and administrating
techniques, is not possible here. However, because zoning
was used as an example of a major urban policy
reflecting the negative urban bias, it will receive some
attention in a later section of this chapter. First
a suggestion for the planner at the State and Federal levels
will be mentioned.

The planning profession's role at the State and
Federal levels has never been well defined. Because
Federal and State policy can be highly influential on the
city, however, there is a need for more and better
channels between the planner and these governmental
bodies. Using the research suggested into our cultural—
environmental preferences and the requirements of the
city as an institutional entity and working through AIP,
HUD and State planning agencies, the profession could
critidize current and proposed urban policies and offer
various alternatives. Planners have already voiced their
concern over Federal and State transportation and
housing policy. Better means of voicing concern and
affecting Federal and State policy must now be developed.
Exactly how this could be done would make a useful

topic for further research.

194

The next few sections will offer suggestions
for the kinds of changes that need to take place in the
areas of zoning, FHA, and Federal highways. As with the
previous discussion, the suggestions should not be construed
as comprehensive or complete. They are merely suggestions
as to the general directions these policy areas might take
in dealing with the city. As with the previous sections,
the thrust of the discussion will center on the need to
facilitate control over urban institutions and the need
to rationally satisfy our cultural values (specifically,
the negative urban bias and its ramifications). In all
of these areas, it should be clearly understood that no
change can occur in one area without a change in the
others. For example, efficient mass transit would be
ineffective without changes in land use patterns and
housing to bring more people and land uses closer together.
This should be kept in mind while considering the following
paragraphs.

The area of zoning, it has been shown, has
largely relied on techniques designed to space out land
uses and separate them into districts. It has already
been demonstrated that this practice reduces the ability
of the city to function and is a very wasteful practice.

Zoning must move in the direction of greater inno-
vation. There needs to be a change away from strict

districting and spacing. The emphasis should be on how to

195

bring uses together instead of how to separate and
buffer them. If more information can be gained on the
interaction needs of the various institutions and their
counterparts, much could be done to improve zoning.

The use of planned unit development techniques
and performance standards needs to be improved and
continued. These are the kinds of innovations which
are needed. Perhaps adding the concept of institutional
interaction to criteria which are used to determine
compatibility would serve to encourage and facilitate
greater interaction between the institutions embodied
in the city's various land uses. This might also serve
to suggest various beneficial combinations of uses for
planned unit developments and performance standard based
zones.

Height regulations need to be realistically
reconsidered. Limiting such uses as shopping centers to
two stories is as ridiculous as building a building as
tall as the Empire State Building on the same site. One
results in underuse, the other in overuse. There needs
to be a greater emphasis on "pulling the city together".
Height regulations currently serve to defeat this purpose.

Lot area coverages and yard requirements also need
to be reconsidered. More emphasis on techniques which
pool open areas into usable spaces, such as planned unit

developments do, are needed. Space consuming functions

196

such as parking lots need regulations which require them
to be developed into structures once they reach a certain
size, again, in an effort to bring the city together.
Placing uses behind several hundred feet of asphalt and/or
lawn serves to make the interaction between uses

difficult and makes dependence on the automobile even more
manditory.

In sum, zoning needs to be "loosened up". In
reacting against the evils of crowding and the extreme
mixture of the city of the nineteenth century, it has
helped to produce an environment wherein interaction is
difficult and expensive, and wherein space is needlessly
squandered. A middle ground must now be sought.

FHA has done a great deal to shape the cities
now prevalent in America. In emphasizing the one—family
dwelling in both promotion and program offerings, it has
facilitated the sprawl and separation our cities now
suffer from.

FHA (and/or other branches of the Department of
Housing and Urban Development) needs to rechannel its
energies toward housing innovation more than has been the
case in the past. What is needed more than anything else
is an alternative to the space consuming single-family
dwelling. Radical departures need to be developed which
maximize offerings of space, privacy, and individuality.

This may mean the development of radically different

197

apartment or condominium developments such as the “Habitat"
development of the Montreal Expo '67, or it might mean
better engineered and designed row type housing. Whatever
its form, a substitute for the single-family home which
allows the greatest degree of density while retaining
usable open spaces and an "open feeling" needs to be
advanced. This will mean reducing the discrimination

of FHA in favor of the single-family home, and continuing
and increasing efforts in the area of research and develop-
ment.

Another change FHA and related housing programs
might take is that toward helping a community to solve
its housing problems as a whole. Rather than promote one
or another type of housing, efforts might be better directed
toward financing all of the different types of housing a
city needs through one basic program. This would mean
greater coordination of various housing programs and a
redirection of priorities.

Just as the Federal Government's programs for
housing need to be better coordinated and made less one-
sided, the Federal Government' programs for transportation
need this too. As with the other areas covered in this
chapter, a complete discussion of all the ramifications
in this area is beyond the scope of the thesis. A few

suggestions can, however, be made.

198

There is a need for Federal policy to work
toward encouraging balanced transportaion systems which
serve to meet a city's total transportation requirements,
rather than encouraging only one particular form of
transportation. Belated efforts in this direction have
been made, with the passage of the Housing Act of 1961 and
the Mass Transportation Act of 1964, but an overwhelming
advantage continues to be given to highway building
which more than off-sets efforts at balanced transportation
systems. There is a need, then for a reordering of
priorities and more research and development of complete
systems of transportation.

Transportation experts have already broken trips
down into various types, and have studied their character-
istics. Perhaps, via the research suggested earlier in this
chapter on the interaction requirements of the city's
various institutions, transportation systems can be
developed which serve to link uses based on these needs.
Our cultural bias toward open settlements needs to be
considered, of course, but not to the detriment of the

city as a functioning unit.

Conclusion

 

The suggestions put forth above will mean establish-
ing policies which help, not hinder the functioning of

the city. "...The discovery of techniques by which

199

the institutional ground of urban life can be ordered,"
says Haworth, "is the outstanding problem of the twentieth
century--comparable in gravity to...world peace. For
while peace guarantees life, urban order assures us

that life will be worth having."11 Techniques need to

be improved and used to more and greater advantage. ”The
problem of the archtypical suburb," says Mumford, "is to
trade some of its excessive biological space (gardens)

for social space (meeting places): that of the city is
just the opposite.”12 New and better techniques will be
needed for this. Land uses and the institutions they
represent must be better related to one another. Functional
intermixtures must be experimented with. Applicants for
zone alterations should be made to feel welcome rather
than suspect when a new idea is put forth. Transportation
systems must be established wherein "...the largest number
of alternative modes of transportation at varying speeds
and volumes for different functions and purposesl2may
coexist:]."l3 "There is no one ideal mode or speed: human
purpose should govern the choice...."14 What are being
referred to here are techniques and policies which serve
the needs of our culture gpg_the city, techniques and
policies which are the result of conscious choice. The
alternatives the planner puts forth must not only take
cognizance of our peculiar cultural values, they must

also be capable of creating a viable urban entity wherein

200

the various institutions of the city are able to interact
and function freely and properly in their role of satisfying

human needs.

FOOTNOTES

1. Lawrence Haworth, The Good City (Bloomington:
Indiana university Press, 1963), p. 104.

2. Haworth, p. 17.
3. Edmund Bacon, "The City Image", in Man and

the Modern City, eds. Elizabeth Green et. al. (Pittsburgh:
Univeristy Of Pittsburgh Press, 1963), p. 26.

 

4. The concentration of uses in the city is essential
to effective interaction. With proper planning, concentration
need not lead to crowding. See William Whyte, "The Anti-
City", in Green et. al.

5. Anselm Strauss, Images p§_the American City
(Glencoe: Free Press, 1961), p. 241.

6. Lewis Mumford, The Urban Pros ect (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and Werld, Inc., 1968 , p. 82.

7. Mumford, Prosppct, p. 116.

8. Leo Marx, "Pastoral Ideals and City Troubles",
in The Fitness p; Man's Environment, Smithsonian Annual II
(washington: Smithsonia Institution Press, 1968), p. 122.

9. Marx, in Smithsonian Annual II, p. 141.

10. Lewis Mumford, "The Mission of the City", in
Metropolis:. Values ip Conflict, eds. C. E. Elias, et. al.
(Bellmont: Wadsworth Publishing Corp., 1966), p. 46.

ll. Haworth, p. 43.

12. Mumford, Prospect, p. 43.

13. Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 19617, p. 507.

14. Mumford, Prospect, p. 96.

201

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