The Spread City

The city, as a form of human settlement, is changing. And as it changes, urban land policy must also change. But to what end, and how? Who will direct the new urban land policy?

Barring some wholly new development not now foreseen, or perhaps foreseeable, the population of United States will continue to concentrate in metropolitan areas. The nonmetropolitan areas, which contain no city as large as 50,000 but many small cities and most of the nation's open country, are essentially stagnant. Even the building of new towns on a large scale (a development that seems unlikely) would probably not change this situation. There is ample room for many new towns within present metropolitan areas, and these areas might well be the most economic location for them.

On the metropolitan scale, the population movement is outward from city center to suburb, and has been for much longer than is often realized. Census data on city populations conceal the fact that since 1880 at least, and probably earlier, city boundaries have pushed outward almost as fast as population has increased. The decentralization is far more than merely numbers of people, and far more than simple residences for them. Taxable wealth and investable capital have also moved outward; so have jobs, and retail trade; and, perhaps most serious of all, so have social and political leadership. Moreover, the outward trend holds for blacks as well as for whites. A preoccupation with overall statistics on racial change in the older urban cores has obscured the significant migration of middle- and upper-income blacks to the suburbs—a movement that is likely to continue and to accelerate.

All this raises significant questions as to the future form of the American metropolis. One picture has been a black core surrounded by a white ring. Another has been a doughnut—a decayed and largely abandoned core surrounded by growing suburbs. Melvin Webber advanced the intriguing idea of community without propinquity, suggesting that technological advances in communication would make actual physical proximity unnecessary and that groupings of people into cities would therefore have little purpose. The trend, however, has been in the opposite direction; as metropolises have grown, business (which is basically human contact) has grown to replace, and more than replace, the losses of industry from the central city. Face-to-face contact acquires increasing values as metropolitan size and impersonality increase. In my opinion, metropolitan cores have such strengths and values that they should be revitalized and reconstituted at some time in the future. But, for the present and for the next decade or two at least, land use policy might be most effective in the suburbs where the largest changes are now taking place. If action is taken soon, it may be possible to direct these changes to social ends.

One point that is sometimes overlooked is that change occurs gradually in city and suburb alike. Buildings typically last 50 to 100 years, and annual residential construction is rarely as much as 3 percent of standing stock. Even more permanent and pervasive than the buildings are the streets and other major features of the city, including the vast underground network of sewers, water pipes, telephone lines, electric power lines, and the rest. New construction typically takes place incrementally. When a building is under construction, all the surrounding buildings and streets are part of its environment; but, once built, it becomes part of the environment for newer structures. A city cannot change immediately and drastically—a fact that one may regard as an asset or as a liability. Nevertheless, within a few decades, or even a few years, substantial changes can take place, and choice is possible.

The expansion of the city into the suburbs and the rebuilding of the older city center will be characterized by a mixture of private and public efforts. It is a complex process, with many actors. City building and rebuilding to accommodate new residents and to provide better housing for present residents will be largely an activity of private business; public housing has been, and is likely to continue to be, relatively unimportant as a source of shelter. But the private activity will take place within a framework of laws and institutions established or imposed by the public, operating through government at various levels.

Urban and suburban growth and development are, or can be, controlled in a variety of ways: by the location and timing of public improvements, by lending policies and restrictions of private lending agencies and of the government agencies that supervise them, by governmental subsidies and other programs, as well as by public land use controls. The most important land use control—and the one emphasized here—is zoning, but subdivision regulations, building codes, and health requirements can also be influential in guiding land use.

The various groups involved in urban land use zoning and other controls are each seeking their own ends, using all the economic, political, and legal powers they possess. If the results are disadvantageous to other groups, this is not by evil intent; it is an unavoidable outcome of each group seeking its own ends. Zoning may properly seek to preserve the quality and the value of an established area, but this objective rather easily slides over into a purely exclusionary one. Zoning, to be effective, must restrain some person or group from doing what he otherwise would have chosen to do; otherwise, it is worthless. But are its restrictionary outcomes in a general social interest, or not?

On the affirmative side, zoning and other land use controls have provided a significant degree of stability in land use in established residential and other areas. They have operated to keep the intrusion of discordant land uses to a practical minimum; service stations, funeral parlors, grocery stores, and scores of other uses do not readily invade an established residential area, for instance. By keeping out what are generally considered discordant land uses, zoning has helped to maintain land values in each zone. And by assuring some permanence of land use within an area, zoning may have encouraged private investment, thus adding to the attractiveness and stability of the protected area. Zoning has reduced the ease of land use change within established areas; whether one regards this as an advantage or a disadvantage, that seems to have been its effect.

On the negative side, zoning and other land use controls have operated to exclude some groups from settling in the growing suburbs. The effects have often been indirect; that is, a zoning ordinance would rarely if ever specify that a poor person or a minority group member be excluded from a particular area, but it might establish conditions that would virtually guarantee this outcome. Large lot-size requirements, building codes that seem defensible but ensure expensive houses, and lending policies that make it difficult if not impossible for a member of a racial minority to get a loan have operated to exclude the blacks and the poor almost as surely as an outright prohibition would have done. Seymour Toll has described how this aspect of zoning was embedded within land use zoning from the beginning.

These same controls have been of limited value, however, in guiding new suburban land development. While the whole community might unite to help exclude the unwanted poor, the typical developing suburb has been unable or unwilling to enact zoning and other controls that were strong enough to effectuate a general plan for the area. The difficulty has been primarily political, not legal; dominant elements in the developing area have successfully resisted any major limitations on their operations.

In the past, land use zoning has been used by units of local government (counties and cities) for local ends. Within such local areas, it has been dominantly the concern and the creature of certain special interest groups—the real estate developers and the zoning lawyers primarily, with limited participation by the electorate at large. Each local zoning area has sought its own objectives; one area may want to attract industry to secure its tax contribution, another may want to exclude industry to preserve a style of suburban life desired by its upper-class residents. Both figuratively and literally, local communities have dumped their sewage upon their neighbors. There has been no regional or metropolitan or overall concern except for special functions such as fire fighting, police control, parks, and highways. The absurdity of fire-fighting companies refusing to help fight fires in neighboring jurisdictions, or of police not cooperating to help capture criminals fleeing from one jurisdiction to another, overcame even the localism of local government. But, when it comes to overall economic and social development and implementing a metropolitan strategy, local land use zoning and controls have been notably deficient. The result has been Spread City—an amorphous spreading texture lacking strong nodal points and real metropolitan form—combined with exclusion of the poor and the blacks and the degradation of the environment. De facto, we have allowed a major part of national land policy to be formed by the sum of many disparate local actions.