Foundations of American Urbanism: Part 4

Early Fordism/Depression

• Ford’s automobile and the internal combustion engine changed society radically

– Tractors now motorized; even fewer farmers (and farm animals) needed

– Automobiles competed with mass transit and horses, led to suburban infill and small town death (as people would drive a little further to get a few more options)

• Starting during WWI, and then due to labor shortages following the end of immigration, see the Great Migration of Southerners (especially Southern African Americans) to Northern Industrial cities

– The South remains segregated with little rural economic opportunity; but in the north, ghettoization awaits

• 1920’s also a phase of mergers and acquisitions by large companies (both of competitors (horizontal integration), backwards and forward linkages (vertical integration), or just nice looking businesses (diagonal integration))

– By 1920’s, 1% of companies had 50% of productive capacity

• This means that the largest company in town may no longer have owners with local ties, which means major decisions about a city’s future are beyond local control

Early Ford/Depression (cont.)

• Depression caused by a perfect storm of overaccumulation

– Machines had made farm produce so plentiful, its prices dropped; same with manufactured items

• Lots of money had been spent on fixed production capital (machines, factories, etc) that was not needed

– Stock market caught in speculative bubble with complex mergers making markets nervous and leading Washington to make credit harder to get

– Hoover refused to do anything other than allow a tariff to pass that halted world trade

– Problems so big that even spending on consumer fixed capital (things used for a long time like cars, appliances, and houses, also called consumer durable), could not fix the problem in the short term

• What did was Keynesianism, in which the government stepped in to stimulate the economy by providing infrastructure, a social safety net, labor/business peace and direct employment to keep people working

– It was, in fact, the mammoth government spending of WWII which finally ended the depression

– Government will now try to change cities

Suburban Infill

• This begins the era of Suburban infill (1920-45) – As cars compete with mass transit

– Growth over this period in autos in US was huge: 8,000 in 1900; 470,000 in 1910; 9 million in 1920; 27 million in 1930

• Fordism

– Ford first brought is vision of mass production with mass consumption to the auto industry and his auto workers

• He did this by achieving economies of scale from scientific management and large production batches, while paying workers a comfortable wage that stopped turnover and improved efficiency

– In so doing, he brought the price of autos down significantly

» From $950 in 1909 (22 months pay for average worker) vs. $300 in 1925 (less than 3 months pay), when Ford’s factories were producing a car every 10 seconds!

• This becomes the model for entire societies over the course of the 20^th century

– What is amazing is how quickly it rises and how relatively quickly it has crumbled

Roads

• Cheap cars were only half the story, it took a powerful coalition of interests to pave America

– State and local government in Florida spends $9 billion annually on highways alone (this excludes roads + the federal dollars that go into this)

• By comparison, the state spends $26 billion on K-12 education; a fraction of that on public transport

• In 1890’s, first push to pave came from bicycle manufacturers and riders, Post Office, and Grange (a farmer’s organization) who thought markets would improve with more roads

– Within a decade, automobiles, oil, rubber, construction and a coalition called Good Roads Associations (a group of urban merchants and industrialists)

• In 1916, get the Federal Aid Roads Act, requiring every state to have a department of highways to plan intercity transportation in order to receive federal aid, and Highway Act of 1921 began to fund linking road networks up between states

• By 1930’s, both federal and local government were putting money into urban roads, an expensive project (cost a $1 million a mile in Chicago)

– Mostly this was paid for by the sensible gasoline tax, thus making people pay for use (and eventually, awarding fuel efficiency)

– Urban areas also were faced with a brand new, expensive problem: parking

Parkways

• Some of the first limited access highways were parkways, many in the greater New York City area; Long Island Motor Parkway was the first

– Essentially they were 4 lanes, beautifully landscaped, and designed to get urban dwellers out into the countryside

• Robert Moses (more on him later) also thought you could replace blighted areas with ribbons of green

– The beaches and trails now accessible by parkway were less crowded than the railroad/street car alternatives

• The most famous of the old railroad beaches (first developed in the 1860’s) was Atlantic City, NJ, Philadelphia’s beach; in UK, it was Blackpool for Manchester/Bradford/Leeds and Brighton for London

– Other cities follow suit; for example, San Fran builds the Golden Gate bridge opening up Marin County

• But most planners are busy building small bridges, sewerlines and utilities to allow suburban infill

Decline of Mass Transit

• The fixed routes of mass transit (and their focus on downtown) could not cope with the changing land patterns of less dense automobile suburbs

– As more people moved into the auto suburbs, new shops and offices chased the markets out there, meaning what was “new” was now dispersed

• Now get cross-town and inter-sububran traffic for the first time, very few transit system felt need for circulator lines

• Weekend and shopping traffic, which had once used the rail and street car, now started using roads

– This meant less money for rail and streetcars, which meant more infrequent service, less repair and higher ticket prices

» Which drove more people to cars

– As more people used roads for commutes (30% of people east of Mississippi and 60% west by 1920!); streetcars had no speed advantage at all and got mired

• Plus, a coalition called National City Lines (GM, Firestone, and Standard Oil), would bribe local officials for transit contracts, rip up the electric streetcar lines, and replace them with buses

– This happened in 45 US cities

– While buses at the time seemed to make more sense (since they could change routes quickly), many cities now wish for emission free streetcars

Automobile Suburbs

• Boom of 1920’s was made by the suburbs, which grew 39% during that decade

• First auto suburbs, were actually the growth of older transit suburbs, orientated towards central city, but different in form

– Lots were slightly bigger (but often houses smaller)

– No sidewalks (yuck! See all of St. Lucie county for example of this continued, horrid practice)

– Curvilinear streets with fewer junctions

– Few amenities built

– Most now working class suburbs caught between the older, fancy railroad suburbs and post-1950 suburbs

Automobile Suburbs (cont.)

• Big influence on their form was the case of Village of Euclid v Ambler Realty, which allowed local governments to forbid property owners for using land for purposes other than it was zoned and the right of local governments to “abate a nuisance” that would impact the “general welfare” of a residential area

– Zoning soon excluding both undesirable land uses and, by making large lot sizes, undesirable people

– Thus, because local governments could zone and exclude, many areas rushed to incorporate

• Also, once zoning maps were in place, developers felt comfortable developing larger and larger tracts

• Thus, as opposed to the sector based development of industrial city, suburbs over time made the overall urban shape more symmetric

– Lot sizes were about 5000 sq ft (vs. 3000 in street car suburbs); 10000 people per sq mile (vs. 20000 per sq mile)

Planned suburbs

• Most suburbs were unplanned, and unaware of the challenges (traffic and environmental quality) and opportunities (different quality of life) provided by opening up so much new land

– But some were actually planned, and became the models for subsequent phases

• First one’s were railroad/street car suburbs like Chestnut Hill, PA; Lake Forest, IL

– Self contained in terms of lower-order services, secluded, but not auto friendly

• 1920’s the first automobility suburbs

– Palos Verdes, Los Angeles, CA; Country Club District, Kansas City, MO; and Coral Gables and Boca Raton, FL

• Although in practice, once you get to Miracle Mile, Gables was designed to be walkable (and it once and now again has a trolley circulator)

– Built by private developers for upper middle class, 3 dwellings per acre, high quality landscaping, recreational facilities like pools and golf courses, public parks, shopping amenities and building codes

Planned Suburbs

• Country Club District was hugely influential

– Was founded by Jesse Cylde Nichols, who founded the Urban Land Institute (the developers’ urban research arm)

• He liked Europe’s Garden City movement and City Beautiful movement; but to make that type of leafy, winding street plan, with greenspace belt, he needed the affluent

– Included 6000 homes and 160 apartment buildings

– At the heart was the first automobile shopping plaza, Country Club Plaza, built in Spanish Colonial style (in KC?) with waterfalls, fountains, flowers, brick walls to hide the parking

• Controlled retail to put upscale on first floor; doctors/lawyers/accountants on second floor

– Houses set back from the street with driveways and garages

– All owners had to join the home owners association and were filtered by racially restrictive deed covenants (deed covenants were restrictions that stayed with the land even if the owner changed hands)

• This made sure lawns were mowed, no extended families, all whites, determined what colors houses could be painted, etc.

– Racial covenants were overturned in 1960 by Shelley vs. Kraemer

– It attracted builders from across the United States, who replicated it (though not always with the same attention to detail) in many places

• Especially its use of random, non-local style

Planned Suburbs (cont.)

• Also during this era, the Regional Planning Association of America (with Lewis Mumford and other progressive, reform architects) was able to create two planned communities, Sunnyside Gardens, NY and the better known Radburn, NJ

– One of the core principles was transportation segregation, meaning that there were separate circulator routes in the community for cars, bikes, and pedestrians (to the point where pedestrian paths were protected by routing cars over them with attractive bridges)

– Cul-de-sacs were used to keep thru-traffic out of residential neighborhoods; houses were put close together but surrounded by green space and parks that everyone was supposed to share (the idea was called super blocks)

– Over time, as families got multiple cars and private yards became the fad, the model it represented became less popular

• It returned to vogue after the 1970’s, when fuel prices shot up and studies showed residents walked for groceries 60% of the time in Radburn (vs. 3% in unplanned US suburbs)

– Unlike Country Club District, these were meant to be socially mixed, but were so nice, it got expensive, and realtors conspired to keep out blacks and Jews out to maintain property values (ughh…)

Federal Suburban Policy

• Depression brought all construction to a halt (it fell by 95%) and foreclosures were a plague (50% in default by 1933)

– Hoover tried a program to help housing, but it was not successful; Roosevelt was more so

• Started Home Owners Loan Corporation, which refinanced loans at better terms and allowed former owners to return on better terms

• Then made the Federal Housing Authority in an effort to spur new construction and put people back to work

– This is classic government stimulus Keynesianism

– The FHA stimulating private sector construction by insuring home mortgages made by banks and Savings and Loans

» Thus more loans were offered and on better terms (lower fixed rates, reasonable down payments, longer payment periods)

» Also had minimum standards for the housing purchased with its insured loans, ending the shoddiest of construction

– It worked; it made more people property owners (which had the downside of tying them to a long term project/investment) and construction picked back up

Federal Suburban Policy (cont.)

– The New Deal also experimented in planning and development

• Started the Resettlement Administration which wanted to draw more people to the suburbs so slums could be cleared and redeveloped

– The head of Resettlement Administration, Rexford Guy Tugwell, wanted 3000 cities called Greenbelt Cities based on Radford

– Proposed a pilot project with 25 low cost housing communities, got funds for 8, which got whittled to 5 by congress, and eventually three after intense pressure from private developers

» They were Greenbelt, MD; Greenhills, Cincy, OH; and Greendale, Milwaukee, WI

– In 1938, the agency was shuttered; although similar plans were done by other agencies; examples include Norris, TN by the Tennessee Valley Authority

Suburbanization of Commerce & Industry

• During Suburban Infill era, commerce and industry were slower to leave the city

– Eventually, after WWII, the fact the suburbs had the most desirable consumers and most-skilled workforce (plus cheaper, available land), they began to move out

• Smaller corporate offices and services like doctors, lawyers, accountants moved along major business thoroughfares relatively early on

– Although in this era, still only 7 suburban automobile shopping plazas in the whole of US

• The advent of trucking begins to allow some wholesaling to move out of city center away from rail yards

Suburbanization of Commerce & Industry (cont.)

• During the depression, building in central city industrial areas stopped: they were cramped, with high rents, and old physical plants designed for broilers, not electricity

– Some factories shut down, beginning first wave of downtown deindustrialization; surrounding working class communities who were already hurting from the Depression suffered considerably; as did the oldest, closest streetcar suburbs

– Factories eventually would need many many acres, those were just not available in cities

• Department stores and civic/entertainment functions did comparatively well in this era, and in fact, department stores did get ever more features in them to keep people coming in

– Some department stores like Sears and Montgomery Ward open suburban branches, but mostly geared towards men who did the bulk of the driving

• Downtown still was about women’s fashion, accessories and jewelry, plus children’s items

Multiple Nuclei Model

• By 1945, a lot had changed, and the sector model was no longer holding as true as it had

• Thus the Multiple Nuclei Model was developed

– The model argued that suburban development was unpredictable, except in terms of relative location

• It would develop around a university, government center, transit stop or highway intersection

– Offices and retail attracted middle class development

– Factories attracted working class development

Urban System in Transition: Heading towards Disorganized Capitalism

In these lectures

• Focus on three post-WWII periods in US urban development

– Postwar Economic Recovery and Growth (1946-1972) with sprawl and suburbanization

– Economic Crisis and Reorganization (1972-1983) due to deindustrialization

– Technology and Communications Revolutions (1983-today)

• Also examine the impact of these epochs on urban theory

Post-War Economic Recovery

• Interstate Highways – This changed the organization of the US profoundly, from a society that used rail to travel anything but a short distance to one that lived in automobiles

– The other major change of this era was the coming of regional and sub-regional airports that could accommodate passenger jets.

• In terms of the urban system, what grows (and continues to until very recently) is the Sunbelt (the US South and West)

– Factors include cheaper land, lower taxes, lower energy costs, and cheaper/less militant labor, all promoted by local boosters

• Electronics, aerospace and petrochemicals were particularly attracted to these locations because they could create the infrastructure they needed without legacy costs

– Also, in Manufacturing Belt, machines were aging, costs were getting higher and agglomeration diseconomies were outweighing cumulative causation

• Thus decentralization

Post-War Recovery (cont.)

• However, the largest urban centers, New York and Chicago (along with newcomers Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, and LA) begin picking up more and more corporate headquarters

– In these cities, the cumulative causation of entrepreneurial talent and support services remained strong, so that when a wave of mergers and consolidations came, they ended up with the new merged HQ’s

• Another trend emerges around Research and Development (which becomes increasingly important to find new profits), where, along with big cities, three sites with a combination of strong university research facilities, strong federal science presence, and a range of cultural and recreational amenities emerges

– Silicon Valley, CA; Route 128 near Boston, MA; and the Research Triangle (Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill), NC

Freeways and Metropolitan Sprawl

• Cars grow again in number (from 26 million in ’45, to 52 million in ’55, to 97 million in ’72)

– Number of people per car fell from 5 to 2

– Even low price cars could now go 80

• Suburbs added 19 million in the 1950’s (45% growth)

– Surrounding counties grew very fast; and in fact, a lot of growth of central cities came from western cities like Dallas and San Diego annexing surrounding communities

Freeways and Sprawl

• Peter Hall noted 4 preconditions for this sprawl

• Zoning, as affirmed in Euclid v Ambler

• Pent up demand from Depression and WWII

• Cheap, long term home financing from FHA and the GI Bill

• Highways

• The change came with the 1956 Federal Aid Highway Act

– Planned 41,000 miles of interstate, linking every major city

– Change the internal form of cities by creating a ringroad/beltway with spoke highways going into the CBD

• Once you had ring roads and highway intersections, suburban malls, then residential, then light industry, offices and warehousing all head to the burbs

Freeways and Sprawl (cont.)

• Fordist Suburb

– Beginning in 1950, housing starts were at 2 million a year, and have averaged 1.5 million or more almost every year since

• FHA assisted 11 million buyers during 50’s and homeownership rate went from 45 to 65%

– This happened with little planning or oversight

• Developers wanted profit, so they made standardized products and introduced more prefabricated elements

– Most important was the balloon frame, using many many 2 x 4s, it was cheaper (by 40%) and needed less skilled labor to build than the old corner pillar/support beam homes

Freeways and Sprawl (cont.)

• The predominate house styles were the Ranch and Bungalow (single story, big windows, low slung roof, carport or garage and lawn)

– Bungalow was so named because it was designed by the British to be a well ventilated house for use in Bengal

• Whole big developments of these emerged, like the 100,000 person Lakewood Park complex near LA and Levittown, NY, with its standardized designs and innovative materials and low costs of $100 and $57 a month

• This meant that while in the past, the urban fabric was developed more carefully with thought (in general), but now, it growing by big wide swatches was the future

• Geographer Donald Meinig said the California suburb was now one of the iconic landscapes of America; Historian Lizabeth Cohen notes the emergence of a “consumer’s republic”

Freeways and Sprawl (cont.)

• People were in love with driving, so you get drive thru and drive in food, drive thru windows and banks and dry cleaners, drive in movie theaters, etc…

– This meant that more and more land dedicated to parking, which caused buildings to be put back further from the street, which made signs bigger and suburbs uniformly parking lot covored

• Some exceptions to Fordist burbs

– Oak Brook and Park Forest near Chicago had extra green

– Columbia and Reston near DC brought back the greenbelt concept with separate transport type corridors, green space, and self-sustaining village centers with rec and retail

– California begin to get the all-inclusive auto subdivision, with the club house, golf course, riding trails, ball fields, lakes, pools to make a recreation oriented environment

• Examples include Irvine, Valencia and Mission Viejo

Freeways and Sprawl (cont.)

• Except for the heaviest industry like steel tied to older plants and locations, most industry could now locate anywhere

• Areas they got zoning for industry included:

– Along highways (where residential did not want to be)

– At interstate junctions (for transport advantages)

– In developer built industrial parks

– The area around airports (again for transport)

• Began to get even more industrially/commercial agglomeration, with nearby businesses becoming interconnecting

– Like aerospace and electronics in Orange County, CA