Social striving propels the drive-only suburban machine
Note: This article appears in the current print issue of Better! Cities & Towns.
I’ve studied a lot of books on New Urbanism. Every once and a long while one of them opens my eyes to an entirely new way of thinking. Such is Dead End: Suburban Sprawl and the Rebirth of American Urbanism.
Ross packs a trove of trenchant analysis into a readable 256 pages. He concludes with much-needed ideas on how urbanists can gain political influence to initiate structural change and once again build healthy cities and towns as a matter of course.
An environmental scientist with a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ross spent 15 years as president of the Maryland Action Committee for Transit, honing his skills as a grassroots activist in southern Montgomery County, where New Urbanism has been gaining a solid foothold for a quarter-century. He absorbed the arcane details of this trend while breathing the political air of the nation’s capital, and this apparently inspired the first comprehensive political strategy for New Urbanism.
I hope this book inspires other works along the same lines. As the author says, “change requires politics, and politics requires strategy.” For that undertaking, Dead End is more than a good beginning.
To take on a project as ambitious as this, a writer has to determine what makes people tick. Dead End is the shrewdest book on the psychology of the built environment that I have read in a long time.
The roots of that psychology go back nearly 200 years. The publisher says Dead End “[b]rings together the history of suburbanization and urban decline and revival in a single book … providing an unparalleled synthesis of leading cross-disciplinary scholarship in urban history and urban planning.” That is not an overstatement — the footnotes reveal an astonishing breadth of research. I have read dozens of historical accounts on this subject, have written some of my own, and have absorbed countless articles and lectures, yet I learned something on every page of Dead End.
Ross makes a convincing argument that status-seeking was the primary motive for the policies that promoted single-family houses and automobiles while strangling compact cities and towns. Status-seeking remains deeply imbedded in the American psyche today, but that is not the real issue: Rather, these desires are channeled through our legal system in ways that still favor automobile-oriented, detached housing.
While Ross’s tale strikes an emotional chord, this is not an outraged book on the sad state of our communities. This is an analysis of history and current events with the aim of mapping a course out of America’s addiction to sprawl. The history has been told before in wide-ranging volumes, but the strands have not been woven together so completely into a single narrative.
Controlling development
Zoning is the strongest pillar in what Ross calls the current system of “suburban land tenure.” Private covenants, governed today by homeowners’ associations (HMOs), are another substantial pillar:
The regime of covenants and zoning obliterated a basic principle of 19th Century real estate law, that owners of land could build as they liked absent special circumstances. Free trade in land, which had earlier displaced feudal landholding in Europe, now gave way to the new suburban land tenure. The collectivist spirit of the new system was a sharp departure from the individualism of American legal and economic thinking. Sacred doctrines of freedom of contract and freedom of movement were set aside; people and buildings would henceforth be separated according to fine gradations of social status.
Ross argues that suburban zoning springs more from private covenants than from simple 19th Century city codes that regulated street width and building height.
Private covenants took root in socialist, utopian societies where intellectuals escaped the city in the first half of the 19th Century — and thus were anti-urban from the start. These societies were limited in influence and mostly short-lived, but the codes were later picked up by purely market-driven developments like Riverside, the community that Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. designed west of Chicago in the 1870s.
Private covenants worked imperfectly and incompletely, Ross explains. “Homeowners and real estate developers desired more comprehensive and more effective controls. This was something only the power of government could achieve,” he writes, explaining why the covenants morphed into zoning in the 1910s and 1920s. Zoning provided a profession for planners and the opportunity for patronage and graft for machine politicians. Private covenants continued to be used through the middle of the 20th Century in upper-class subdivisions that imposed racial and ethnic restrictions and architectural standards.
Homeowners’ Associations (HOAs) became ubiquitous only after 1963, when the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), issued an endorsement. Municipalities saw the value of avoiding maintenance costs for internal streets and public spaces. HOAs rose from 500 in 1962 to 20,000 in 1975, and 80 percent of new housing was subject to private covenants by 1994, Ross reports.
A primary purpose of zoning was to restrict apartments, which were perceived as lower class. That was the issue in the Supreme Court’s 1927 Euclid v. Ambler decision, which provided the legal foundation for zoning. The court starkly described the apartment dwelling type as a “mere parasite” on a single-family neighborhood. Whether the court considered the buildings, or the people in them, to be parasites, is open to question.
The text of that decision is startling in its open condemnation of residences that are not single-family houses. The waves of immigrants crowding the Lower East Side in Manhattan had subsided by 1927, but the image of that crowding was still vivid in the minds of the American elite.
The planning profession arrives
The planning profession was built on the intellectual foundation of the Garden City movement of the United Kingdom and the City Beautiful movement in the US, but planners applied those ideas selectively at best, Ross says. “The classicism of the City Beautiful was still in vogue in the 1920s among architects and builders of public buildings, but the new planning profession had moved on,” he writes. Zoning, according to the Supreme Court, must contribute demonstrably to the “public health, safety, morals, or general welfare.” Planners had the job of making those demonstrations. “They were now technocrats, collecting facts and using them to calculate the future course of the metropolis.”
Good and bad layouts according to the FHA, 1938
Among the tools was “redlining,” and here Ross adds to the usual explanation—that the federal government colluded with banks to deny financing to African-American neighborhoods. The Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC), established in April 1933 as part of the New Deal, was biased at heart against all urban places; the agency’s policies dovetail nicely with Ross’s theory about status. Says Ross:
The HOLC appraisal methods did vast damage. Recognizing the value of a house depends on its surroundings, the agency established four categories of neighborhoods. Its ratings reflected the housing market’s established pecking order of social status. Newly built subdivisions automatically scored higher than older ones, and traditional urban layouts, such as houses built close to the street, were downgraded. Old streetcar suburbs lacked access to funds that flowed into newer developments built for the automobile.
The ethnic and racial makeup of neighborhoods also factored into the appraisals. African-American sections received the lowest scores.
Color-coded maps displayed the results of this evaluation, with the lowest category shown in red. For years afterward these maps were used by private banks for lending decisions, giving rise to the term “red-lining.”
Next came the FHA, a New Deal program, established in June 1934, that adopted the HOLC appraisal system and went much further. The FHA was biased against rental housing, particularly rental units near single-family houses.
The FHA recommended segregating apartments units in, to quote the administration, “what amounts to a privately owned and privately controlled park area.” This became the model for suburban “garden” apartments. Due to minimum parking requirements, the units came to be surrounded by parking lots rather than gardens. A similar design was imposed on rowhouses.
FHA’s ideal subdivision
Crucially, FHA established a norm for the ideal subdivision — this became the model for the postwar automobile-oriented suburb. “FHA design standards specified minimums for lot sizes, front and side setbacks, and the width of a house,” reports Ross. See FHA’s 1938 drawing for “good” and “bad” street layouts. FHA standards exerted a huge influence. “Developers who laid out entire communities and built the houses were favored with commitments to approve loans before the houses were built,” Ross notes.
Minimum parking requirements were implemented throughout most of the nation in the late 1940s. “Curbside parking was disfavored because it was déclassé, suggestive of old neighborhoods with no garages and cars in the street,” he says. Sometimes this was justified on aesthetic grounds, although Ross notes that a car in the driveway is no more attractive than one on the street. Early off-street parking requirements often did little to increase the supply of parking, because each driveway takes away an on-street spot. But, from a status point of view, “one’s own BMW in the driveway is entirely different from someone else’s Toyota on the curb,” Ross observes.
The suburban norm of garages at the fronts of houses, condemned by new urbanists as “garagescapes” and “snout houses,” is also an indicator of status. These garages in effect announce how many automobiles a household owns. Suburbs are all about status and conspicuous waste —large front yards, greenery that is not allowed to be productive (no tomatoes or chickens, thank you). Postwar America offered legally enforced conspicuous waste to the white middle class, which snapped it up.
The car was privileged in public policy as the high-class way to get around. And specific changes to the built environment can be can be traced to political maneuvers. Larger curb return radii subtly transformed the character of street corners across the US, increasing crossing distances and allowing vehicles to speed around the turn. “These changes were no whim of car-loving traffic engineers. Behind them stood the lobbying might of the trucking industry,” Ross explains.
The beginnings of modern traffic engineering profession, and the mindset that holds considerable influence today, are related in the following passage:
The planning profession, driven by its scientific pretensions and encouraged by automotive lobbies, outsourced the design of roads to specialists. As [pre-eminent planner] Harland Bartholomew later put it, the design of highways was “a scientific process or an engineering matter, just as the design of a sewer and drainage system.” Traffic engineers could determine the proper width of streets in much the same way that sanitary engineers calculated the diameter of sewer pipes.
The narrow, tree-lined streets of the early 20th Century Garden City planners blew up to enormous proportions over time. See photo of an intersection in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Bicycle lanes are useless on this Palm Beach County highway.
Jane Jacobs, J.C. Nichols, Herbert Hoover, Robert Moses, and many others play prominent roles in this book — as their lives are woven into the tapestry of 20th Century planning. The Housing Act of 1949, also known as “urban renewal,” with its windswept plazas, and the freeways that allowed motor vehicles to cruise at top speed through dense neighborhoods, brought an urban form of sprawl into the city. The bulldozing of urban neighborhoods set the stage for the epic battle between Moses and Jacobs, and the grassroots movement to save cities.
The bohemians
Ross highlights an underappreciated thread of American urbanism. At a time when white America was flocking to suburbs and minorities had little choice but to settle in cities, one group enthusiastically embraced urbanism: bohemians. Ross describes two strains: artists and political leftists. Both rejected the conformity of suburbia and were scorned, in turn, by the suburban middle class as less than red-blooded Americans.
Bohemian culture had its genesis in New York’s Greenwich Village, and spread to enclaves in other big cities like San Francisco and New Orleans. Greenwich Village was the home and inspiration for Jane Jacobs, who launched the modern urbanism movement in planning. Ross devotes an entire chapter to Jacobs, who, though influential in cities, had no impact in slowing sprawl.
Hipsters, the latest version of bohemians, are now flocking to cities all across America and helping to bring them back to life. And like their antecedents, hipsters are in the crosshairs of cultural warriors.
Anti-urbanists
This brings us to the anti-urbanists, writers associated with libertarian/conservative think tanks like the Reason Foundation, Cato Institute, and Heritage Foundation, who are paid to attack smart growth. Ross ably dissects the illogical arguments of Joel Kotkin, Randal O’Toole, Wendell Cox, and others of this kind.
Such writers are put in a bind. “To be accepted in the conservative network, writers must defend suburban land tenure and yet appear to uphold the doctrine of the sovereign consumer,” Ross says. “But suburbia has little to do with the free markets that libertarians claim to believe in. Covenants, zoning, subsidies, and exclusions created it and keep it alive.” Likewise, their support of highways makes little sense from a free-market point of view. Suburban roads are, “even more than suburban neighborhoods, made by government,” he points out.
To solve this problem, says Ross, “They drew up a case for sprawl that rests overtly on population statistics and economic theories, but conveys an underlying message that is cultural and emotional. The single-family suburb embodies true Americanism, under attack by an alien cultural elite.”
Cox calls his book on sprawl War on the Dream. O’Toole founded “The American Dream Coalition,” and Kotkin claims the state of California is waging a war on suburbia on behalf of “aging hippies who made their bundle during the state’s glory days and settled in places like Mill Valley.”
This un-American charge has a long history. George Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis’s fictional Realtor, denounced long-haired professors and proclaimed American superiority in 1922. It echoes 1950s McCarthyism, and it aligns with the current Agenda 21 rhetoric of the Tea Party, “which married dislike of cities to fervor against government.” Logic is not paramount when you have identified the enemy — folks who challenge the automobile-dominated suburban way of life.
Upending social status
The counterculture of the 1960s, which grew out of bohemian culture, “upended the ranking of social status,” Ross explains. “Cool outranked square; authenticity displaced wealth; old houses and old clothes were better than new.” The hipsters, as disrespected as they are in some quarters, have considerable status among the young.
Urbanists have violated the status rules of sprawl, and have often done so on suburbia’s home turf. Familiar status markers, e.g., big lots and setbacks, are gone in new urban places. And the market is paying a premium for new urban communities, which may explain some of the resentment these communities have encountered.
“At the heart of New Urbanism was a root and branch rejection of the doctrines that created suburbia,” Ross says while identifying the practical difficulties that encumbered new urbanist developers: “The builders of new mixed-use areas were carried forward on a current of popular demand, but they swam with weights tied to their ankles. Only after a safe passage through treacherous waters of negotiations and approvals could they put a shovel in the ground. Along the way they invariably had to compromise urbanist visions to meet the demands of traffic engineers, zoning boards, and suburban neighbors.”
Ross covers still more fertile ground. One chapter identifies five patterns of governance that perpetuate sprawl. He also criticizes historic preservation policies as the third pillar of suburban land tenure, working with zoning and private covenants to “embalm communities” in the present state. Ross’s ideas here may be controversial, but he recognizes legitimate purposes of historic preservation and calls for specific reforms.
The psychological motivations for spread-out development suggest particular strategies for reversing the trend. Urbanists, smart growth proponents, transit and complete streets advocates, and others can learn an immense amount from Dead End.
Dead End: Suburban Sprawl and the Rebirth of American Urbanism, Oxford University Press, 2014. Hardcover, 256 pp. $29.95.
See more coverage of Dead End in the March-April issue: Political strategies for smart growth, The politics of Lean, Form-based coding and democratic urbanism, and Sprawl repair challenges and opportunities.
Robert Steuteville is executive director and editor of Better! Cities & Towns, dedicated to communications, competence, and coalitions for better cities and towns.
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