American Urban Planning: From Inception to Modern Day
The layout of the modern city is both unseen and omnipresent in the lives of every American regardless of where they live, work, or shop. Few stop to consider why a freeway is located where it is, or why one neighborhood has a subway station but another does not, or why detached single-family homes became the dominant form of housing in the mid-twentieth century. Our nation’s urban framework not only surrounds us, but it defines us and, without our noticing it, controls the decisions we make on a daily basis.
The roots of modern urban planning have been traced to Professor Reinhard Baumeister of Karlsruhe, Germany. Writing in 1876, Baumeister noted the concentration of industry in nineteenth-century cities, and the impact of non-compatible neighboring land uses. Baumeister’s “proposal was to craft a municipal instrument that would legally cement the economics-based congregations and mandate a greater separation between industry and dwelling quarters, since industry posed greater hazards to human health than ever before.” Frankfurt became the first city in the world to develop a comprehensive zoning act in 1891.
Twenty-five years later, New York became the first U.S. city to adopt municipal zoning. Previously, “cities mostly regulated what could be built through nuisance laws. If someone didn’t like how their neighbor was using their property, they could haul them to trial and let a judge decide what to do about it.” Restrictions on different building heights for residential and commercial areas were also used by cities to regulate development.
In 1926, The Supreme Court ruled that municipal zoning was constitutional in Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., even when it substantially reduced a property owner’s land value. Four years earlier, Euclid, Ohio, used the then-revolutionary practice of zoning to fight the spread of industry from nearby Cleveland into the mostly residential village by imposing height and use restrictions on the land within its boundaries. Ambler Realty, which had planned to industrially develop its property, sued. Writing for the majority, Justice George Sutherland found that municipal zoning was a permissible exercise of a state’s police power. Applying the law of nuisance, he wrote, “[a] nuisance may be merely a right thing in the wrong place — like a pig in the parlor instead of the barnyard. If the validity of the legislative classification for zoning purposes be fairly debatable, the legislative judgment must be allowed to control.”
Urban planners began to take a more comprehensive approach to development during President Roosevelt’s New Deal. Under the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act, the United States Resettlement Administration designed three “green” towns in 1935 — Greenbelt, Maryland; Greendale, Wisconsin; and Greenhills, Ohio. These public cooperative communities were intended to be self-sufficient and provide affordable housing to the expanding federal workforce. As much a response to demand for new housing as a social experiment, these towns promised residents the opportunity to “walk to the center city without crossing a street, buy groceries at cooperative supermarkets, medicines at cooperative pharmacies and gas at cooperative service stations.”
The ideals these cities were based upon — affordability, walkable streets, and mixed residential and retail development, would quickly be relegated to history as the federal government began to promote private homeownership over all else. As Molly O’Meara Sheehan wrote in City Limits: Putting the Brakes on Sprawl, “A new government agency for home loans was created in 1938, and revamped in 1968 as a private-public enterprise, the Federal National Mortgage Association (now called Fannie Mae), to buy home loans from banks that originate them, providing fresh supply of money for housing. By refusing to back loans in central city neighborhoods and favoring loans in new suburban developments, the agency helped distort urban development.”
Following World War II, pent-up demand for new housing for GIs returning from the battlefield and starting families was met by generous Veteran Administration loans and a new type of housing development: the subdivision. 11 million veterans returned to civilian life between 1945 and the early 1950s. The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act created the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)’s “home loan guarantee and, later, insurance for veterans to purchase, build, or improve homes.” In just three years, 2.5 million new homes were built, primarily in the nation’s fast-expanding suburbs. Eventually, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and VA would provide mortgages for 11 million new homes. For returning GIs, These mortgages were usually cheaper than the cost to rent.
The Housing Act of 1949 was a landmark piece of legislation that emphasized urban slum clearance, increased the FHA’s budget for mortgage insurance, and funded the construction of 810,000 new public housing units. Federal administrators who came of age during the New Deal and military buildup of the World War showed a preference for one-size fits all solutions to national problems and housing was no exception. Instead of localized solutions to housing shortages, they promoted tract housing, which rapidly turned open fields at the edge of cities into new suburbs of similarly constructed houses. William Levitt, and his company Levitt & Sons, was the first private developer to understand the implication of the federal government’s new preference for affordable suburban housing. Within five years he built 17,447 homes for 70,000 people on Long Island. In the community’s early years, 80% of the men commuted to jobs in Manhattan.
Even in this context, the modern suburb might never have developed without a piece of legislation that, officially, had nothing to do with housing. The 1956 National Interstate and Defense Highways Act authorized the construction of 41,000 miles of high-speed surface roadways connecting American cities within 10 years. At the same time, rates of private car ownership exploded. From 1950 to 1990, car ownership among residents of the 58 largest U.S. metropolitan areas increased 80%, while the geographic area of those cities increased 305%. Americans began to use interstates not only to travel between cities, but also to travel between jobs in city centers and houses in outlying suburbs. By 1950, suburbs were growing at a pace ten times that of city centers.
As this was happening, the Public Housing Administration produced numerous high-rise apartments modeled on Le Corbusier’s Tower in the Park concept in cities across the county. The Wendell O. Pruitt Homes and William Igoe Apartments, commonly known as Pruitt-Igoe, a housing project built in St. Louis, exemplifies the rise and fall of public housing during the 1950s and 1960s. They “opened to great fanfare in 1954. The St. Louis Housing Authority advertised a paradise of ‘bright new buildings with spacious grounds,’ indoor plumbing, electric lights, fresh plastered walls and other ‘conveniences expected in the 20th century.’” In less than 20 years they would be imploded on national television, their names synonymous with gang violence, poor construction, and urban decay.
At the same time, minorities were being excluded from the newly expanding suburbs through the practice of “redlining” which limited mortgage and insurance options available in low-income neighborhoods. Richard Rothstein, a Distinguished Fellow of the Economic Policy Institute and a senior fellow (emeritus) at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund told NPR in 2017, “The term ‘redlining’ … comes from the development by the New Deal, by the federal government of maps of every metropolitan area in the country. And those maps were color-coded by first the Home Owners Loan Corp. and then the Federal Housing Administration and then adopted by the Veterans Administration, and these color codes were designed to indicate where it was safe to insure mortgages. And anywhere where African-Americans lived, anywhere where African-Americans lived nearby were colored red to indicate to appraisers that these neighborhoods were too risky to insure mortgages.” The FHA required banks to avoid lending in racially diverse communities and encouraged discriminatory zoning practices. From 1945 to 1959, less than 2% of new federally insured home loans went to African Americans.
The effect of redlining lives on today. Research has shown that the air in minority and impoverished communities is significantly worse than in white communities. Robert Bullard, a distinguished professor at Texas Southern University told the Washington Post that, “the elevated air pollution disparities we see today between Black Americans and White Americans have their roots in systemic racism endorsed, practiced and legitimated by the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation some eight decades ago.”
By the 1990s, 83% of Americans stated a preference for a single-family detached house in an outer suburb compared to a townhouse of the same price in an urban setting and two-thirds of the American housing stock is detached-single family. Today, Levittowns have been replaced by suburban McMansions, and “the rich and the poor live in separate municipalities, each with its own local government and budget. As people have moved to suburban areas that often exclude low-income people, inner cities have been left with a large population of people in poverty. These central city government thus have shrinking tax revenue to address expanding social problem.”
The transformation of the American city was hardly inevitable — many foresaw the long-term negative effects a mass migration to the suburbs would have. In 1947, Thomas Harris MacDonald, who had headed the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads in the 1920s, told the American Association of State Highway Officials they should end “the preferential use of private automobile [and] promote the patronage or mass transit . . . [U]ness this reversal can be accomplished . . . the traffic problems of the larger cities may become well nigh insoluble.” President Dwight Eisenhower, the grandfather of the interstate highway system, envisioned freeways connecting cities but avoiding running through urban areas. When he passed a major road construction project cutting through northwest Washington DC on his way to Camp David in 1959, he “was shocked to learn that the highway project was part of his interstate system.”
Some post-war private developers attempted to build full communities, incorporating residential, commercial, retail, and industrial areas. Reston, Virginia, built by Robert Simon in the late 1960s, is a good example of one of these developments. Designed to house 75,000 people 18 miles from Washington DC within 15 years, Reston’s plans included recreational facilities, commercial and industrial zones, a library, museum, theater, and hospital, all connected by roads, walking, and bicycle paths. El Dorado Hills, California, and Waipio, Hawaii were also developed along similar lines, but planned communities with both commercial and residential developments remained rare.
Municipalities, too, have tried to fight back against sprawl. According to Silvia Pettem, writing for the Boulder Municipal Magazine, in 1967, Boulder, Colorado, concerned about rapid growth and development, “became the first city in the United States to implement a sale tax to acquire and maintain open space.” Portland has historically been the national leader in sustainable growth. Its urban growth boundary “redirected growth back into the cit[y] instead of onto farmland, emphasizing density over trophy houses — and helping to empower communities. . . . Nowadays, in new developments, shops are built at street level with apartments and condos above, reflecting a European model. Environmental sensitivity has become part of Portland’s social fabric.”
Courts have intervened to prevent some of the most egregious examples of exclusionary zoning. The New Jersey Supreme Court took an aggressive stance in Southern Burlington County NAACP v. Mt. Laurel (Mt. Laurel I) when it ordered municipalities in the state to ensure minorities had a realistic opportunity to acquire housing. The court was critical of minimum house and lot sizes, prohibitions on multi-family housing, and the maximum number of bedrooms which produced “an acute national housing shortage. . . . The brunt of this shortage is, of course, borne by persons with low or moderate incomes.” However, the Supreme Court weighed in two years later in Village of Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp., where it held that a prohibition on multifamily-housing was permissible because it had been uniformly applied at was not created with “a discriminatory purpose,” even though the outcome was discriminatory.
In 1998, Vice President Al Gore acknowledge the historic failures of the federal government’s approach to urban planning and launched a “comprehensive Livability Agenda to help communities across America grow in ways that ensure a high quality of life and strong, sustainable economic growth.” The agenda focused on traffic, preserving green space, and regional collaboration. The Republican Mayor of Indianapolis, Stephen Goldsmith, agreed, writing “Federal urban policy drives wealth out of the cities. In fact, if we specifically designed a ‘suburban policy’ to drive investment out of our cities, it would look a lot like the current system.”
Nonetheless, single-family detached homes remain the dominant form of newly constructed housing in the United States. COVID significantly reduced public transit usage as employers switched to remote work. The United States’ largest transit network-the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York City-lost more than half of its subway riders in just a few months. Affordable housing also remains extremely controversial. While the Mt. Laurel decision technically remains in force, it has been limited to only those in “growth areas.” Communities may also avoid its legal remedies by demonstrating they have satisfied an amorphous “fair share” doctrine. In 1988, the federal court system weighted in on affordable housing in Huntington Branch NAACP v. Huntington which held that a violation of the Civil Rights Act could be established without proof of discriminatory intent and explicitly ordered “the Town to rezone the 14.8 acre Matinecock Court site located at the corner of Elwood and Pulaski Roads in Huntington Township to R-3M status.” Three and a half decades later, ground still has not been broken, and 1,480 people have joined the “Stop Matinecock Court” Facebook group. Change may be coming — the Huntington Town Board voted 4–1 in December 2021 to authorize the construction of the project.
New York City has implemented innovative new incentivizes for private developers to include affordable housing in new buildings. The city allows larger buildings and provides tax abatements and bond financing to developers who agree to set aside approximately 20% of their units for low and moderate-income residents. If rezoning will “substantially increase potential housing capacity in strong markets, the City will require a portion of the new housing developed to be permanently affordable to low- or moderate-income households in order to ensure diverse and inclusive communities.”
The truth is, there is no panacea for the challenges facing the modern American city. Solving one problem, like urban sprawl by enacting greenbelts, can worsen another, such as housing affordability. Redeveloping an urban neighborhood or trailer park can displace a historic community. Shuttering industry and manufacturing might be good for the environment, but harms a city’s workforce and tax base. A mixed approach is necessary to ensure cities remain viable.
There are some easy solutions. Pairing urban growth boundary restrictions with denser housing or taller height restrictions may ease some of the burden. Zoning rules permissive of “granny flats,” backyard cottages, or basement units can increase the number of households on a lot without changing a neighborhood’s character. Using a flexible approach to Green Belts may also limit the rise in home values. By managing, but not prohibiting, growth on the periphery, a city may be able to achieve a viable medium of reduced sprawl, but also affordable housing. Promoting clean, high-tech industry will protect jobs.
From Bangor, Maine, to Honolulu, Hawaii, the modern American city is a unique amalgamation of historic trends, state and federal policy, and commercial development. Of those who played an outsized role in their development, few likely would have predicted the long-term influence of their decisions. Though they may have failed to recognize the gravity at the time, Professor Baumeister, Justice Sutherland, William Levitt, and President Eisenhower’s choices continue to shape the lives of every American.
Nicholas Monck is a graduate of the University of Colorado Law School. He also received an Energy, Environmental, and Natural Resources Law and Policy Certificate and a Graduate Renewable Energy Certificate from the University of Colorado. He has previously written about urban planning in the University of Colorado Law Review. Opinions expressed are his own and do not represent the views of his employer.
