by Jane Jacobs
Wouldn’t you think the city fathers would want to understand what makes our area successful and learn from it? Or failing such creative curiosity, that they would at least cherish it?
Obviously they do not.
However, so long as we recognize this, there is no reason to despair of our future. The Village will deteriorate only if we let City Hall take care of things with one short-sighted expediency after another, and await the sure sequel to that: the surgery of Dr. Moses.
POTENTIAL ALLIES
In our efforts to forestall the wrong things happening and to win the right things, it would be useful if we had the help of two potential allies who perhaps do not understand how much stake they have in the stability of the Village. One is the owners of the new apartment houses which have been spurting up. In March, Daniel Rose, the builder of some of them, spoke here and told us the Village was fated to become largely an area of high-rent apartments with a transient population. This of course is one of the classic steps toward deterioration. You can see the sad, final stages of this process in several parts of the city. Mr. Rose paid tribute to the magnetism of Washington Square, but said the Village is so popular with tenants because of convenient transportation. Nonsense. If transportation were the governing factor, East Harlem, 12 minutes from the Grand Central Area and with great bargains in land, would be burgeoning with new private construction. It hasn’t had one stick since 1942. Chelsea would be booming. No. The fact is, we have a better mousetrap down here. The new apartment-house owners would do well to realize they are in on a good thing, and see to it that the environment in which their tenants like to bathe does not go down the drain.
PRETTY COY
The other potential ally is New York University, which is part and parcel of the Village but apt to be pretty coy about it when anything “controversial” like the highway through the Square comes up. NYU ought to take a good look at the horrible problems of institutions in some other parts of the city, whose neighborhoods have rotted around them. It ought to be every bit as sensitive to danger signs, of which there are now a number, and every bit as eager to foster our wondrous combination of variety and stability, as the Greenwich Village Association or the Washington Square Association. Purely for its own self-interest. NYU can ask Columbia—which is now bitterly discovering that redevelopment leaves a lot unsolved—or the Manhattan School of Music, or City College, whether an intimate concern for its neighborhood is worthwhile.
The chief means of preserving the Village and improving it consist of:
First, zoning to retain our scale, our variety, and the wonderful flexibility which make the Village so successful an incubator of the arts and business;
Second, traffic control to keep us from being destroyed by traffic plans gone completely antisocial;
Third, judicious rebuilding to mend the wear and tear of time and use;
Fourth, careful siting and design of public facilities to make most sense for the community.
Constructive, creative use of zoning, as suggested by Albert Mayer at the first of these meetings, and traffic control are more important to our future than everything else put together.*3
These are the means, but the citizens of the Village, with or without the two allies I have mentioned, are going to have to think how to put these means to work for our good. Nobody else will. Councilman Stanley Isaacs, speaking to the Inter-School committee of this area, gave the recipe: Agree on what you want, and use every pressure, rational and emotional, to get it. There is no other recipe.*4
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*1 Drs. Wiley and Moses are T. T. Wiley (1908–99) and, of course, Robert Moses (1888–1981). Wiley served as New York City’s first traffic commissioner between 1949 and 1961. Moses has figured in many stories of Jacobs’s life as her bête noire. Variously head of slum clearance, parks, construction, and planning projects of all sorts in both New York City and New York State over the course of his long career, he was probably best known for his role as head of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority. The “outrageous plan” mentioned here was to extend Fifth Avenue south through Washington Square Park, encircling its iconic arch in a traffic circle.
*2 As Jacobs prepared these comments, Robert Moses was involved in a closely covered feud with Albert Cole, the federal Housing and Home Finance Agency administrator responsible for approving federal funds for urban renewal projects. Jacobs and her audience would have been reading about it in a series of New York Times articles that year. Cole, upset by revelations of scandal in New York’s urban renewal projects, was withholding funds from the Lincoln Square project that included Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. He didn’t like the way that Moses preselected the developers for urban renewal projects without competitive bidding, and he was spooked by rising clamor over the social costs of relocation on urban renewal sites. Moses still enjoyed much support, however, and by August, a behind-the-scenes campaign by Lincoln Square’s many supporters, from the Rockefeller family to a host of union heads, business executives, religious leaders, bankers, and city officials, forced Cole to relent. For more on Lincoln Square, see Samuel Zipp’s Manhattan Projects (pp. 157–249).
*3 Albert Mayer (1897–1981) was a planner and architect, well known for his interest in modern housing and his master planning efforts at Chandigarh, a new town in India eventually designed by Le Corbusier. Mayer was an unorthodox modernist. He and Jacobs probably met in East Harlem, where they both assisted the social workers of Union Settlement House in their efforts to assuage the impact of public housing on the neighborhood. Zipp, Manhattan Projects (324–50).
*4 Stanley Isaacs (1882–1962) was a New York City politician and a longtime member of the City Council. An outspoken advocate on housing issues, in 1951 he joined Councilman Earl Brown in drafting and passing a bill making discrimination in publicly assisted housing a crime in New York. In 1957, his Sharkey-Brown-Isaacs bill also outlawed discrimination in private housing. In the mid-1950s, he was one of the first politicians to distance himself from Robert Moses and publicize the trauma suffered by those relocated from clearance sites.
Metropolitan Government
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ARCHITECTURAL FORUM, AUGUST 1957
In spite of a potent grass-roots-and-town-meeting folklore, the U.S. has become a nation of metropoli; very peculiar metropoli with problems that are something new—at least in degree—under the sun. Sprawling over municipal lines, township lines, school district lines, county lines, even state lines, our 174 metropolitan areas are a weird mélange of 16,210 separate units of government. The Chicago metropolitan area, one of the prize examples of fragmentation, has about a thousand contiguous or overlapping local government units. But the problem is similar everywhere: how does the metropolitan area (which lacks governmental entity) contend with urgent and massive problems of a metropolitan nature, armed with a cross-purpose jackstraw heap of local sovereignties representing genuinely clashing interests?*1
The metropolitan problems—monstrous traffic, missing or bankrupt transit, incompatible land uses, unbalanced land uses with their sequel of unbalanced tax structures, transformation of old core cities into racial and economic ghettos, pollution of air and water, and a host of others—are not new in kind. But they have become abruptly massive and urgent during the past ten years because we have had a phenomenal growth of metropolitan population and this has coincided with the phenomenal scatteration made possible by the automobile. These problems will become still more massive as the present metropolitan area populations of about 96 million increase by an estimated 54 million in the next eighteen years.
Jigsaw government: The Cleveland metropolitan area, with sixty-odd municipalities, cannot plan its waterfront rationally, nor can it distribute the cost of its services fairly. This typically fragmented metropolis is now merging into two other metropolitan areas, also jigsaw puzzles.
Cumulatively, the number, size, and complexity of the metropolitan problems add up to a metropolitan crisis, as set forth in la
st month’s Forum.*2 Looked at another way, they also add up to one of the greatest adventures in inventive self-government that any people has ever had a chance at.Governmentally, we have never really come to full grips with the fact of cities, and this is a root of our trouble.
Governmentally, we have never really come to full grips with the fact of cities, and this is a root of our trouble. Our governmental structure is based on static units of territory, rather than on dynamic units of populations. Our states, divided into their revealingly named counties, are an organizational heritage from feudal territorial war lords who fitted the city into their scheme of things as a special, chartered “exception.” It is still an “exception” theoretically, although the ancient legal form of the city and its physical reality began to part company half a century ago, when the early suburbanites hop-skipped along the railroad lines out in the county.
But it would be folly to jump to the conclusion that the states, and the cities’ positions within them, represent a troublesome archaism necessarily. The American political genius has consisted in the ability to take the instruments at hand and evolve them to new purposes as needed. It is quite possible that the salvation of our fragmented metropoli will be found in the existing states, rather than in the creation of new layers of “supercity” metropolitan government, an idea now intellectually fashionable.
In any event, the first thing to understand about metropolitan government is that it is going to be dealt with not by abstract logic or elegance of structure, but in a combination of approaches by trial, error and immense experimentation in a context of expediency and conflicting interests. Whatever we arrive at, we shall feel our way there.
THE APPROACHES
In broad terms, there are three possible approaches to metropolitan government and one impossible approach.
The possible approaches are: 1) much greater extension and evolution of present ad hoc devices such as special districts, authorities, compacts, contracts, and taxation ingenuities; 2) greater dependence on the federal government for the required money and hence for the required decisions and authority; and 3) federation of governmental units within metropolitan areas; such a joint government might be a council, or it might be a decentralized agency of the state, and the local units would surrender sovereignty over certain problems.
The impossible approach is consolidation of municipalities within metropolitan areas, making the metropolitan area one big city, at least within state lines.*3 It is well to deal with this idea first and at some length because it shows, in sharpest relief, many of the limitations and complexities that apply to the other approaches too.
CONSOLIDATION: IMPOSSIBLE
Consolidation is impossible, first, as a pragmatic fact, because the citizenry of most of the units concerned strongly oppose it. Annexation, for example, has very lean pickings nowadays. Last year no cities other than Houston, Mobile, Dallas and El Paso annexed so much as 10 sq.mi. Among annexations by 348 other municipalities having a population of 10,000 or more, the average was three-fifths of a square mile. And these figures, so pathetic against immense urban scatteration, are the best since the war.
The bigger the metropolis, as a rule, the more ardently its outliers will defend themselves against being “swallowed.” This fear, while possibly selfish and shortsighted, is not imaginary, as one illustration of a common situation shows. In Philadelphia, the city government has to contend with the problem of “the suburbs in the city,” areas within the city of low density housing which the city needs to intersperse with higher density zoning because of population pressures and costs of services. Although the citizenry in the “suburbs” involved has been vociferous and politically active in its opposition, it has consistently been defeated because it is a minority voice in the city as a whole. Conflict of precisely this nature, in many different guises, is the hard core of the whole metropolitan government problem.
Political scientist Edward C. Banfield comments: “The problem is not, as many seem to think, merely one of creating organization for effective planning and administration. It is also—and perhaps primarily—one of creating or of maintaining organization for the effective management of conflict, especially of conflict arising from the growing cleavage of race and class. These needs may be incompatible to some extent….Indeed it may be that area-wide planning and administration would of necessity heighten conflicts by raising questions which can only be settled by bitter struggle. Conflict is not something to be avoided at all costs. It may be well, nevertheless, to consider whether there are not decisive advantages in organizational arrangements…which, although handicapping or entirely frustrating some important undertakings, nevertheless serve to insulate opposed interests and to protect them from each other.”*4
Aside from being politically impossible—and in the Banfield view perhaps politically undesirable—consolidation may also be illusory as a planning solution for the following reasons, which have their influence on all schemes of metropolitan government. It presupposes more or less neat and manageable arrangements of core cities surrounded by satellites. However, there are now eighteen growing “urban regions” in America where two or more standard metropolitan areas overlap or adjoin. Where we had wheel or star-shaped urban structures, we are now getting amorphous masses. In even the largest of these regions, the core-city-satellite concept still does have validity for many purposes, especially the journey to work, but it has little validity in solving other problems such as general traffic, air pollution, water supply. The logical “jurisdictions” of such problems do not even necessarily coincide with each other, nor is the territory involved today likely to be the same in twenty years or even five years.
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THEN THERE IS THE entire problem of size, workable size for a specific governmental function. The problem of the school district too small for efficiency, or of the suburb with its tax base and child population wildly out of whack, is well known. On the other hand, the huge New York City Board of Education, with more than 900,000 children to provide for, tries hard to plan but also has poor success with it, probably because it is just too big. Decisions on sites and buildings, for instance, are necessarily made so remotely from the “communities” intimately involved, and with such an absence of natural give-and-take and explanation, that the result is a system of ukases from above, countered by frenzied pressures from below, with planning lost in the shuffle. Execution of planning, generally, suffers many defeats by dealing in units of great size, as well as by being confined in units too small. In a unit of very large population, departments and bureaus, each an empire in miniature, require increasing layers of coordination and mayoral assistants constantly engaged in attempting, often vainly, to pull things together.
Size also involves the entire problem of local responsibility and the principle, probably inseparable from vigorous self-government, that any division of government should be kept as close to the people as function permits.
In short, consolidation does not answer the situation: if the metropolitan problems themselves are a fearsome snarl, the problem entailed in going at them make a fearful snarl too.
AD HOC DEVICES
How much promise is there in such ad hoc devices as special districts, authorities, compacts, contracts, and taxation ingenuities? (This we have called the first of the “possible” approaches.) A great deal of invention is now being spent on unraveling the metropolitan snarl one knot at a time. For instance, “special districts” created to deal with problems that cross governmental lines are by far the most rapidly growing category of governmental unit. Since 1942, 6,124 new special districts have been created. California, with 330 municipalities (and 1,841 school districts), has 1,652 special districts. Illinois has 1,785. Not all special districts are metropolitan, but most are. Their ancestor was the Boston metropolitan sewage district created in 1889. Many are authorities with independent borrowing power, modeled after the Port of New York Authority, which was created in 1921.
Among dozens
of other inventions for attacking this facet or that of fiscal or physical disability are ungraduated city income taxes (applying to suburbanites too), county home rule (for metropolitan areas within a county), state taboos on new incorporations in the sphere of a core city, and planning powers for the core city extending a few miles beyond its boundaries.
One of the strangest inventions is the Lakewood Plan, named for a Los Angeles suburb of 75,000, which in 1954 incorporated and contracted with Los Angeles County for almost all its services. This scheme, hugely popular, has triggered 11 incorporations in the county since, and detailed price lists have been worked out for buying services, such as $3.63 for each health call; $7 a day for women in jail, $3.50 for men; $73,000 per year for one around-the-clock police patrol car. These communities even contract with the county for technical services in tax assessment and collection, planning and zoning and civil service administration. They have made headway in solving the problem of duplicated governmental overhead and inefficiency, but these communities still retain their autonomy, set their own policy—notably zoning—a point to keep in mind.
Looking at current devices as a pattern, two rather alarming motifs stand out. The first is the effect of the “special district” approach. “The great disadvantage of special districts and authorities lies in the cumulative effect of their use,” comments political scientist Victor Jones. “One special district may be of no import, but ultimately their use will lead to functional disintegration. This is a problem of politics, of control as well as of administration, and will force us to reorder our values or start all over again to build a community from functional fragments.”