Western Suburbanization
Let me be clear about my approach to western suburbs: western suburbs differ from eastern Big City suburbs in several remarkable ways. Suburbs are not mere clones of each other—an important element of this history. To me the uniqueness of Western suburbs is that if I ask the reader to name a suburb of Phoenix, Denver or Los Angeles, I’m likely to get a correct response. Generally, lots of people are aware of western suburbs, if only because they are large—distinctive, and defined on their own terms. I am less sure that I would get a similar quality response if the cities were Boston, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, or even Chicago. With New York City, the answer might be Westchester (county), New Jersey, or Long Island (at least two counties). The identity of eastern suburbs seems to be tied to the central city—less so western suburbs. Why?
The simplest difference is a critical one—each region’s suburbs developed in different time periods reflecting different transportation modes (street car and automobile). So they are not going to look the same. Secondly, western suburbs, as we shall shortly discover, did not necessarily acquire a critical mass by attracting residents from a central city; western suburbs. During the explosive war years especially, western suburbs attracted a ton of first time residents from elsewhere. Few of these newcomers ever spent a day in the central city. Western suburbs could garner residents from eastern suburbs or second/third tier cities. The factories were built in the suburbs and did not move from the central city. All this is quite different than eastern suburbs whose residents were former central city residents. Some western suburbanites never wanted what they perceived as the “mixed blessings” of a congested, older area governed by city elites and long-time residents not at all sympathetic to newcomers. Western suburbs, therefore, grew simultaneously alongside their central cities—with the former attracting fewer residents but residents that consciously chose to live in a suburb.
Thirdly, for the most part western central cities were located at distances considerably far from their nearest competing central city. Eastern metro areas, despite the label of sprawling, are noticeably more compact than the western metros. The clash of close-by competing central city hinterlands did not inhibit a western suburb’s sprawling, horizontal expansion. If anything, greater distances permitted stronger, more autonomous western suburbs to develop. Finally, the typical eastern suburb expanded as affluent classes drove across a central city periphery to acquire a lifestyle, lower taxes and housing reflective of its wealth—leaving behind poorer residents, often newcomers from the Great Migration. Not so with western cities that attracted a previously socialized native population of a particular age, the Depression Years cohort, looking for a job to end Depression-induced poverty. The migration of Afro-Americans to the west was noticeably less than to the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic cities. Hispanic minorities in this postwar era were unevenly distributed, and sometimes settled in greater numbers in the suburbs (Tucson and Albuquerque, for example). The demographics of western and eastern suburbs were somewhat different—maybe less exaggerated would be more precise.
Having said western suburbs developed in a different time and place than their eastern predecessors, is there such a thing as a distinctive “western suburb” (or for that matter central city as well)? Carl Abbott makes the case that western cities and suburbs were different and characterized by different land use patterns from which they have developed a different central city-suburb relationship. He also argues that the path and pace of suburban development is, in itself, different from the East and Midwest. In broad strokes he states that “Over the last half-century [he writes in 1990], we have slowly come to realize that Western cities can best be understood as characteristic products of twentieth century America …. as clear expressions of new technologies of movement and communication. They cluster straight-forwardly along their highways.”[1]
As Abbott points out, popular and professional consensus in the postwar pre-1960 world often saw western cities as either “the forerunner of the urban world of tomorrow”—or as “God’s own junkyard”, the “non-city”. My sense is Abbott is fundamentally correct—perception of western cities was most affected by one’s reaction to the car and the highway, by preference for density or decentralization. One stresses the individual, the other the community—and that is one of the fundamental distinctions between our Progressivism and Privatism. If so, we should not be surprised that even western cities will exhibit a Progressive and a Privatist version—between northern California/Pacific Northwest and southern California and the southwest—with Denver and the Great Plains somewhere in the middle.
Two introductory observations relevant to our first discussion of western suburbs are that whatever the variant of western suburb/central city evolution, western cities (1) shared the four dynamics mentioned in the first two paragraphs, and (2) these four dynamics usually played out to permit a decentralization of the metropolis [into] multiple independent centers—a multi-centered or multi-nuclear metropolitan area[2]. Western central cities and their suburbs have moved along a different path than their Eastern and Midwestern forbearers. We can observe from western cities from Lubbock Texas, to Las Vegas, to Los Angeles that these cities are built around the automobile which, at root, provides individual control over personal travel. Such cities are linear (sprawled if one must), dominated by commercial strips and a network of shopping centers—each an island in a sea of parking lots.
Taken together, Lubbock, Las Vegas and Los Angeles offer consistent lessons about the form and visual character of most Western cities. They are vernacular environments that have responded to the tastes and demands of middle Americans, with only sporadic and often post facto attention to comprehensive planning and urban design. These ordinary cities are linear rather than centered and hierarchical. The ideal model has no privileged locations comparable to the downtowns of turn-of-the-century American cities or the public centers of historic cities. With the automobile reducing the time and inconvenience of distance, each district has approximate equality of position along the axis or within the grid …. ‘the freeway is totally egalitarian’.[3]
Snapshots of Western Postwar Suburbanization
The easiest jumping off point for discussion on postwar western suburbanization is World War II war production (which caused explosive population growth in a few short years) produced a distinctive physical pattern among western cities—a physical pattern with which postwar western central cities had to confront a t war’s end. The rapid expansion of war production capacity i.e. new factory construction had mostly occurred beyond existing central city boundaries where land was cheap and regulation/time lost was light. The same was true of army bases and airports.
Makeshift housing and related commercial/industrial businesses developed alongside the new facilities. Transportation access and required infrastructure was inherent in new facility construction. Portland’s huge Vanport and Oakland’s San Lorenzo expansions testified to the potential size of these new developments. If deterioration and blight had destroyed the downtown core of most Eastern/Midwestern cities, war production had produced a physical chaos on the borders/peripheries of western cities. “Every metropolis that had experienced a wartime boom … had its hap-hazard trailer camps, strings of tract houses along unpaved streets, and knotted traffic jams at country crossroads. The immediate response was frequently based on the assumption of primacy for the central city”.[4]
County governments were usually rural, without capacity to government and the default to postwar suburban/periphery chaos was central city leadership. In the spirit of if one wants to get out of a hole, the best first step is to stop digging, western cities had to “impose order on suburban chaos by bringing new subdivisions under the control of the central city”—this became a central plank for business urban reformers who came to power in western cities in the postwar era[5]. Western central cities had two tools at their immediate disposal: metropolitan planning (and the provision of infrastructure) and annexation—both contained significant elements of economic development policy and strategy. The degree of use and the effectiveness of each by the individual central cities will provide an early sense of the variation in Progressive and Privatist central city/suburban policy systems.
Portland: Portland, whatever its internal politics, turned early on toward metropolitan planning. Finance Commissioner Ormond Bean, a former chair of the Oregon State Planning Board, consistently linked the hap-hazard sprawl to increased costs for Portland taxpayers. As early as 1944 Bean, at a meeting of the League of Oregon Cities, drove home the point that “sporadic, scattered and unregulated growth of municipalities and urban fringes has caused tremendous waste in money and resources. He called for legislation to create metropolitan planning agencies to provide for “orderly growth and development”. His ally, fellow city commissioner of Public Works, Bowes supported him. Bowes chaired a special committee in 1947 that “successfully urged the [state] legislature to provide for county planning commissions”. Both Bean and Bowes worked closely with Portland’s suburban counties and by 1952 came within a hair’s breadth of establishing a city/counties single planning board with consolidated staff—a planning commission with authority over three-fourths of Portland’s metropolitan area[6].
As the reader may remember from past sections in this chapter, most western central cities turned primarily to annexation. Friendly state legislatures, such as in Oklahoma, produced annexation legislation which facilitated easy and generally successful employment of this tool during the late forties and fifties. Oklahoma City, Phoenix, Albuquerque are each examples of intensive use of annexation to solve the immediate postwar urban fringe crisis. The huge expansion of central city boundaries in this period have become the principal factor that 1970’s and 1980’s economists would attribute to the decline of Eastern/Midwestern cities and the rise of the Sunbelt cities. Statistically, the two dynamics may well be highly correlated, but western postwar annexation was both more complex in its policy motivations, and, despite favorable state legislation constituted a “once in a lifetime” opportunity for western central cities.
The problem was that western population growth did not stop at the end of World War II. For better or worse, a good deal of people continued to move into unincorporated areas or suburban communities. Also, western cities were not invulnerable to losing residents to suburbs. As expansive as these annexations were, they could not keep up with periphery development. “If the 1950’s were years of successful expansion for many sunbelt cities, they were also the era when the balance between city and suburb began to tilt …. By the end of the 1950’s, or the beginning of the 1960’s, it was clear that the attractions of reform [central city] governments to hold residents in older neighborhoods, that the process of annexation had failed to keep pace with peripheral growth, and that decisions on regional service distribution had been inadequate to subordinate metropolitan growth patterns to central city needs”[7]. Say it another way, the suburbs attracted population that was increasingly resistant to attempts of central cities to annex them!
The success of the 1950’s annexation created its own seeds of failure. In Phoenix, during the 1960’s the suburban cities such as Scottsdale, Tempe, Glendale and Chandler put the kibosh on any further attempts by Phoenix to annex them. As Luckingham describes it, “Mesa boosters energetically pursued both industrial and residential growth. The city bought up water rights, promoted its downtown, and sought new businesses. Glendale offered a $ 20,000 bonus to the first citizen that could bring a 100,000 sq. ft. factor to town. Business and civic groups such as the East Valley Partnership, the West Valley Partnership and Phoenix Together gave lip service to regional cooperation, but competed for everything from sports facilities to educational institutions …”[8] Indeed, new suburbs, such as Del Webb’s Sun City exposed the intense and pervasive popular demand for the suburban lifestyle, On January 1, 1960 Webb opened up six model units for inspection. By the end of the weekend, an estimated 100,000 traipsed through and nearly 250 homes were sold. After 1961, Phoenix was successful in only one annexation during that decade.
Increasingly, suburbanites were using independent governmental units to defend their isolation from city residents and city problems, converting spatial distance into political and social distance. … As political scientist Oliver Williams [observed] that the proliferation of governmental entities within a metropolitan area allows residents to promote and preserve differences in lifestyles and values. The independent suburban municipality and the special service district can all be used to preserve attractive and low-density physical environments, residential segregation by economic class, and ethnic segregation of schools systems.[9]
Frankly, one is not too sure this could not have been said for pre-1920 eastern suburbanites. In any case, to better demonstrate the shift from annexation to suburban resistance during the fifties and sixties, a brief snapshot of Denver and its complex city-suburban metamorphous comes next.
Denver: The Denver Planning Commission was an active agency. As early as 1939, it had put together the Upper Platte River Regional Planning Commission (three counties) to put some order on its suburban counties. But when a ten member Denver Planning Commission delegation to the Urban Land Institute conference at MIT came back home warning the befuddled local residents that a “sinister disease” of decentralization was about to hit their city, Denver went into high gear to cope with its suburbanization. Even by that point Denver suburban growth rates were five times the central city rate. Denver quickly enacted a housing code to preserve the city’s attractiveness and stem the flight to suburbs. Not wasting any time, Denver annexed five square miles between 1941 and 1946. By that time, however, the three counties in the Upper Platte River RPC pulled out—upset at the lack of sensitivity of City planners to their needs. Metropolitan planning had suffered its first setback.
The real thorn in the suburbs’ butt was the Denver Water Board. Ever since its 1918 formation, the Board had been chintzy in allocating scarce water resources to locations outside the city perimeter. For a variety of good and bad reasons, the Board, which was appointed by the mayor and reflected the priorities of the Chamber business and real estate elites, felt threatened that suburban growth could result from its supplying suburban areas with water. By the time the business reform mayor, Quigg Newton, got control in the late forties, the Water Board was fairly independent and unresponsive to his initiatives.
By 1948 water was allocated only to those suburbs which in the judgment of the Water Board had adequate zoning and housing codes in place. The resentment of the suburbs, however, grew exponentially during the severe drought of the early fifties. Alleging it was necessary to preserve sufficient water resources for Denver, the Water Board “blue-lined” water allocations to suburban areas. By 1954-1955 the blue-lined suburban areas were rationing water. Suburban counties rejected the joint development of trans-mountain water in 1954 and that forced Denver to go it alone at a jaw-dropping $115 million cost. The blue line allocation system was kept in place until 1960. By then, however, several suburbs (Littleton, Englewood, Westminster and Aurora—who joined forces with Colorado Springs instead) had decided to go it alone and develop their own water. By 1962, the four county Denver metro areas had developed ten city water systems (in addition to Denver’s) and several dozen special water districts[10].
While all this was going on, Denver kept on annexing in a hundred small bits its periphery. Between 1941 and 1974 Denver doubled its size through annexation. It did not abandon metropolitan planning, however. But that tool was not at all successful. “The legacy of bitterness left by the water fights doomed most of the subsequent efforts to create regional service districts. In 1965, 1966, and 1967 Denver’s attempts to create regional government to administer six services failed in the state legislature. Sensing time was running out, and that the city was becoming politically isolated, Denver initiated a series of annexation efforts in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s … this land war brought on an overwhelming political reaction”[11]—the Poundstone Amendment. All in all a tale reminiscent of that told in Chapter 3 by Dilworth Richardson about pre-1900 New York City suburbs, Denver had galvanized suburban opposition to Denver expansion[12].
While outside the time period encompassed by this section, Denver’s city-suburban break point came in 1973-1974. Two laws passed at that time, the Poundstone Amendment and the Boundary Control Commission, cemented Denver’s suburban autonomy. The story behind the Poundstone Amendment offers additional insight into this development. Freda Poundstone reacted rather negatively when, in 1973, the Denver Supreme Court decided that Denver must desegregate its schools. The decision presumably drove more Denver citizens to the suburbs, but also had the effect of raising concerns by suburbanites who perceived themselves in danger of further Denver annexation. Freda was one of those concerned suburbanites. With no political experience, she did her best imitation of Jane Jacobs and convinced the surrounding suburbs and the state legislature to approve legislation which required the consent of the voters in the county in which an annexation was intended. Perhaps surprisingly, some in Denver believe the shock to Denver’s citizens that Poundstone had effectively shut down Denver’s expansion forced Denver citizens to look at themselves and forge a new identity and commence their own revitalization.
Los Angeles:
Wait a minute! Los Angeles is not a suburb! Could have fooled me. Los Angeles just never got the memo outlining how central city and suburbs were to evolve. But that doesn’t seem to have stunted her growth. Los Angeles, in terms of population at least (3.8 million), is America’s present day second “World Class”, First Tier city (having edged out Chicago for their honor in 1990). In 1900 its population slightly exceeded 100,000 (36th largest city in the nation); New York City in that year was 1st with a population of over 3.4 million. By 1940, Los Angeles’s population of 1.5 million was 5th; in 1960 3rd with 2.5 million (NYC 7.8 million). During the fifties, Los Angeles grew by 26% and in the sixties by 13%. In the postwar era, LA flooded into the San Fernando Valley which acquired the label “America’s Suburb”. The now-infamous “Leave it to Beaver” show (1957-1963) was filmed totally on the Los Angeles Universal set, the two houses used reflecting the Southern California suburban motif.
Los Angeles was a twentieth century growth machine–growth based on sprawl, decentralization and suburbs. “Growth Machine” was exactly how William Fulton[13] described Los Angeles–that and “fragmented metropolis”. These two concepts drove the twentieth century evolution of the West’s Queen of cities. City builders of Los Angeles (people like Huntington, Mulholland and Harry Chandler) were the tip of a small “cartel of powerful interests” that drew from the area’s distinctive political culture of Midwestern Privatist immigrants to create “the most effective growth machine(s) ever created“[14]. The core dynamos of Los Angeles’ growth machine were housing, real estate, control over transportation modalities, and infrastructure. The unplanned result was a metropolitan area of several counties stretching a hundred miles along the coast and a hundred miles deep into California’s interior. If ever a western city and suburb were simultaneous in their origin, it had to have been Los Angeles.
The result was a decentralized settlement pattern quite different from the industrial cities in the East and Midwest. Unlike almost every other city in the world, metropolitan Los Angeles did not grow by radiating from a single center. It appeared when many different centers blurred together. [Huntington’s Red Car bus system provided the region] a backbone, but made sprawl permanent by facilitating long-distance commuting. Soon the automobile began to fill in the gaps… a huge real estate infrastructure emerged. The modern homebuilding industry was practically invented in Los Angeles. So, ironically enough, was modern zoning, originally promoted by local subdivides as a tool to ensure high-quality (and high-profit) development. As early as the 1920’s, traffic engineers began working on designs for the freeway system.[15]
Fulton is describing the Privatist heaven, but the workings of that Privatist growth machine created a series of interrelated fragmented cities, counties and unincorporated areas–“a multi-headed beast with no center“, a central city of Los Angeles with a weak downtown and a series of waterfront economic centers spread the length and the breath of the city itself. Commercial strips, a lot deep and backed up to sprawling residential neighborhoods, predominated. During these years the famous electrified rail system disappeared year by year—replaced by even more freeways. The economy was a unplanned and uncoordinated masterpiece of diversified gazelles: technology, Hollywood, aerospace, agriculture, international trade (the City of Los Angeles Port and Long Beach Port which combined are the nation’s fourth largest port by tonnage), business services–and a robust construction-home building-finance sector that consumed ever more land to provide homes, shops and jobs for a seemingly endless stream of in-migrants and immigrants. By the end of the 1980’s Orange County, the next county over from Los Angeles county, the suburb of the Los Angeles metropolitan area, had a “downtown larger than San Francisco, and its own suburbs an hour even farther away from central Los Angeles“.[16] During this era, Disneyworld opened (1955), and the Dodgers (1958) and Angels (1961) came to town. In 1965 the Watts riot resulted in thirty-four deaths and one thousand injuries. Smog defined the City[17].
At the end of the postwar period (early 1970’s) a sub-Policy World “Los Angeles School” emerged and attempted to characterize and understand what they saw outside their windows. “They pointed to the decentralization of the metropolis, its multiple independent centers, its international connections, and its shifting employment patterns as models of future urban development …. Los Angeles [was] the paradigmatic expression of late capitalist industrialization, urbanization and social life”[18]. Reyner Banham’s 1971 book, Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies, summarized his take on Los Angeles as seventy miles of “surfurbia” make Los Angeles “the greatest-City-on-the-Shore-in-the-world”. To him Los Angeles “was structured around personal control over personal travel (“autopian freeways”) in which Wilshire Boulevard became the first linear downtown and neighborhoods were defined by freeways. “Life in Los Angeles means choice and circulation within an open environment that is spatially and perhaps even socially egalitarian”.[19] The New York Times in 1955, however, described it as a “violently aggressive organism”. Goodness! How did all this happen?
As such Fulton conceives as Los Angeles as “the anti-city“. Its residents and its culture were anti-urban–a central city with a suburban mentality and culture. Contained within its annexation-imposed boundaries were numerous decentralized residential areas each of which permitted considerable perceived individual autonomy. With an “in born mistrust of big government and especially of political machines”, the region in which the City lie was a “plethora of small, self-governing cities… with government close to the people as the norm“.[20] Economic development, such as it was, was Privatist, growth machine dominated, while its government and politics increasing became Progressive, decentralized, and robust. If one is honest with oneself, Los Angeles is the ruin of all economic and political models.
The political structures of the metropolitan region were reformist–i.e. Progressive reformist. City managers, non partisan (mostly ward) elections, with a strong “Lakewood system”[21] dominated the metropolitan area. The Progressive political system was extended to the state level and that included an exceptionally strong referendum powers which penetrated to the county and municipal levels. Governed by a semi-weak mayor form of government combined with an incredibly vibrant city council elected by wards in non-partisan elections, politics tends to be decentralized and neighborhood/district focused. Day to day policy-making seems less affected by the mayor than the council–each of the fifteen members being in effect “the mayor of a city the size of Syracuse or Toledo….“[22]
Elections in a decentralized city of this size were media affairs–driven by money and party affiliation. Independent boards/commissions and city department heads protected by civil service tenure and state regulations not only characterize, but dominate its municipal administration. The City (unlike its Orange County suburb) during the postwar period was guided by Republican mayors, Elected in 1961, the controversial Democrat populist Sam Yorty supported Nixon not Kennedy, and the Yorty administration clearly was a transition to a city politics dominated by Democrats. Since 1961 to the present day, with one two term exception, the mayor has been Democratic. Interestingly, from 1938 to 1993, only four men have served as mayor—with three serving three terms and Bradley, five.
Economic Development in LA Stephen Erie Annexation as a way of life—the role of the county, See Fletcher Bowin and urban renewal before 1953.
Reinforce that annexation declined in sixties—see Abbott urban for chap 7 suburban equality
Now the reader knows why Los Angeles came last in our discussion of western suburbanization. Sadly we are not yet done and will return to the topic in future chapter
Footnotes
[1] Carl Abbott, the Metropolitan Frontier, op. cit., p. 123 and p. 126.
[2] Carl Abbott, the Metropolitan Frontier, op. cit., pp. 126-127. Abbott correctly advises us that, however, separate the path, western and eastern cities do share many commonalities—that they “converge on the national average”. While this may suggest I speaketh from both sides of my mouth, it is more that western and eastern cities are not night and day, rather more or less. The key take away is the metropolitan hinterland of the two is different, less so the internal landscape and demographics of each suburb and central city. Architectural design and housing style, however can be quite different, of course.
[3] Carl Abbott, the Metropolitan Frontier, op. cit., pp. 129.
[4] Carl Abbott, the New Urban America, op. cit., p. 171.
[5] Carl Abbott, the New Urban America, op. cit., p. 171.
[6] Carl Abbott, the New Urban America, op. cit., p. 172.
[7] Carl Abbott, the New Urban America, op. cit., pp. 175-176.
[8] Bradford Luckingham, The Urban Southwest: a Profile History of Albuquerque, El Paso, Phoenix, and Tucson (El Paso, Texas Western Press, 1982), p. 267.
[9] Carl Abbott, the New Urban America, op. cit., p. 179.
[10] Carl Abbott, the New Urban America, op. cit., pp. 176-177.
[11] Dennis Judd, “From Cowtown to Sunbelt City” in Susan Fainstein et al, Restructuring the City, op. cit., p.187.
[12] Richardson Dilworth, The Urban Origins of Suburban Autonomy (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2005)
[13] William Fulton, The Reluctant Metropolis: the Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles (Baltimore, the Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001)
[14] William Fulton, the Reluctant Metropolis, op cit. p. 7.
[15] William Fulton, the Reluctant Metropolis, op cit. pp. 8-9.
[16] William Fulton, the Reluctant Metropolis, op cit. p. 12.
[17] Wikipedia claims the word was coined in 1905, but was found in an 1893 Los Angeles Times article.
[18] Carl Abbott, the Metropolitan Frontier, op. cit., p. 127.
[19] Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: the Architecture of the Four Ecologies (New York, Harper & Row, 1971) and described in Abbott’s Metropolitan Frontier, op. cit., pp. 126-127; the New York Times December 18, 1955.
[20] William Fulton, the Reluctant Metropolis, op cit. p. 13.
[21] The Lakewood system, approved in 1954, allows cities and suburbs to contract with the county for pivotal services such as police, fire, garbage and the like. The unanticipated effect of the Lakewood system is that it facilitated municipal fragmentation by transferring the costs of critical infrastructure and service needs to the urban county. Together with county wide special districts (in Los Angeles case the Water Authority is a good example), the Lakewood system enabled the fragmentation as well as more affordable municipal governance.
[22] William Fulton, the Reluctant Metropolis, op cit. p. 45
Ron W. Coan 