SHOULD WE BE CONCERNED ABOUT SUBURBS?
Sociologist R.D. McKenzie in 1933 commented that Big Cities were surrounded by growing suburbs/unincorporated areas; acknowledging new economic, political and social interrelationships between city and hinterland meant changes in function, roles and physical requirements of each—an “entirely new social and economic entity”. Since 1880 the Census Bureau had reported statistics for central cities and “metropolitan districts”; in 1910 the Bureau provided data on 25 metros. The 1920 census reported a majority of Americans living in urban areas; more than two-thirds of that majority lived in 58 metro areas accounting for half the nation’s overall population increase (McKelvey, 1968, p. 31). The Bureau, however, also noted that outlying peripheries grew at a faster rate than the central city itself. It wasn’t until the 1920s, however, that a critical mass combined with a visible periphery exodus caught the attention of planners and elements of the business community—and, of course, our RPNY planners.
But in this decade there was little consensus as to whether that was to be feared or fostered. Continued central city dominance was simply assumed as more or less the natural order of things.
We may think of [the] metropolitan economy as an organization of people having a large city as a nucleus … of producers and consumers mutually dependent for goods and service … concentrated in a large city which is the focus of local trade and the center through which normal economic relations with the outside are established and maintained … A closer examination of these dependent towns [suburbs] would show different types performing different functions, but all subordinate. (Glabb and Brown, 1983, pp. 270–71)
Suburbs, it was thought, could be managed or coordinated using alternatives such as regional planning, centralized infrastructure; and a network of highways leading to the CBD were prospective solutions. Battered neighborhoods and a first-rate housing crisis were perceived as the central city’s chief obstacles to maintaining the status quo. The hope was to limit suburban growth by reducing central city population exodus. Still there was no disputing, the suburbs were gathering momentum.
Growth in the Twenties’ Suburb
No doubt a large part of the answer to suburban growth involved the car. Everyone had one—actually with 8 million registrations in 1920, only one in 13 households had one. By 1925, however, 17.5 million cars were registered and there were 2.5 million trucks on the road (Jackson, 1985, p. 162). In the 1920s the era of the streetcar (and streetcar suburbs) was over. Hated streetcar monopolies, with their all-too-corrupt politics, lost ridership, which led to General Motors and municipal-owned bus systems and the ripping up of lines. Streetcar ridership peaked in 1923: “Several cities made key decisions against major spending on public transit during the 1920s … [For example] Detroit voters in 1929 rejected a $280 million proposal that would have resulted in subways, 65 miles of surface rapid transit, and 560 miles of trolley lines” (Abbott, 1987, p. 43).
Suburbs exploded in the interwar period “simply because millions of people wanted to live in them”. In 1920 a little less than 7 million lived in suburbs—by 1940 nearly 17.5 million (Wilson, 1974, pp. 34, 46–57). Baltimore grew by 9.7 percent (1920–30), its suburbs by 52 percent; Shaker Heights Ohio (a Cleveland suburb) grew by 1000 percent and Elmwood Park Illinois by 717 percent. The link between car registration and explosive suburban growth is undeniable. These are auto suburbs. One need not have been “elite” to buy a car. The era of solely elite suburbs is over. Dolores Hayden describes these years as “mail-order and self-built suburbs”; she includes a section on Sears’s mail order (whose motto was “A Home of Your Own is an Absolute Necessity”), from which she estimates 50,000 houses were constructed (Hayden, 2003, p. 97). The era of American home ownership, an era that last until 2008, had started. Manufacturing also decentralized to the suburbs: “In 1919 eleven central cities in the country’s forty largest manufacturing counties still accounted for 85 percent of the [nation’s] manufacturing workers. By 1937 this percentage had fallen to just under 60” (Glabb and Brown, 1983, p. 275).
Typical was Shaker Heights, pioneered by brothers Otis and Mantis Van Sweringen (I did not make up their names), former clerks and bicycle-shop owners. Purchasing 1400 acres on what had been the site of a Shaker religious community, they meticulously planned a suburb comprised of different subdivisions at varying price levels, ensuring each subdivision included homes with similar priced units on 100-foot lots. Cheaper units would not impinge on their neighbors. They abandoned the city grid and platted curved and semi-elliptical roads off of large boulevards. Natural park areas were retained, and each subdivision was comprised of units with similar housing design and followed strict exterior and landscaping appearance. As always, marketing and promotion was core to the model. From 1919 to 1929 (the Depression) 300 homes were sold each year. Starting with a population of 1500, by decade’s end Shaker Heights was home to 15,000. Unfortunately for the two brothers, they sold their company, invested the profits and went bankrupt in the Depression.
Pre-Depression Initiatives to Deal with Growing Suburbia
Since the 1850s’ state legislatures (Dillon’s Law again) confronted repeated and divisive requests from central cities to annex and prospective suburbs to incorporate. The longstanding truism that state legislatures were disproportionately controlled by rural and non-Big City politicians, while correct, is probably overstated in regard to annexation in the nineteenth century. Big Cities were authorized to annex repeatedly by state legislatures, but “special legislation” or special charters were more a colossal pain the in the butt than an opportunity to poke a stick in the Big City eye. So, early in the Civil War period, state legislatures increasingly abandoned special legislation in favor of voter referendum. By 1910, 27 of 46 states had repealed these special charters in favor of referendums (Teaford, 1979, p. 38)—let the voter decide.
So long as the Big City could provide enhanced services—safe, clean, cheap water being the most central—suburbs were willing to vote for annexation. Yellow fever epidemics in the 1890s convinced many suburbs to join the Big City. Big Cities therefore were very successful in annexation drives, most often led by chambers which sincerely believed “the bigger the city, the better” because stagnant cities risk non-competitiveness with growing cities (Teaford, 1979, p. 88). But, after 1900, this Big City advantage dried up with each year. Several alternative ways for suburbs to acquire the needed services were increasingly available. Between 1900 and 1910 Big Cities were still successful, but this was Big City annexation’s last hurrah.
What made mail order, self-built or builder subdivision suburbanization possible was the development of the service district. The service district, another hybrid structure— set apart from gifts and loan clauses, and outside municipal government budgetary and debt constraints—was “governed” by private/public boards, sometimes elected, sometimes appointed. These infrastructure hybrids were responsible for water, sewers, roads, lighting and all the good stuff that earlier Big Cities had detailed to corporation charters, franchises, regulated utilities and state and/or local independent boards and commissions. The service district, without doubt, put to rest the flux of imperfect public/private HEDOs that had dominated infrastructure since Chapter 3. Service districts took over the heavy lifting associated with installing infrastructure necessary for a large urban center and an industrial economic base—an infrastructure that had been the highest priority and first task of early economic developers. To the astute reader who remembers our conceptual model, onionization takes a great step forward. Service districts made large-scale suburbanization possible.
Possibly the first Big City service district was Boston’s 1895 Metropolitan Water District; in 1905 NYC established its massive Water Authority, and the North New Jersey Water District was formed in 1918.
Suburban service districts were possible in the twenties because tax exempt debt was attractive to bond markets and outside the debt limits of state constitutions. Moreover, by the twenties many of the smaller and poorest suburbs, and the settled unincorporated areas, had consolidated with or annexed to suburbs. A landscape of larger suburban towns and cities resulted—they reached sufficient scale to justify their own service districts. Service districts cemented suburban autonomy, taking annexation off the table and locking Big Cities into a fixed geography.
The year in which Illinois’ legislature enacted the Sanitary District Bill was the last year Chicago would make massive additions to its territory. Boston would annex only one town following the creation of the Metropolitan Water District. … Between 1900 and 1930, the state legislature of Ohio enacted twenty-five measures providing for intergovernmental contractual relations, including statutes that allowed municipalities to construct joint sewage systems and joint water works. (Teaford, 1979, pp. 80–82)
If not service districts, then the so-called “urban county” could also provide services. In 1898 only two states empowered counties to operate libraries; by 1930, 28 state counties were empowered. The first county park (Massachusetts) was authorized in 1895; by 1930 there were 45 states authorizing counties to operate parks. And function after function was added during these years to county governments. Baltimore County, Westchester NY and Los Angeles led the pack.
States like Ohio empowered counties during the twenties to assume what formerly were municipal functions for suburbs and unincorporated areas. Sewage and water districts were subordinated to counties, and the scope of functions performed by counties exploded to include libraries, health and sanitation, parks and recreation, fire and police, and regional planning. County fiscal, budgetary and policy capacity reforms accompanied these new responsibilities: “In urban areas from New York to California, the county was extending its governmental functions and responsibilities more rapidly than the municipality, and the county’s share of local government expenditures was rising.” (Teaford, 1979, pp. 81–2) Aside from infrastructure, urban counties did not become involved with ED-related programs during the twenties.
During 1900–20 the muckrakers were active, and reaction to Big City machine corruption and inefficiency may have been at its highest level. Suburbanites feared the cost of corruption and the inefficiency of service delivery. The issue of ethnic intolerance and racism were also evident, but more like the crime and gangsters associated with Prohibition played a larger role in this period. “Dry” suburbs were an attraction of the rising women’s movement. The success of business structural reforms, the city manager system with non-partisan, at-large elections also popular in these years made an effective alternate form of suburban government possible. Zoning allowed suburbanites to “customize” the suburb to make it more attractive to voters in referendum campaigns. Big City annexation efforts were an increasingly hard sell—by the 1920s a near impossible sell.
In other Big Cities, powerful forces coalesced around their best idea on how to marry city and suburb to effectively compete against rival cities: city/county consolidation. Cincinnati, for example, obsessed with Cleveland’s perceived growth and success, turned to city/county consolidation. The city manager municipal government, the chamber, the Citizens’ League and the League of Women Voters (LWV) lined up in support. In accordance with Dillon’s Law, the battle was fought in the state legislature, where Cincinnati’s Republican political machine rallied state-wide suburban support to defeat the measure. Attempts by Seattle (1923) and St. Louis (1926, 1930), and two attempts in Cleveland also met with failure during the twenties. Out West, things were different. Both Denver and Los Angeles approved partial city/county consolidations (McKelvey, 1968, p. 60).
The most interesting alternative, a real hot-button during the twenties, was the “federation”. The federation borrowed from England’s 1888 County of London model. Within the county were 28 self-governing suburban boroughs responsible for services such as parks, streets, libraries and recreation, while the County Council (CC) handled county-wide services such as sewage, planning and water. Suburbs could keep their identity and self-government, and could customize key services, while city/county consolidation made the county the government of the area—it was a dual-level federation.
Massachusetts debated it in the 1890s, but by the twenties California, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Milwaukee and St. Louis were hot to trot. Vigorous campaigns were waged and between 1928 and 1934 federation efforts were on the verge of victory in Pittsburgh and Cleveland. State legislatures, however (for various reasons) proved an obstacle, and in the referendums wealthy suburbs supported the federation; but the more numerous working- and middle-class suburbs voted against it—and the promising federation alternative rode off into the policy sunset.
J.C. Nichols: The Mall and the Country Club
The contemporary mythical image of the suburban subdivision had to come from somewhere—our candidate is J.C. Nichols and his Country Club District, developed during the 1920s. Jesse Nichols was an out and out Privatist, but not one that perfectly fits the stereotype. His earlier real estate experiences included building working-class and City Beautiful-like subdivisions. Taking a gamble in 1912, he started development on a new type of subdivision which borrowed heavily from a 1907–08 Baltimore suburb, Roland Park, designed by Olmsted. With no utilities or streetcar, Nichols visualized an upper-class suburb designed for, and dependent on, the automobile. Moreover, he was determined that it would remain a high-class district forever. Property values would never deteriorate, and the quality and beauty of the subdivision would last.
Homes on large lots in park-like settings were only the first step. Statues, fountains and all the “beauty” associated with the old City Beautiful were replicated: broad streets, plenty of parking, lawns in the front. Open space between streets preserved a country-like atmosphere. The key to “forever” was near- perpetual deed restrictions which prescribed, indeed micromanaged, what could be done with the property: types of improvements, colors, gardens—and, of course, racial covenants. To enforce these restrictions and covenants, owners were required to join a “homeowner association” which contracted for the services necessary to maintain the subdivision and enforce its “standards”. Fire and police as well as utilities were also contracted by the association. By 1915, these homeowner associations were converted into Missouri or Kansas non-profits and built into state law. Homeowner associations wasted little time and became a sort of neighborhood government that lobbied city, schools, county and state for services and supportive legislation.
The Country Club District proved successful. In the early twenties, Nichols upped the ante. Believing the future of shopping and consumer commerce did not lie with the congested downtown, he began his design of America’s “first extensively planned and architecturally homogenous shopping center” (Brown and Dorsett, 1978, p. 176) adjacent to his Country Club District—what today is called an outdoor mall. Up to this point “strip” shopping centers, hodge-podge clusters at intersections, without parking, typified commercial developments along the streetcar lines.
Nichols, again relying on the car, departed from the streetcar line and built on-site housing, a quarry, brickyard and a landfill. He spent over $1 million to acquire the land; actual construction started in 1922. The Country Club Plaza shopping center was designed around the automobile, with ample parking a defining feature. Kansas City’s famous City Beautiful planner, George Kessler, was retained as designer and an Olmsted student brought in to assist. Architectural uniformity around a Spanish style was incorporated in each building. The first stores opened in 1923, and soon after branches of downtown department and chain stores opened as well. Nichols believed in owner associations and he set up a Plaza Merchants’ Association to coordinate business activities and programs. In 1923 the association began its first Christmas display—an event that continues to the present. Apartments ringed the Plaza on three sides, creating traffic; by 1929, 5000 lived in the six-block area (Brown and Dorsett, 1978, pp. 176–9).
Both the District and the Plaza were financially successful, and extremely popular. By the end of the Depression, nearly 10 percent of Kansas City’s metro area population lived in the ever-growing Country Club District. It had prospered even during the horrors of the Depression. Nichols’s model was adopted by developers across the nation. And so by the early 1920s the now infamous, insipid, monotonous, tasteless mall had arrived on America’s suburban scene—Babbitt was happy, less so architecture students and planners. Privatists, on the other hand, were overjoyed.
Ron W. Coan 