Читать книгу The Best-Laid Plans - Randal O'Toole - Страница 33

In June 2005, five members of the U.S. Supreme Court agreed that New London, Connecticut, could take people’s homes by eminent domain and give or sell the land to private developers, even if the area was not blighted. While this decision provoked widespread outrage, few noted that Justice Stevens’s majority opinion specifically approved of the taking because New London had “carefully formulated an economic development plan that it believes will provide appreciable benefits to the community.”¹ Justice Kennedy concurred, saying, “The taking occurred in the context of a comprehensive development plan.”² As the American Planning Association gleefully observed, “The decision validates the essential role of planning”—at least, essential to the process of taking people’s homes by eminent domain.³

In other words, the majority of the Court was seduced by the claims of urban planners. These five justices never asked whether the outcomes of plans ever turned out as well as the planners promised. They merely presumed that, if a plan had been “carefully formulated,” the benefits would be greater than the costs.

Tell that to the former owners of homes and businesses in the Bronx, Ft. Lee, New Jersey, or many other places whose properties were taken by eminent domain decades ago and reduced to rubble for “urban renewal.” On many of these sites, that rubble can still be seen today as no urban renewal ever took place.

Or tell it to the nearly one million low-income families—80 percent of which were black—displaced by urban renewal—sometimes called “Negro removal”—between 1950 and 1980. Since urban renewal often replaced slums with luxury housing, one study found that urban renewal “succeeded in materially reducing the supply of low-cost housing in America.”⁴ Another study concluded that urban renewal cost the average displaced family “20 to 30 percent of one year’s income.”⁵

Or tell it to residents of Greenwich Village, New York, whose neighborhood was saved from urban renewal bulldozers by the efforts of people like the late Jane Jacobs. Today, property in that neighborhood is extremely valuable, no thanks to the urban planners of the 1950s and 1960s who considered it a blighted slum and slated it for demolition.

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a government agency could use eminent domain to take property from private owners for redevelopment if land around the property was “blighted”—even if the property itself was not blighted. Just as in 2005, the fact that the agency in question had written a comprehensive plan swayed the Court’s decision.⁶ The ruling led many cities to prepare grandiose urban-renewal plans, some of which proposed to sweep away entire neighborhoods of thousands of families. One of those plans called for leveling 14 blocks in Manhattan and displacing nearly 10,000 residents and workers to build an eight-lane elevated freeway connecting the Holland Tunnel with the Williamsburg and Manhattan bridges.

Jacobs, then a critic for Architectural Forum magazine, responded by writing The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which she described as “an attack on current city planning and rebuilding.” Urban planning, she said, was no better than “the pseudoscience of bloodletting” because it has “not yet broken with the specious comfort of wishes, familiar superstitions, oversimplifications, and symbols, and [has] not yet embarked upon the adventure of probing the real world.” “Having swallowed the initial fallacies and having been provisioned with tools,” planners “go on logically to the greatest destructive excesses.”⁷

Since urban renewal was legitimized by the existence of blight, Jacobs focused much of the book on proving that many high-density, mixed-use urban neighborhoods were not blighted at all but were living, vibrant communities. A journalist at heart, she took a journalist’s approach to the problem: “The way to get at what goes on in the seemingly mysterious and perverse behavior of cities,” she wrote, “is to look closely, and with as little previous expectation as is possible, at the most ordinary scenes and events, and attempt to see what they mean and whether any threads of principle emerge among them.”⁸

By looking closely at her neighborhood, Jacobs concluded that cities need “a most intricate and close-grained diversity of uses that give each other constant mutual support, both economically and socially.” To attain the diversity necessary to allow a city to thrive, she continued, “four conditions are indispensable”: mixed uses, short blocks, a mixture of old and new buildings, and a dense concentration of residents as well as workers. “The necessity for these four conditions is the most important point this book has to make.”⁹

There is a contradiction here. First, Jacobs tears down the science of urban planning. But then, by reducing to a simple formula all the conditions needed for a lively, thriving city, she creates the foundation for a new science of urban planning. “By deliberately inducing these four conditions, planning can induce city vitality,” she claims.¹⁰

Jacobs cautions readers not to “try to transfer my observations [about great cities] into guides as to what goes on in towns, or little cities, or in suburbs.” But it is a half-hearted warning: she admits she likes “dense cities best” and considers suburbs, with their separated uses, to be “city destroying.” Eventually, as suburbs are “engulfed in cities,” she expects that her observations will “have somewhat wider usefulness.”¹¹

Jacobs was unaware that, as she was criticizing urban planning as a pseudoscience, she herself was creating another pseudoscience. One person who was aware of this irony was Herbert Gans, a sociologist whose research far exceeded Jacobs’s amateurish efforts. Gans spent a year living in an inner-city neighborhood like Greenwich Village, and then spent a year living in a low-density suburb. His books The Urban Villagers and The Levittowners dispel many of the myths propounded by urban planners to this day, including some that were accepted or promoted by Jacobs.

Like Jacobs, Gans was often critical of urban planners, whose “values are those of the professional upper-middle class.” Among other things, Gans found, planners acted as though lower-class people were simply people with middle-class values who lacked “access to opportunities and services available to the middle class.” So planners assumed “that cultural change can be induced by providing the improved residential conditions and … educational, health, and other facilities.”¹² This is the design fallacy—the idea that urban design shapes human behavior—that pervades much of urban planning.

In his 1961 review of The Death and Life, Gans admits that Jacobs’s observations of inner-city neighborhoods “are far more closely attuned to how people actually live than are those of orthodox city planning.” But he points out that Jacobs’s emphasis on such things as short blocks is simply another example of the design fallacy, and her claim that cities need diversity is “not entirely supported by the facts.”¹³

Instead of focusing on design, Gans presents a cultural interpretation of inner-city neighborhoods. In the 1950s, ethnic, working-class families dominated these neighborhoods. “In this culture, the home is reserved for the family, so that much social life takes place outdoors.” Thus, the active street life in these neighborhoods “stems not so much from their physical characteristics as from the working-class structure of their inhabitants.” This active street life also attracts “intellectuals, artists, and bohemian types [such as Jacobs], contributing further to the street life.” The resulting “exotic flavor then draws visitors and tourists, whose presence helps to make the district even livelier.”

Middle-class people enjoy the “charm and excitement” of such lively neighborhoods as tourists, but few—Jane Jacobs and Herbert Gans being exceptions—actually tried to live in them. Gans pointed out that those charmed by Jacobs’s description of Greenwich Village or their own visits to such neighborhoods often failed to see that, from the point of view of residents, “the houses in these traditional districts are often hard to maintain, that parking is often impossible, that noise and dirt are ever present, that some of the neighbors watch too much, and that not all of the shopkeepers are kind.”¹⁴

“Middle-class people,” Gans wrote, “especially those raising children, do not want working-class—or even bohemian—neighborhoods.” Their social lives take place indoors, which leads people on the outside to erroneously conclude that their neighborhoods are dull. “But visibility is not the only measure of vitality, and areas that are uninteresting to the visitor may be quite vital to the people who live in them.” Middle-class people do not necessarily socialize with their neighbors; “their friends may be scattered all over the metropolitan area, as are the commercial and recreational facilities which they frequent.” This means they need a car, not pedestrian-oriented, mixed-use housing.

Gans recognized, as Jacobs did not, that the inner-city neighborhoods “were built for a style of life which is going out of fashion with the large majority of Americans who are free to choose their place of residence.” Young people raised in these neighborhoods moved out as soon as they were old enough to have their own children. As working-class families moved to the suburbs, some were replaced by bohemians—mainly young people with no children who appreciated the lively streets. But it is likely that many of the lively neighborhoods would have disappeared with or without urban renewal.

While Gans himself enjoyed living in one of these neighborhoods, he “made no recommendations for or against urban villages or ethnic enclaves, because they are desirable only if people want to live in them, and that is up to them.” His objection to urban renewal was “first and foremost economic and political” because it often imposed high costs on low-income people in order to subsidize high-income housing and because it deprived people of the right to choose how they wanted to live.¹⁵ He feared that Jacobs’s colorful descriptions of these neighborhoods would “win her the support of those who profit from the status quo” and those “who want to bring back the city and the society of the 18th and 19th centuries.”¹⁶

This is exactly what happened when a new generation of urban planners read Jacobs’s book. Instead of finding in The Death and Life a warning that urban planning does more harm than good, planners used the book as a model for how they should do urban renewal. If Jacobs’s high-density, mixed-use communities were so good in the inner city, the planners reasoned, then they should be built everywhere else too, and particularly in the suburbs. Calling themselves New Urbanists, they proposed that all new developments be like Greenwich Village: high densities, mixed uses, with limited room for the automobile. They also urged that existing suburbs be redeveloped along these lines. “There’s no question that [Jane Jacobs’s] work is the leaping-off point for our whole movement,” says the executive director of the Congress for the New Urbanism, which was formed about 30 years after The Death and Life was published.¹⁷

Few would question The Economist’s judgment that The Death and Life “was among the most influential and controversial books of the twentieth century.” However, the magazine erroneously added that the book “stopped America’s urban renewal movement in its tracks.”¹⁸ While it did help stop the Lower Manhattan Expressway, if it had stopped urban renewal, Susette Kelo would never have become famous as a U.S. Supreme Court case. Though Jacobs demolished the theory behind inner-city urban renewal, the tools that made urban renewal possible, including eminent domain and tax-increment financing, remained in place. As a result, cities continue to “renew” urban areas to this day, with results that are often as controversial and devastating to neighborhoods as they were in the 1950s and 1960s. Since New Urbanism is the current planning fad, much of that urban renewal aims to recreate Jane Jacobs’s vibrant streets in quiet suburban settings.

While the Kelo decision set a precedent by allowing cities to use eminent domain even in areas that are not blighted, many state laws still limit the use of eminent domain and other urban-renewal tools to blighted areas. But to the New Urbanists, any low-density suburb is blighted simply because it does not have mixed uses or small blocks, or meet Jacobs’s other standards. For example, in 2002, the city of San Jose declared a full third of the city to be blighted. One neighborhood of Victorian and Craftsman-style single-family homes was considered blighted because planners found wet leaves on the tennis court behind one of the houses—which happened to be the home of San Jose’s representative in Congress.¹⁹

if there is a difference between urban renewal in 1960 and urban renewal today, it is that highways are no longer a major tool to clear slums. This is partly because inflation in construction costs led cities and states to reduce their plans for new highways and partly because planners today are more interested in discouraging driving than in building new roads.

Planners could use eminent domain to force sales of land in neighborhoods they considered blighted, but they still needed to pay for the land. With freeway funds out of the picture, they turned to another tool: tax-increment financing. Tax-increment financing allows urban-renewal agencies to divert all property taxes on new developments in an urban-renewal area to subsidies for that development. Typically, the agency designates an area an urban-renewal or redevelopment zone and makes specific plans for how that redevelopment should take place. Planners project the tax revenues from the new development and sell bonds that will be repaid out of those revenues. The money from the bonds is used to buy the land, build streets and other infrastructure, and provide other subsidies to the developers. First authorized in California in 1952, tax-increment financing is now legal in every state but Arizona.

Armed with these tools—eminent domain; tax-increment financing; and various other federal, state, and local grants and subsidies—planners remain very much in the business of urban renewal. Only now they call it something else: smart growth. And the most famous smart-growth plan in America was written for what was then my hometown, Portland, Oregon.