Cities Versus Suburbs: A Struggle for Survival

by WILLIAM ZECKENDORF

1

THE idea of decentralization is not original with our generation. Nations, cities, all communities work on the same principle. New York, which started at the Battery and once had its northerly boundary at Wall Street, decentralized; they thought they were decentralizing enormously when they got as far north as Chambers Street and, a little later, as far as the Bowery — that was the open country. Today, of course, we know the Bowery as in a sense an outmoded, abandoned area. With the advent of rapid transit the city decentralized still further, but that did not mean the destruction of the city. It merely meant that the city was growing, and enjoying the benefits of greater population and better communications.

Distance is not space but time. A man who had to walk ten miles to go to work took more time than a man who today flies from New York to Chicago on a job. Naturally, as new means of transportation and better roads are developed, more remote places continually become accessible. The whole principle of real-estate economics changes.

Today, however, a new and vicious development has arisen in cities throughout the United States, which makes decentralization feared as the death knell of the central core area. This fear will continue at least as long as we have the present inept laws bearing on municipalities and satellite towns.

Satellite towns, which are the product of decentralization, are parasites. The high cost of maintenance of the central core that supports the whole metropolitan area is borne by the city, but the revenues and benefits go to the towns at the periphery — each having its own political setup, its own separate fire department, police department, water supply, its own mayor, its own councilmen; all a duplication of the cost of the city’s core.

Every satellite town saps off the buying power, the taxing power, and the vital factors that make for a cohesive, comprehensive, healthy city. This is just as though the United States suddenly lost the taxing power of California and New York through their setting up independent operation, but continued with the central bureaucracy and cost of maintenance of the Army and Navy, and so on. It wouldn’t take very long for the U.S. to go broke on such a basis, and as long as this sort of thing can be done by the satellite towns around the mother city, we are jeopardizing the entire fiscal and political future of our great municipalities.

What I conceive as the answer would consist of a change in the basic law, providing that municipalities have the right of unilateral incorporation or of involuntary incorporation of the communities that live on them at the periphery. The satellite communities should be forced into the large city and taxed to make them a contributing part of the whole community.

The test as to whether a community is an independent community is simple and obvious, and if it fails to meet the test, then it should be incorporated into the large city. Otherwise, the township should retain its independence. This test should be: “Can this community survive financially, socially, and economically without the benefits from the large city?” Take employment, for example. Does the bulk of employment or earning power and other benefits come from the mother city or is the town a self-reliant, independent community? If the former is the case (which it happens to be in 90 per cent of the satellite towns in the immediate vicinity of large cities), then the city should have the right to incorporate the town.

The net result would be beneficial. We could have integrated roads and highways. We could eliminate duplication of government officials and bring about a vast reduction in repetitive bureaucratic setups. There could be a single taxing power, and there could be truly comprehensive zoning and planning so that the entire area becomes one interrelated unit. As long as we continue growing in the present unrelated pattern where each community imposes its own zoning and controls its own street system, and where it will do its own taxing and waste its own money and disregard what happens to the central core, just so long we shall have more and more confiscatory taxes by the central city, and less and less control of central city politics by the general citizenry, who will have abandoned the mother city to ward politics of the lowest order. The eventual result will be financial catastrophe.

There are many horrible examples of what we are speaking about, and perhaps the saddest of all is Boston on. The present tax load on Boston real estate is as great in proportion to its sound value as the average tax plus first mortgage charges on the average city throughout the United States. One might say that already the city of Boston has gone a long way down the road toward confiscation of the real property asset, including the complete subordination of institutional first mortgages. This is merely symptomatic of the inevitable termination of decentralized communities each playing its own game, siphoning off the strength of the central core. There are 43 independent cities and towns in the metropolitan Boston area. Boston’s tax rate compared with tax rates in some of the surrounding “bedroom towns,”whose residents make their living in Boston, gives some indication of the burden on the taxpayers in the mother city. These are the 1951 tax rates per $1000 of assessed valuation:—•

Another flagrant illustration of how termite communities feed on a great city can be seen in New York Harbor. On the Jersey shore of the Hudson River, along a ten-mile stretch running from Bayonne to Edgewater, there are piers vital to the welfare of the harbor generally. Yet they are situated in a series of townships notorious for their bureaucratic wastefulness. In communities such as Jersey City the tax rate raises the cost of pier occupancy beyond the ability of private ownership to pay taxes and maintain the piers and still to rent to shipping concerns at rates competitive with those in other ports. In Hoboken, for instance, a pier owned by our company has an assessed value of $622,000 and a tax rate of 8.3 calling for annual taxes of more than $50,000. This figure represents approximately 75 per cent of the total rental revenue. Because of lack of earning power the value of the pier has been depressed to a point where we would gladly sell the property for 25 per cent of its reproduction value and less than half of the city’s assessment. The diversion of shipping from New York Harbor which is now taking place can be attributed to a large extent to waterfront costs, including pier rentals.

Many factors are involved in decentralization. The obvious one is ease of transportation, but among others which have a potent force is sociological and economic change. There is snob appeal: the desire of the rich or the newly rich or the aspiring rich to disassociate themselves from those in a more modest economic or intellectual category. The established families tend to hold themselves above the Johnny-come-latelies. TheJohrmy-comelatelies soon reach the same category as their former “superiors,”when their income improves and their education or their children’s education brings them up to acceptable country club standards. Fortunatley the tracks can be crossed either way, and the crosscurrents soon get mixed after the third generation. As the less desirable encroach on the established communities of the right people, the right people move farther out, discovering new fields and following the social leader. They leave in their wake a void which is rapidly filled by those aspiring to the higher level, who in turn follow their leader, abandoning what was once the best location in the community close to the central core (“best “ because it was originally selected by the settlers for reasons of convenience) to the poorest economic and sociological level. The result is that we have some of the worst slums within the shadow of City Hall all over the United States. This pattern is to be found in almost every community over a hundred years old.

These City Hall slums offer a wonderful opportunity for real-estate speculation and a challenge to the entrepreneur because large-scale redevelopment at a great profit can be achieved in the central area. But one of the worst tendencies in redevelopment throughout the United States is to demolish slums close to the central core after condemnation, and then to replace them with low-cost housing. The downtown area of the cities in the United States should not be used for housing but should be devoted to high tax producing sites, to give the cities the greatest long-term tax benefits.

2

Now a city can maintain its beauty and functionalism only by determining what it is best qualified to offer to the general economy. Where does it stand in the national orbit? New York is an excellent example of a city that has gone a long way toward achieving the greatest development consistent with its abilities.

First, it is a great port. Being a port, it must have great distribution and collective transportation power. It must be able to take in the imports and distribute them through the country and collect the products from the factories and farms of the nation so that they can reach the distant cities of the world by water-borne traffic. New York has made the most of the Hudson River. It has the greatest network of railroads in the world. Back in the middle of the nineteenth century it recognized the necessity of tapping the western development and was the first to go in for an integrated group of canals to the Middle West.

Before decentralization of manufacturing took place it was a great location for manufacture, for the processing of the world’s raw materials and the distribution of the commodities which came to its door. With the decentralization of heavy industry and a great deal of light industry, New York changed its pattern accordingly, and rapidly became not only the distributive point but also the merchandising point, leaving it to the rapidly growing industrial areas of the nation to do the manufacturing. New York enlarged the concept of the idea-exchange market, financial center, executive center, cultural, advertising, and style center, and took comfort in the fact that in spite of the loss of heavy industry and some light industry through decentralization, it could well make on the bananas what it was losing on the peanuts. The city realized that as fast as manufacturing would be decentralized, just as fast would it be imperative to centralize the market place, the idea center, and the world of finance which, in turn, would make possible the further development of the decentralized areas.

Boston, on the other hand, failed to accommodate itself to change. Boston held on to its old spinning mills, and its weaving and its water power, and had the rug pulled out from under while it tried to retain plants that long since were outmoded by competition which it could no longer meet. New York has been the most rapidly changing of all the cities. It has proved the wisdom of abandoning heavy industry in favor of office buildings. There is no city in the whole nation that has strength and solvency of office-building investments comparable to that of the city of New York. New York gets the highest rent, has always enjoyed the highest occupancy, and has always had the finest corporate representation. When the world capital, the United Nations, was seeking a home, it was New York that reached out and grabbed it, recognizing the importance to the city of this international forum. The United Nations, seeking a city that best suited its character and function, realized that New York was its proper home for a long-term future; and so, finally, New York in addition to all the other things has now become the capital of the world.

Other cities have a similar opportunity to develop within the scope of their potential — Houston, for example, or Buffalo. Many of them are achieving their destinies, some unconsciously; but the moment they start to try to be or to look like New York they are going to fail. The city of San Francisco has a distinctive personality. The same thing is true of Los Angeles, of Atlanta, and of many other cities throughout the country. They must find what they can best do most profitably in the large sense, and then readapt themselves according to this realization.

3

INCORPORATION of the communities that live off the mother city is by far the most important single remedial step that can be taken to stop the breakdown of cities which we are currently pleased to call decentralization. Cities, meantime, must make themselves more attractive; they must reattract people to the central core. Let’s say a city has analyzed its potentials. It should then take stock of what it has to offer the people who live in it and around it, and go all out to satisfy their fundamental demands.

In too many cities — especially in the manufacturing and industrial cities—there is an element of grimness, a lack of balance between work and play, which drives people out. The automobile enables people to escape, and they are no longer trapped within a narrow radius as they were before the automobile was invented.

Take the city of Buffalo as illustrative of this point. Basically Buffalo is a vibrant city, strong and virile, with a tremendous growth potential, a great urge to expand. The city is strong industrially. It has a reasonable diversification, although not as much as I like to see. If there were more interests owned locally or more interest taken locally in the home industries, probably less of the city’s earnings would be siphoned off and spent elsewhere. But Buffalo is most deficient, as I see it, in this respect: it has not devoted much of its time or thinking to the lighter side of life for the people who are its industrial employees.

Well, what to do about it? We have the trend toward shorter hours and more leisure time. I urge upon the many cities across the country in which this situation exists that they take a welllocated site and, making the most of the desire to eliminate blight, replace it with a development just as important as housing: namely, a play area — a place for fun. Each city must find the best place for its center of fun and entertainment, and since most have their share of substandard properties close to the central core, the selection should not be difficult. Watch the way Pittsburgh is developing its new recreation park, once a railroad yard, at the meeting of the rivers.

I visualize these fun centers as consisting of a tremendous dance hall, bowling alleys, skating rinks, merry-go-rounds for the children, a swimming pool for the children and one for the adults too — in short, a happy, functionally designed center for dancing and exercise and entertainment. In addition to lifting the morale of the people, such a place would give balance to the labor of the men who make the basis for the city’s economy. And they would say, “Let’s go to town. Let’s have some fun tonight!" People would feel that their city is a great place to live in, not a great; place to get away from.

Curiously enough, such a center would pay for itself. There is no type of investment well conceived and well located and well executed which will pay as high a return in relation to the invested capital as this sort of thing. If your city is one that people want to come to, one of the great and important problems of your economy can be substantially solved simply through the attraction of more and better labor. And you can reattract, to the central area a large part of the buying power that is now being lost to the non-taxpaying satellite communities.

Atlanta, like Buffalo, is virile and dynamic, and is growing out of its breeches. It is a great distributing city — possibly the greatest for its size in the United States except for cities that are seaports. It is blessed with a geographical position beyond the pull of such cities as Chicago, Washington, Philadelphia, New Orleans. Atlanta has no important near-by competition that is going to by-pass it and leave it dying on the vine. Geography makes Atlanta’s position safe if its potential is fully exploited.

Atlanta is a great retail market as well as a secondary wholesale market. The position of the city with respect to the many communities within its radius is strong and growing stronger. It can draw as a magnet from farther and farther points, thanks not the least to its merchants, who know how to offer people things that they come for. The city is well located from the standpoint of proximity to good labor and raw materials. Since these advantages are correlated with a wellintegrated transportation system — air, rail, and highway —the city should continue to grow with a strong, diversified industrial expansion in balance with the distributing, light manufacturing, and retail end. The city has everything except water shipping and makes up for that with railways.

But the same thing applies to Atlanta that applies to Buffalo. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Atlanta, in my opinion, has not devoted enough time and thought and investment of capital to entertainment and play. It should wipe out the blighted central area and, as part, of the park system, plan a center of fun. Atlanta should also have cultural and theatrical facilities worthy of its potential, and it, should have convention and auditorium facilities that can handle the people whom it will continue to attract and reattract.

4

THIS brings us to the heart of the matter — the problem of over-all planning. I am a great believer in planning but a great disbeliever in spot planning. Planning means the coöperation of the private developer and municipal authority, Cooperation furnishes the key. I am not in favor of any city authority going into private real-estate business. Planning alone by planners without hard-boiled knowledge of real-estate economics means boondoggling and bankruptcy. On the other hand, I would not permit two or three holdouts in an area to stymie a great development which would be in everyone’s interest. We need a marriage between government and private capital on a practical, workable basis for the redevelopment of our cities.

What is the city’s role in development? First, to analyze itself to discover the things it can do and the things it can’t do, and then to implement its potentials through a master plan. This master plan may be a somewhat idealized conception, but it can be a vastly important one as a standard to live up to and as a guide.

The city should then enforce its plan through those powers which in its position of arbiter are proper to it: 1) the right to zone; 2) the right to condemn; 3) the setting up of a revolving fund for the purpose of buying and selling land, not in the speculative sense but to achieve the best in its redevelopment program.

Most people know about number one. The city says: If we are going in for office buildings, for example, let’s place the highest type here, the second-grade type there; light industry and semiheavy and heavy industry would be here and over there, where they logically go with utilities and functions allied to them. If we are going in for theaters, let them have a logical relationship to the things that are connected with them — the hotels, dining places, cabarets, and perhaps opera, music, ballet, and allied arts, and schools of all kinds in these several fields. The city must rigidly restrict the different sections against encroachment by an irrational type of building. Second-rate retail stores with neon signs and cheap buildings should not sit next to residential property; residences should be kept to appropriate areas, and industrial activity should not encroach on residential or office space areas. Each has to have its place in the scheme. Leave it to the ingenuity and individuality of the man to plan his own buildings; but in order to protect the community, give him limitations as to where he may build what he wants to build.

The right to condemn is a most important municipal function. The city should continue to deliver the communal developments such as parks, streets, and highways; but, in my opinion, it should be much more generous in its use of eminent domain for redevelopment purposes and it should also try to make a profit. This may be heresy, but I am against the windfall profit for the fellow who had nothing to do with the creation of increment through a communal development. If the city, in other words, decides it is going to build a park, it should condemn an area around the park and should realize on the increased value of the land around the park through the resale to private developers.

In this way it will be possible for the city to redevelop itself and get its money back for the communal project. Furthermore, the city can create increment merely by virtue of assemblage.

If a block consisting of ten separate 25-toot holdings is assembled, it is a simple principle of realestate economics that the whole is worth more than the ten individual parts. Appreciation of real-estate values in urban areas takes place through assemblage. That costs nobody anything.

It is purely the constructive result emanating from the greater functional utility of larger areas. By this means the city can recapture the greater part, if not all, of the cost of areas it wants redeveloped, directly from the properties that realize the benefit, reflected in increased value.

The actual redevelopment work would, of course, be left in the hands of private enterprise. To have private capital develop or redevelop the urban areas is vital and essential. I do not believe a bureaucratic, city-wide, state-wide, or national planning or executive commission could possible accomplish the actual work. It has to be done under the hard, cold analysis that venture capital will give everything that it goes into. Success of individual enterprise is the only true test.

One more point — in some ways the most important of all. The question of master planning and supervision of design can almost never be carried too far so long as it is in intelligent, imaginative, and honorable hands. The relationship between city authorities and private enterprise, therefore, in meeting the great challenge of our cities should be one of mutual open-mindedness. Pride of authorship should be forgotten in the interests of all, and the planning authorities should encourage the submission of plans by creative private enterprise, thus ensuring that no bets are overlooked, that their own planning ideas are compared with those of private enterprise, and that all men in the community are making their best contribution toward a living community.