Carrying out the city plan

We have thus far considered how the municipal authorities may execute a plan by enforcing those rights which the legislature has delegated to them as the representatives of the people. Through the ownership of land and by the exercise of the police power the city may absolutely control the working out of many details of a plan. But a city is seriously handicapped in the use of both of these methods of control. The acquisition of land by any method is expensive, and by the condemnation method is both expensive and slow. To enforce a police ordinance requires an injunction after a court hearing, and the usual administrative agency is slow to ask for an injunction and the usual court is slow to grant it. Some details, at least, of a city plan will be executed, in the future as in the past, by the mere guidance of developments undertaken on private initiative without resort to legal compulsion.

A plan for a city’s growth generally approved by the business interests, by public service corporations, and by the public, and administered by a tactful agency which advocates the execution of the proper features of the plan at the right time carries with it the persuasion of good business policy. It becomes the thing to do to fall in line with such a plan.

THE CONTROL OF STREET LAY-OUT BY ADMINISTRATIVE PRESSURE

In a growing community, even if the public authorities are utterly supine in the matter, private initiative will constantly increase the number of house lots and bring about the creation of streets necessary to give access to them. These streets may promptly become public ways or they may remain private ways for a long time; but in the aggregate they form the most important single element in the city plan, largely controlling every other feature. The most obvious and perhaps the most important step in the wise guidance of a city’s growth is the endeavor to make the streets thus brought into existence through private initiative serve not merely the immediate selfish purpose of the dealer in real estate but the permanent interests of the whole community. The attempt to control private development is made through the supervision of all plans offered for record, supplemented in a few cities by the establishment of an official street plan to which all private plattings are expected to conform.

The right in a municipality to supervise all plans of subdivisions is well recognized in the United States, but the exercise of the right is by no means general. It varies from a purely formal supervision, to a real attempt to control private development. A street which is to be a public highway is frequently required to conform to standard specifications as to width, sidewalk space, surfacing, and so forth. In some cities a considerable measure of co-operation is secured and owners of property are induced to change even the number and direction of proposed streets at the suggestion of the municipal authorities.

The method of enforcing the right of supervision in most general use is to refuse for record any plan of proposed streets and lots which has not been approved by the proper municipal authorities. Owners who persist in their plan are prevented from describing lots by a short reference to a recorded plan and must in each transfer describe by metes and bounds. The inconvenience is considerable, although the burden of this falls rather on the title examiner who is paid for his labor and on the purchaser than on the vendor. In cities where the custom of dealing in lots by reference to a recorded plat instead of by metes and bounds is nearly universal, a prospective purchaser may balk at buying a lot that fails to conform to the customary standard in this respect.

Another method of control, also in pretty general use, is the refusal to accept a non-conforming street as a public highway. Instead of having the benefit of the co-operation of the municipality in the construction of water mains, sewer pipes, and other municipal services, and instead of being entirely relieved of their upkeep, the cost of both construction and maintenance of the highway and of the various conduits for public service falls on the owners of lots abutting on the private street. Unfortunately, these owners are rarely the offending developers of the property; they usually are innocent purchasers who have bought lots, relying on the supposition that they were on an accepted or acceptable street. Rather than pursue their rights against the land company which made the sale, they are more likely to prevail on the municipal authorities to waive the requirements and accept the street as a public highway.

The experience of at least one town has worked out a variation of these methods of pressure. Massachusetts towns, by the acceptance of Chapter 191 of the acts of 1907, may authorize the board of selectmen to act as a board of survey with power to compel the submission of all plans for the location of streets or highways for their approval.[147] It was found that while development companies were usually quite willing to submit plans and accept suggestions, when the land was cut up into streets and lots the plans which had been accepted by the board of survey frequently had not been followed. Consequently the town adopted the following regulation:

This practice seems effective at least in cases where the developer desires the approval of the board of survey, but the situation is still left without remedy where the developer is willing to subdivide his land without submitting his plans to the municipal authorities and to construct and maintain streets at his own expense.

The possibilities of official supervision have not been fully realized, partly because of the too frequent use of political influence and partly because of an adherence to old methods, and of an utter lack of scientific handling of the problem and the absence of a well considered city plan. The property owner often objects with justice to the arbitrary specifications required both for the width of a street and the allotments of space for sidewalk and parking strips. Even in cities where most has been accomplished in the planning of a street system there has not been a sufficient regard for the difference in the use of streets as affecting their width and cross section. Many cities require all streets to have a certain minimum width, either 40, 50, or 60 feet between property lines, whereas in some cases a width less than this standard minimum would be much more suitable. Often a street is made 70 feet wide because it is the extension of a street 70 feet wide, although this width both for the old street and the new may be too great or too little. Sidewalks in many cities are given a fixed width in proportion to the width of the entire street, although that width may be excessive or inadequate for sidewalk purposes in special cases.

But at best, supervision by these means will fail of great effectiveness because too much depends on persuasion and there is too little opportunity for legal pressure. The property owner can block the best laid plans of the municipality. To obtain positive control of property development land or rights in land must be taken, and for this the city must pay.

With the purpose of forestalling private development several cities have established bureaus to prepare an official plan of streets to which private platting is expected to conform. A device included in the legislation creating some of these street planning bureaus, which aims to place the location and design of streets absolutely in the control of the municipality, is contained in the provision that owners who erect buildings within the limits of a proposed street as laid down on the official plan will receive no compensation for damage to their buildings when the street is constructed.[148]

But in every state which has enacted this provision except Pennsylvania this interference with private property is regarded as a taking of property without compensation, therefore unconstitutional, or has been expressly so held by the supreme court.[149] From early times Pennsylvania statutes have given the properly constituted municipal authorities power to determine in advance the location of all streets without compensation for the interference with the rights of property owners. By act of June, 1836, commissioners were authorized to set off a certain tract of land and plot it with streets and squares. Notice was then given to property owners concerned, and after a hearing of objections the plan with or without amendments was recorded and became official “and the streets, lanes, and alleys so approved shall forever after be deemed, adjudged and taken to be public highways.” In 1841 the court of general sessions refused to grant a petition establishing this plan on the ground of the unconstitutionality of the statute. The case on a writ of certiorari went to the supreme court which reversed the decision of the lower court and found that

Thirty years later, in 1871, the supreme court further extended the principle by holding that if buildings were erected within the line of the street after notice of the plan was given to the owners, the damage to such building on the opening of such street could not be paid for, “otherwise the map or plan would be entirely nugatory.”[151] The same question was considered in 1893 and the principle was held well established.[152] Curiously enough, the first Pennsylvania case was decided on the reasoning in a New York case decided in 1836, Furman St., 17 Wend. 649,[153] but this New York decision was reversed in 1892 by the case of Forster vs. Scott, 136 N. Y. App. 577,[154] the court holding that

This power of determining the lines of a street without immediate construction of the street has allowed a widening of some of Philadelphia’s narrow business streets in a way impossible in a city of any other state. In 1870 it was determined to increase the width of Chestnut Street from 40 to 50 feet by an addition of five feet on either side. Land abutting on this street has great value and was occupied by costly buildings, and if condemnation proceedings had been instituted for acquiring the additional 10 feet the expense of the improvement would have been perhaps prohibitive. But the act of 1870 provided that compensation should not be paid till a building was reconstructed and set back to the new building line, and thus the expense for getting a 50-foot street was distributed over many years and nothing was paid for buildings. The same process has been adopted for at least two other downtown streets of Philadelphia, but this power has not been employed to increase the width of streets in built-up areas in any other city of Pennsylvania.

PLATTING BOARDS IN VARIOUS CITIES

Philadelphia. Official planning in Philadelphia is done by the bureau of surveys. The board is composed of fourteen district surveyors presided over by the chief engineer and surveyor of the city. Each district surveyor has charge of a particular section of the city, with a corps of engineers and assistants under his immediate direction. He is the only person having the authority to make an official survey of public or private property in his district. All fees for work done for private parties are paid into the city treasury by the individual for whom the work is done. Such a system gives each district surveyor a practical knowledge of the land and of the land owners, and the confidence which is had in the district surveyor has done more to prevent violations of the street plan than the penalties contained in the legislation. The city has a plan of streets ready for each district before the land owners are ready to subdivide their land. When any one or more of the land owners begin to consider platting their land the district surveyor must be consulted, and the city is in a strategic position to carry through its own officially adopted plan.

Boston. The board of survey in Boston was created in 1891[155] with power to make plans of such territory “as the board may deem advisable, showing thereon the location of such streets or ways, whether already laid out or not as the board shall be of opinion that the present or future interests of the public require or will require.” For five years the activity of the board resulted in planning 6,000 acres of comparatively unoccupied territory. The board of survey was succeeded and its duties were taken over by the long established and conservative board of street commissioners in 1896. Since this time there has been much less activity, if the amount of territory covered by a street plan is an accurate measure. The fifteen years of the work of the street commission resulted in the platting of about the same amount of territory as was covered by the board of survey in five years. The difference may be due to a lack of sufficient appropriation. The act of 1891 carried with it a special appropriation for the work of platting new streets, and the city council during the life of the board of survey was very liberal with appropriations for this purpose. During the subsequent history of the street commissioners the only amount available for purposes of platting was what could be spared out of the total appropriation for street work. It is also a fair conclusion that there was less enthusiasm for platting under the board of street commissioners than under the board of survey, which was created for that specific purpose.

A provision in the board of survey act, like those in the Pennsylvania acts, withholds compensation to property owners who erect structures in the streets proposed for new areas, but the supreme court held that this no-damage provision was an interference with the use of property and that since no compensation was given the owner it was an unconstitutional interference.[156] Although this opinion was not necessary for a decision of the case there is little question that the dictum would be followed in Massachusetts, and in accordance with this dictum the street commissioners have been advised by the city of Boston law department that building lines can not been forced without payment of compensation.

It is conjectural just how much this decision has weakened the effectiveness of the board of survey acts as instruments for building up an adequate street system, since no record is kept of the violation of the lines which the board of survey has laid down. The official plan has standing among respectable property owners who recognize a real economy in a planned street system. Conservative banks in Boston refuse to loan on property subject to a board of survey line unless the building plans show the observance of these lines. Careful conveyancers in examining a Boston title inquire whether there is a board of survey line on the property. The practice in Boston is to issue from the city hall a certificate showing all municipal claims against any given parcel of property, and the existence of a board of survey line is noted on this certificate. Pressure can still be brought to bear on non-conforming owners by refusal on the part of the city to co-operate with them in the construction and maintenance of the water, sewer, and lighting systems. It is the general impression among those who are most closely acquainted with the work of the laying-out of the streets that violations of the street lines are of infrequent occurrence.

Under Chapter 191 of the acts of 1907, Massachusetts towns may authorize their selectmen to act as a board of survey with the same power to lay out official streets as the Boston street commissioners. Several towns of the state have accepted the act and in a very few cases survey lines have been imposed on particular streets, but there has been no general extension of the street plan into unoccupied areas.

New York. New York had a topographical bureau for four years, dating from the first Greater New York charter, January 1, 1898, but during these formative years there was little or no progress with official plans. On January 1, 1902, the amended charter placed the topographical work in each of the five boroughs under the control of the borough president, and since then five separate bureaus have had charge of the completion of the map of the city and the drainage plan. The disadvantage of separate planning bureaus, particularly where the territory of two boroughs is contiguous, is obvious. There is, however, one opportunity for securing co-ordination in street planning. All plans must be submitted by the presidents of the boroughs to the board of estimate and apportionment, and they do not become official without the approval of that board. In Manhattan and Brooklyn the plans submitted consist almost entirely in changes in the official map which is practically complete for both boroughs. The following table shows the work of the topographical bureaus in the other boroughs since 1902:

TABLE 7.—PROGRESS MADE IN MAPPING THE BOROUGHS OF THE BRONX, QUEENS, AND RICHMOND, NEW YORK CITY, TO JANUARY 1, 1913[157]

Baltimore. The Baltimore topographical survey commission was created by ordinance in 1893 for the purpose of making a complete survey of the city, including about seventeen square miles of undeveloped territory, rural in character, which had become a part of the city in 1888. With the completion of the survey an official plan was adopted for the annexed territory in 1893 by the mayor and city council, and subsequently by act of the general assembly of Maryland, Baltimore was prohibited from accepting a deed of dedication or the opening in any manner of a street which did not conform to the general plan or the plan duly amended. Amendments of the official plan must be approved by the topographical survey commission and adopted by the city council before they can be incorporated.

In spite of the legislation in Maryland which seems to put the control of city planning in the hands of the city, and in spite of the activity of topographical bureaus of New York City, the limitations on municipal control of street planning in both Baltimore and New York are the same as in Boston. Official streets in both cities have been blocked by the owners of the land or speculative builders, and cases of successive house planting in New York City are notorious. And yet, the advantages of official street plans are considered to offset these limitations and street planning bureaus have passed the experimental stage.

Their success furnishes a precedent for many cities in the United States which still exercise little or no control over a phase of planning where the interest of the private owner is so often opposed to the public good. The possibilities of administrative pressure in the solution of other city planning problems now determined on the initiative of private or corporate interests suggest themselves. The development of the water front, the location of railroad terminals, the transit problem, have all been distinctly recognized as requiring the permanent attention of a special planning board representing the public interest. But in those fields where the public interest is apt to conflict with the advantage of private or corporate owners, the value of expert suggestion and study can never be as fully realized as where the execution of a plan is entirely in the control of the municipality.

PLANNING OF PUBLIC WORK OTHER THAN STREETS

In the location and design of public parks and in the location and design of public buildings, including bridges, the administrative agency of the municipality or other governmental unit has a free hand. The establishment and development of a system of parks and parkways are now entrusted very generally to an administrative board which employs expert advice and considers the park problems of the entire city as a unit. The location and design of public structures are, however, in most cases left to the judgment of the several departments which will use or maintain them; but occasionally the function of a municipal art commission is enlarged so that its approval is necessary to the selection of the site and design for public structures as well as for the location and design of “works of art.”

In New York City the art commission must approve the location and design of all structures for which the contract price exceeds $250,000; but in the case of other public structures the approval of the commission need not be required if the mayor or the board of aldermen request the commission not to act.[159]

The Philadelphia art jury created in 1912 was given this additional power by the legislature of 1913.

In spite of the complete control which a municipality has over the location and design of public structures and the creation and extension of its park system, the obstacles to the formulation of and adherence to a consistent plan are as persistent and often as effective as those which prevent the control of street development.

Expert suggestions have too frequently been disregarded by a purely political city council whose power of appropriation is a most effective check on the execution of city plans. One of the chief objections to the usual form of city government with a mayor and a large elected council of one or two chambers, aside from incompetence and wastefulness and, at the worst, dishonesty, arises from this power of obstruction. Neither the people’s representatives in council nor the engineers and architects in the employ of the city departments have been educated to the idea of a unified city. The department system emphasizes a city’s subdivisions; the political system emphasizes still different subdivisions; and neither group of subdivisions logically fits into a city plan. There may be interesting historical reasons for the combination of certain areas into this or that group; politicians may have had shrewd reasons for establishing certain political boundaries; but the topographical conditions of the site often prove the strangeness of the compound. Several sections contained in a political subdivision may be separated by considerable waterways or difficult grades so that transit between parts of the same political district is almost prohibitively expensive; and yet that district must be treated as a unit when appropriations for public improvements are considered. The ward or district method of electing city councilmen does not produce a body interested in the best development of the city as a unit, the best transit system for the whole city, the best park system for the whole people, the most complete playground system for all the children. Instead, forty units, more or less, with selfish ideas fostered by local business men and property owners, are represented each by a councilman whose best equipment is his ability to get things for his own ward, and the city plan develops like a crazy quilt.

The last few years have seen considerable development of the unit idea. One interesting step is the correlation of all the departments of a city administration. This is done, first, by the creation of a new administrative board in which are united for purposes of efficiency and economy the various departments. Thus under a board of public works or of public improvement are united the maintenance work of the city, and the construction of streets, water mains, sewers, and so forth, each of which municipal services was formerly in charge of a separate department.

The mayor’s cabinet in Kansas City, Missouri, is an interesting experiment in correlation. A weekly conference of the heads of all city departments is held at which questions from each department which affect the development of the entire city are discussed, and the policy of each department is influenced by its effect on other departments. For nine months the experiment was tried only in connection with the city administration. It succeeded so well that to the members of the city administration were added representatives from several organizations and industrial bodies. These conferences are said to have resulted in an improvement in the city’s management by the securing of a most desirable measure of co-operation between the administration and the tax payers. Kansas City was a most advantageous field for an experiment of this kind. The creation of the park and boulevard system of the city had already produced the finest kind of co-operation between property owners and the park commission, and an eager willingness on the part of the citizenship to contribute to the carrying out of the unit idea as expressed in plans of the commission.

The elimination of ward representation in city government is a recent advance toward the unit idea. It is sometimes expressed in the commission form of government, sometimes in a single city council elected at large. From the viewpoint of city planning the most notable advantage of this simplified form of government is that the administration represents the entire city and is not a collection of representatives from the several parts of the city. Other advantages due to a saving in time and money caused by a smaller body with a businesslike procedure, are no doubt real. It is more satisfactory in urging the need of planning measures to deal with a few men, whether bad or good, efficient or stupid. It is also wholesome to fix the responsibility of a policy on an administration consisting of a few men rather than to trace the responsibility through a maze of committees and motions to an irresponsible clerk. City planning legislation may chance to succeed in two chambers of a city council in spite of numbers, because of the domination of one or two individuals; but when responsibility for success or failure must be fixed, it will not be placed on those individuals but ingeniously distributed over various committees. If the single council of limited number is likely to produce better councilors, just so far city planning measures may be benefited; but there is no guaranty of this result. However constituted, the smaller body does represent the entire city; and though each individual member will have by natural and political inheritance a desire for the advancement of his own locality, he may be controlled by the greater fact that he is chosen by all the citizens of the city.

Boston is the largest city with sufficient experience to test this theory. Certain critics of the charter of 1909 tried to strike a locally popular note by alleging that wards without representation in the council did not get their share of the annual appropriations for local improvements. This statement is not borne out by the facts. The figures for the years 1910 and 1911 show a total appropriation of $2,132,881 for local improvements excluding appropriations for highways, sewers, bridges, and other improvements in which the city as a whole is interested. Of this sum, $795,163 was used in four districts which had no representative, as the term was formerly used in the council. The entire membership in the council came from six districts of the city, or seventeen wards. Distributing the amount spent on these districts among the seventeen wards would result in an average of $78,689 each, with which an average of $90,395 for each of the eight wards in unrepresented districts compares very favorably. Five members of the council of nine live in three wards whose appropriations for the last two years for local improvements make a total of $133,000. This is only one-sixteenth of the total appropriated, and the remaining fifteen-sixteenths is for districts which all together had only a minority in the council. Such evidence is an interesting corroboration of the sound conclusion that the elimination of sectional representation is an important step toward the carrying out of the unit idea in comprehensive city planning.

PLANNING COMMISSIONS

1. HISTORY

The appointment of planning commissions is the most recent step in the development of the unit idea in city planning. In theory, the function of this new agency is to correlate the official plans prepared in the various municipal departments, to pass upon unofficial plans or suggestions for improvement, and to make plans of its own in all cases where no existing agency has jurisdiction. Hartford, Connecticut, was the first to establish such a commission under a resolution of the Connecticut Legislature of 1907.[161] The Chicago plan commission dates from 1909; the Baltimore and Detroit commissions from the following year.

In 1911 Pennsylvania and New Jersey passed general acts enabling cities of the second class (Pittsburgh and Scranton) in Pennsylvania and cities of the first class in New Jersey, to create an additional executive department to be known as the department of city planning. In 1913, by general law, New York state authorized the appointment of planning commissions in all cities and incorporated villages; Pennsylvania extended the act of 1911 with important amendments to cities of the third class, and Massachusetts made planning commissions mandatory in all cities and towns of over 10,000. In the same year by special act of the Connecticut Assembly plan commissions were authorized for the cities of New Haven and West Hartford, following the precedent of Hartford; in Ohio, Cleveland[162] and Dayton included city planning commissions in their new city charters.

The following list of active plan commissions does not include temporary commissions appointed merely to make a report or prepare a city plan.

TABLE 8.—YEARS IN WHICH PLANNING COMMISSIONS WERE AUTHORIZED, AND SOURCE OF AUTHORIZATION, FOR THE 54 CITIES OR TOWNS HAVING PLANNING COMMISSIONS IN APRIL, 1914

A suburban metropolitan plan commission was also created in 1913 for Pennsylvania cities of the first class (Philadelphia), to have jurisdiction over a district comprising the cities within 25 miles of Philadelphia. This commission is to be composed of fifteen members appointed by the governor of the state. Its aim is to secure “coordinating comprehensive plans of highways and roads, parks and parkways, and all other means of intercommunication; water supply, sewerage and sewage disposal, collection and disposal of garbage, housing, sanitation and health, playgrounds, civic centers, and other public improvements that will affect the character of the district as a whole or more than one political unit within the district.”[163] The aims of the commission can be realized only by recommendation to the several governmental units contained in the district. This legislation is particularly interesting since it is the first successful attempt to create a metropolitan planning commission.

The commission of inquiry appointed by the governor of Massachusetts in 1911 presented to the legislature of 1912 a draft for just such a planning commission, which contained a novel feature for getting its plans carried out. Massachusetts is well supplied with executive commissions with some planning functions. It has a highway board, a grade crossing commission, a transit commission, a gas and electric light commission, a railroad commission, a metropolitan park commission, and a metropolitan water and sewer board, all with jurisdiction in the metropolitan district. The commission of inquiry wisely recommended the necessity of keeping these existing commissions in office. Their tasks were large enough.

The new commission was to be distinctly a planning and not an executing body. Its province was to be suggestion, advice, supervision, and correlation. The cities and towns of the metropolitan district were to be offered, for the consummation of improvements classed as metropolitan by the planning commission, the credit of the state and a direct contribution toward the cost of improvements by the state and by the metropolitan district at large, if the local unit accepted in its development the plan of the commission. The device thus incorporated in the bill recognized two strongly rooted attributes in municipal character—jealousy of local self-government and openness to persuasion when the persuasion is golden. It distinctly kept hands off of metropolitan commissions, county commissions, and local governments, by the provision that all improvements should be executed by the body that would have executed them before the passage of the bill. It offered merely to provide a plan for the whole district and help on the financial burden. All improvements in the metropolitan district submitted to the proposed planning commission were to be classified as local improvements, as ordinary metropolitan improvements, or as extraordinary improvements. In the case of purely local improvements the locality stood the entire financial burden; in the case of ordinary metropolitan improvements the localities in which the improvement was located paid 65 per cent of the entire cost, the metropolitan district 20 per cent and the state 10 per cent; in the case of an extraordinary metropolitan improvement the distribution of the expense was to be determined by a commission appointed by the supreme court of the state.

A feature of very real financial assistance was offered by the provision that towns or cities of the district might borrow money to meet the expense of metropolitan improvements, and this loan would not be considered in reckoning the debt limit. The weakness of the device is in the provision that 20 per cent of the cost of metropolitan improvements should be paid by the entire district. It is very questionable whether there is unity enough in any metropolitan district to allow a fixed assessment over the whole district for an improvement where the most direct benefit is to only two or three towns. But this interesting experiment did not survive the legislative hearing. It was defeated not so much because of opposition to the principle of the bill as out of real or imaginary fear in the minds of the political leaders in the towns and cities about Boston, who see in any plan for a more unified development of the metropolitan district the domination of Boston.

Another legislative experiment in city planning which did not come to maturity should also be mentioned. In 1910 the city of Seattle adopted an amendment to the city charter by the addition of a new article which created a municipal plans commission. Seattle was just then finishing some costly reconstruction, washing away grades and widening important thoroughfares, and the wisdom of avoiding such an experience again appealed to the city with peculiar emphasis. The amendment put on the commission the duty of procuring plans for the arrangement of the city with a view to such expansion as would meet probable future demands. Of the twenty-one members of the commission seven represented the city or county government, and fourteen were appointed by the mayor from nominations of fourteen groups representing architects, engineers, business, real estate, the water front owners, and the public service corporations. The commission served without compensation but was authorized to employ experts, not exceeding three, to prepare a comprehensive plan.

So far there is nothing new in the legislation, but the next provisions are unique. The report was to be presented to the mayor and council not later than December 30, 1911, and