# Chapter 3: How We Lost Our Way The United States invented modern city planning, then promptly forgot what it had invented. In the 1920s, America created a framework for building cities. Within a generation, we had abandoned it for something far worse. Understanding how this happened matters because we're still living with the consequences. By the early 1900s, American cities were in crisis. The industrial revolution had drawn millions from farms to factories, creating dense, dangerous urban environments. People lived next to where they worked, and they worked in hellish conditions: coal-burning factories, chemical plants, slaughterhouses. Tenement houses packed families into dark, airless rooms. Cities weren't places people chose to live; they were places people endured out of economic necessity. New York City took the first major step in 1916 with its _Zoning Resolution_. The idea was straightforward: use the law to separate incompatible uses. Keep factories away from houses. Limit building heights to preserve light and air. Give people space to breathe. It worked. Other cities took notice and began drafting their own zoning codes. But this created a new problem: every city was inventing its own approach. The legal foundations were shaky. Courts were divided on whether cities even had the power to tell property owners what they could build. Herbert Hoover, then Secretary of Commerce and himself an engineer, recognized the need for consistency. In 1921 he formed the _Advisory Committee on Zoning_ (later the _Advisory Committee on City Planning and Zoning_) to create model laws that cities across the country could adopt.[^1] This would provide both a consistent framework and a solid legal foundation. The committee recognized a key distinction: city planning involves two distinct realms. There's the public realm (streets, parks, civic buildings) and the private realm (houses, shops, offices). This maps precisely onto the constitutional and representational orders from Chapter 1. The two require different tools, so the committee created two model laws. The first was the _Standard State Zoning Enabling Act (SSZEA)_, first published in 1924 and revised in 1926. It dealt with private property, giving cities the power to regulate what could be built where. The official primer defined zoning as "the application of common sense and fairness to the public regulations governing the use of private real estate."[^2] Note that last word: _private_. The second was the _Standard City Planning Enabling Act (SCPEA)_, published in 1928. This was the parent document, broader in scope and deeper in purpose. It dealt with the public realm, what the act called the "master plan." The SCPEA's definition of a master plan is worth quoting in full, because it shows how clearly the authors understood city planning:[^3] > It shall be the function and the duty of the commission to make and adopt a master plan. Such plan…shall show the commission's recommendations for the development of said territory, including, among other things, the general location, character, and extent of streets, viaducts, subways, bridges, waterways, water fronts, boulevards, parkways, playgrounds, squares, parks, aviation fields, and other public ways, grounds and open spaces, the general location of public buildings and other public property, and the general location and extent of public utilities and terminals, whether publicly or privately owned or operated, for water, light, sanitation, transportation, communication, power, and other purposes; also the removal, relocation, widening, narrowing, vacating, abandonment, change of use or extension of any of the foregoing ways, grounds, open spaces, buildings, property, utilities, or terminals; as well as a zoning plan. Streets come first. Public infrastructure dominates the list. And then, at the very end, almost as an afterthought: "as well as a zoning plan." The master plan, centered on the permanent framework of streets, came first. Zoning was just one component, subordinate to the larger vision. You planned the public realm, then regulated the private realm within that framework. Each act had its own essential map. The Planning Act had the master street plan (referred to as an Official Map): a map showing all current and future streets. The Zoning Act had the zoning map: a map showing what uses were allowed where. The street plan was permanent; the zoning map could change as needs evolved. The authors published the acts in what they thought was logical order: zoning first (since it addressed the most pressing problems), comprehensive planning second (to provide the broader framework). They assumed cities would implement both, in the proper relationship. Unfortunately, they were wrong. Zoning was easier to understand, easier to implement, and seemed to address more immediate problems. Cities rushed to adopt zoning codes. The Commerce Department distributed more than 55,000 copies of the SSZEA, a bestseller by government standards.[^1] Zoning consultants fanned out across the country. By the time the SCPEA was published two years later, zoning had already won over planners and politicians alike. Worse, a 1947 Connecticut case, _Bishop v. Board of Zoning Appeals of New Haven_, redefined "comprehensive plan" to mean something entirely different from what the SCPEA intended.[^4] Instead of a plan for streets and public infrastructure, the court said a comprehensive plan was: > A general plan to control and direct the use and development of property in a municipality...by dividing it into districts according to the present and potential use of the properties. In other words, zoning. The court had effectively written the street plan out of existence. The legal reversal from planning-first to zoning-first was the visible symptom. Something deeper had shifted in American culture: call it the operating system that determines which planning interventions are even possible in a given era. Consider what enabled the 1811 Manhattan commissioners to lay out their grid. They worked in a young republic that believed in future growth and prepared for it, that gave government the authority to impose geometric order on private property, and that had legal and economic systems built to enforce boundaries across generations. They didn't face years of environmental review. They didn't hold endless community meetings. They didn't worry about lawsuits from every affected property owner. In four years they produced a map, and that map became reality. The commissioners planned for "centuries to come," and everyone understood this as reasonable. Today's political cycles can barely think past the next election. A politician proposing a 100-year framework would be laughed at for ignoring "current needs." We've become a culture of fixes, not frameworks, and the capacity for deep time thinking, essential for street planning, has atrophied. The regulatory regime has inverted along with it. In the past, regulation focused on the larger scales (laying out streets for an entire city) while leaving individual property owners mostly free to build as they wished. That produced both coherent public frameworks and private freedom. Over time, regulations crept up the layers of permanence like kudzu. We now obsess over the color you can paint your house, whether you can keep chickens, how tall your fence can be: the things that last years. Meanwhile, we've largely abandoned any attempt to impose coherent order on the permanent framework of streets, lots, and blocks: the things that last centuries. We micromanage the temporary and ignore the permanent. Part of the reason is that the 20th century taught hard lessons. Urban renewal cleared "slums" but created worse problems. Housing projects concentrated poverty. Highways destroyed neighborhoods. Each grand plan that failed eroded trust in planning itself.[^5] But the planners behind those failures had not studied what worked for millennia. They imposed untested theories they thought should work, at a scale that hid the consequences. That disconnect of scale may be modern planning's greatest failing. A planner waves a hand over a map drawn at 1 inch = 1,000 feet, not grasping what the gesture represents. At that scale an entire house lot is barely 1/16 inch wide. A living room is an imperceptible 1/64 inch square. A desk shrinks to 1/256 inch. Yet in real life, that desk is where someone spends eight hours a day, and that living room holds a family's entire existence. It is an order of magnitude easier to design at 1 inch = 1,000 feet than at 1 inch = 100 feet, but the convenience comes at a cost: a pixelated view of life that lacks the resolution to get anything right. This isn't nostalgia for a lost era. The 1811 plan had flaws, and the commissioners were far from perfect. But they had something we've lost: the cultural authority to create permanent public frameworks. Zoning-first planning succeeded because it fit the new cultural code: reactive, protective, piecemeal. What our predecessors knew is a learnable craft. ## Zoning First This reversal, putting zoning before streets, changed how American cities grew. Instead of laying out a connected network of streets and then letting uses sort themselves out within that framework, we did the opposite. We decided on uses first, then figured out streets parcel by parcel. When you zone first and subdivide second, streets become afterthoughts, designed only to serve the specific development they're part of. A residential developer builds a pod of houses with streets that efficiently serve those houses—and only those houses. The office park next door does the same. The shopping center down the road, likewise. None of these street systems connect to each other. Why would they? They were designed in isolation, for single uses, without any master plan to guide them. The result is a landscape of pods, each turned inward, connected only by massive arterial roads that are prone to congestion because they're the only connections available. The cul-de-sac became the perfect symbol of this backwards approach. By design, a cul-de-sac doesn't connect to anything. It serves only the uses on it. From a zoning perspective, this is ideal—it keeps "incompatible" uses separated. From an urban form perspective, it breaks the network. When every development ends in cul-de-sacs, you create an unadaptable city of dead ends. Pre-war American cities, the ones consistently rated as our best places to live, were built streets-first. Philadelphia, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Savannah, Charleston: all started with their streets first. The uses came later and continue to evolve within those frameworks. The same goes for countless small towns: Decorah, Iowa; Clarkesville, Georgia; Beacon, New York. These cities can adapt because their street networks allow it. When the mansions of Boston's Back Bay were subdivided into apartments, the street pattern didn't care. When former warehouses in Portland became brewpubs and lofts, the grid absorbed the change. The permanent framework remains while uses flow through it as needs change. But post-war suburbs, built zoning-first, can't adapt. When the strip mall fails, when the office park empties, when demographics shift and demand changes, these places are stuck. Their street patterns were designed for specific uses. Change the use and the whole system breaks down. To understand the consequences of abandoning master street plans, visit Alpharetta, Georgia. This Atlanta suburb represents the logical endpoint of zoning-first planning: a place where a coherent street network has disappeared entirely. Drive through Alpharetta and you'll find yourself in a maze of cul-de-sacs, each serving a single-use pod. The word "block" barely applies here. A block, properly defined, is an area of private property surrounded by public streets. In Alpharetta, you might drive for miles before completing a circuit around what could technically be called a block. One typical Alpharetta "block" is over 1,300 acres. That's roughly the size of midtown Atlanta—in a single block. This isn't a neighborhood; it's an anti-neighborhood, a place where the basic unit of urbanism has been stretched past usefulness. ![[alpharetta-block.png]] But the inhuman scale is only part of the problem. Those 1,300 acres might contain a handful of office buildings, some apartment complexes, a few strip malls. But because there are so few streets, there's almost no frontage. Even if market demand existed for ten times the development (more shops, more offices, more housing), there's nowhere to put it that would create a walkable, lively place. Sure, you could pile those uses internal to the block, but they would be heavily isolated and disconnected. The sparse street network means any new development must turn inward, creating another pod accessible only by car. You could have enormous demand for urban-style development, but the street pattern makes it impossible. The land sits underutilized not because of zoning or market forces, but because there simply aren't enough streets to create enough connected frontage to support real urban life. It's like having a thousand actors ready to perform but only building a tiny stage. Zoning itself isn't evil. Separating incompatible uses (heavy industry from housing) makes sense. The problem is that zoning came to dominate. Instead of being one tool among many, subordinate to the larger framework of city planning, it became the framework itself. This trap persists because zoning seems to address immediate problems. Residents don't want apartments next to their houses? Zone them out. Worried about traffic? Require more parking. Each decision seems reasonable in isolation. But collectively, they create cities that don't function as cities. Real cities are messy and constantly changing. Jane Jacobs recognized this in _The Death and Life of Great American Cities_ (1961) when she wrote that cities are "problems in organized complexity."[^6] Zoning tries to impose simple order on this complexity. It says: houses here, shops there, offices over there, and never shall they meet. But the mixing is what makes cities work. The coffee shop depends on nearby residents and office workers. Those residents, in turn, need walkable services. And the offices need somewhere to eat at lunch. Separate these uses and you don't get orderly cities. You get dead zones that only activate during narrow windows, that require driving between each activity, that can't adapt when needs change. The solution isn't to abandon all planning or even to eliminate zoning. It's to put things back in proper order: streets first, uses second. The permanent framework before the temporary regulation. So what makes a good street plan? What patterns create frameworks that can last centuries and adapt to changing needs? That's what we discovered when we started measuring the neighborhoods Americans consistently rate as their best. --- Continue to [[Chapter 4 - Learning from Precedent]] → [^1]: Ruth Knack, Stuart Meck, and Israel Stollman, "The Real Story Behind the Standard Planning and Zoning Acts of the 1920s," _Land Use Law & Zoning Digest_ 48, no. 2 (February 1996). [^2]: U.S. Department of Commerce, Advisory Committee on Zoning, _A Zoning Primer_ (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1926), 1. [^3]: U.S. Department of Commerce, _A Standard City Planning Enabling Act_ (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1928), section 6. [^4]: _Bishop v. Board of Zoning Appeals of New Haven_, 133 Conn. 614 (1947). [^5]: Robert Moses embodied the attitude. Frances Perkins, who worked alongside him in the 1920s, said he loved "The Public" but not people: "the public is just The Public. It's a great amorphous mass to him; it needs to be bathed, it needs to be aired, it needs recreation, but not for personal reasons—just to make it a better public." Quoted in Robert Caro, _The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York_ (New York: Knopf, 1974). [^6]: Jane Jacobs, _The Death and Life of Great American Cities_ (New York: Random House, 1961), chapter 22. --- Annotations: 0,16279 SHA-256 d260c55f033a6c1516be &Claude: 9176,17 @Paul Knight: ...