THE STATUS OF THE LAND

The Urban Environment

Twentieth-century America has known two great population displacements-the first from farms to cities and the second from the cities to the suburbs. Three out of four Americans now live in urban environments-in incorporated settlements of at least 2,500 population and in metropolitan areas consisting of central cities and suburbs. Metropolitan areas alone are home to two of every three Americans, and the percentage is rising.

Residential patterns in many metropolitan areas resemble a series of sharply defined concentric circles. The decaying inner city houses the majority of the urban poor, usually nonwhites who ordinarily have little choice but to stay. Surrounding the inner city are neighborhoods commonly less old and less dense, usually populated by white working-class families. These families often lean toward leaving the central city because of rising property taxes, deteriorating school systems, and racial changes. But they have stayed because they could not afford the newer suburban housing or because of strong ties to their neighborhoods. The 1970 census may show some shifts from this pattern. Beyond the city is suburbia. The suburbs are a magnet for those seeking escape from the burdens of urban life while retaining some of its advantages. (In some areas the pattern is different; the poor often live on the fringes, and the affluent in the city itself, and mixed patterns occur in other metropolitan areas.)

The financial plight of the cities is well known. The influx of the poor and the exodus of the middle class and the wealthy, among other factors, have drained the cities of many of their revenue sources. Public services, such as police protection, park maintenance and sanitation, have deteriorated.

The most visible effects of these economic pressures are the rapid pace and nature of physical change. This is clearly evident in downtown areas where the constant cycle of construction and demolition is often considered a city's badge of growth. Pressed for revenues, many cities bow to the demands of developers to replace historic buildings and distinctive architecture with almost uniform steel and glass box office buildings. Unfortunately, this construction may simply put more people on the sidewalks and more cars on the streets, more monotonous skyscrapers towering above, and more noise and congestion below. Much downtown rebuilding has furthered the trend 168

toward daytime cities with facilities such as offices and banks, which have no nighttime uses. Cities lose their uniqueness as their historic buildings and neighborhoods are replaced by the dullest in modern architecture. The result is often a dreary sameness in the appearance and character of downtown areas.

Physical deterioration is overtaking the housing in many areas of central cities. The oldest housing traditionally filters down to the poorest families as previous occupants better their lot and move to new apartments or suburban homes. Of the 1.7 million substandard housing units in urban areas, nearly all lie in central cities. In slum neighborhoods of some large cities, the amount of abandoned housing is as high as 15 percent.

With the well-known reliance of the suburbanite on the automobile, often to commute to the center city, many downtown and other urban centers have gradually become auto dominated. Much of the change and reconstruction in downtown areas is for freeways, parking garages, and lots-lavish users of space. However, the alternative, public transportation, is constantly frustrated by rising costs, the sprawling nature of the suburbs, and dependence on the automobile.

Many cities have lost the spirit to attract people downtown. With the growing number of shops and other services locating in the suburbs and with crime threatening many local businesses and frightening people from the streets, much of the vitality is missing from the central cities. Many city officials, however, are trying to bring people and excitement back. Apartments in downtown areas, sidewalk cafes, outdoor concerts, bicycle routes, even saving the cable cars in San Francisco all are small but key efforts to recapture this lost spirit. Rehabilitation, successfully carried out in Philadelphia, and a few other cities signals that the character of the urban environment can be revitalized.

Few cities have kept pace with parkland needs. Trees have not been planted to shade busy avenues at the same rate that they have been felled for street widening. Too often only a few species are planted, and they are often blighted by disease and insect invasions so common to unstable ecosytems. In the Midwest, Dutch elm disease has decimated row on row of beautiful elms.

The immediate economic pressure on a city to permit a parking lot or building on what might remain open space, or to use parklands as part of a freeway route, is often insurmountable. Nevertheless, the accelerating cost of land acquisition and the growing need to preserve open space in a crowded urban environment make the purchase of open

areas a sound long-range economic practice, which continues to pay immeasurable dividends. The Boston Common, New York's Central Park, Washington's Rock Creek Park, San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, and many other city parks are tributes to the foresight of early planners in saving large open areas. The protection of streams, ponds, and marshes within cities permits the survival there of numerous species of wildlife, including small animals, birds, and waterfowl which adapt surprisingly well to the urban environment.

Man requires a feeling of permanence to attain a sense of place, importance, and identity. For many persons in the city, the presence of nature is the harmonizing thread in an environment otherwise of man's own making.

The Suburban Environment

Although rural to urban migration was primarily economically motivated, the suburban impulse is largely a matter of social preference. Because of economic and social obstacles, these population shifts have affected the races unequally. Eighty percent of the blacks in metropolitan areas now live in central cities, while 60 percent of the metropolitan whites live in the suburbs. Zoning practices, subdivision controls, and the higher costs of suburban living have made it difficult for lower income minority groups to move from the city to the suburbs. From 1950 to 1969, while the population of central cities increased only 12 percent, the population of suburban areas soared 91 percent. By 1969, there were 71 million suburbanites and 59 million central city residents.

The suburban tide—Since the late 1800's a blend of town and country has stood for the optimum residential environment. The suburb is thought to offer the best of both worlds. Besides enjoying ready access to the large city with its concentrated economic and cultural facilities, the suburban resident seeks a crime-free neighborhood amid clean air, open lawns, and quiet and uncrowded living. Streetcar and occasional subway lines started what at first was but a trickle of people from the central cities to the outskirts of town. The Federal Government quickened the outward flow after World War II by providing mortgage assistance, which enabled many central city residents to become suburban homeowners. Later the vast urban freeway systems turned the flow into a flood. The automobile now controls suburban life.

To the couple living in an apartment downtown, the birth of a second child is a common signal to abandon the city. And often families with school-age children leave for the better educational systems of the suburbs. As industries convert to modern, single-flow assembly production processes, manufacturers also forego the city for rambling suburban plants. Since World War II, space needs per industrial worker have quadrupled, and three of every four new manufacturing jobs have been created in suburbs.

Each year, expanding urban areas consume an estimated 420,000 acres of land in an undiscriminating outward push. Development moves out from the city along transportation corridors, branching out from the highways and expressway interchanges. Extension of water and sewer services generates whole new developments on quickly divided farms. After outlying areas are built up at moderate densities, developers often return to land which was passed over as undesirable or too costly in the first wave.

Many suburban communities zone to assure that house lots are large and apartment houses few, a practice that assumes that land is abundant. This zoning practice, in seeking to attract moderate to high income families, tends to exclude those in greatest need of the jobs opening in the suburbs. Excluding them deepens the concentration of poverty and unemployment in the central city ghettos.

Highways and freeways become congested as the tide of suburban commuters to the city grows. This congestion, together with the lengthening distances from suburban homes to downtown offices produces tension and robs the typical suburbanite of time with his family. The impact of growth-Although the impact of the rural-to-suburban shift of land use varies greatly throughout the country, certain effects tend to be common to this change. Open space is continuously eaten up by housing, which, with most present subdivision practices, provides few parks but instead only offers each family its individual front and back yard. Space is likewise diminished by other facilities required by suburban development. Shopping centers and highway interchanges, made necessary by dependence on the automobile and truck, consume large portions of land. Airports, commonly constructed in suburban or exurban areas and constantly growing in size and number, pose similar problems on an even larger scale, attracting a vast conglomeration of light industry and housing. Consequently, the growing suburban population finds less and less public open space.