Before Euclid and Modern Suburbia.

 

Is there a good descriptor of how pre-Euclid and pre-modern suburbia raw development, that led to our great cities, actually worked?

People build kind of whatever they wanted. In Manhattan, the Astor's (richest people in America) abandoned their mansion on the edge of town and moved away because of the encroach of working-class high-rises destroyed the neighborhood character. You had a legal right to build anything, and the only way your neighbor could do anything about it was by suing you for nuisance. And blocking someone's view or sunlight was not considered a nuisance.

But, I don't think Strong Towns is quite getting this quite correct when they broadly blame "regulations" and "financing" for how and why development is different today relative to some supposed historic "incremental" methodology.

Strong Towns is absolutely right in blaming regulations and financing for how and why development today is different. Euclid meant you could buy a house and know that no one was ever going to build a (smelly) glue factory next door. So, housing became a far safer investment. And that meant banks were willing to loan more money to more people. So, there was more demand for owner-occupied housing. SZEA and SCPEA made zoning more prevalent. But that wasn't enough. 

The GI bill made any returning veteran eligible for a subsidized mortgage. Prior to the GI Bill (Federally subsidized mortgages), a mortgage was 50% down and lasted 5 years. Afterwards, it was 5% down and lasted 30 years. By one estimate, half the adult male population had been in the military at that point. So huge numbers of people could afford to buy houses, setting off a massive surge in homebuilding, which made it into a real industry, and people started to apply the mass production methods used for war for housing production. (Levitt-town is famous for a reason). Streetcar suburbs had done something similar, but nothing like at the same scale--there hadn't been the finance to support the demand to support the scale to support the specialization.

Of course it is almost certainly some kind of change in "regulations" and/or how the government operates but I think this would be worth pinning down. If we want to go back to some supposed golden age we need to actually understand that golden age.

SZEA and SCPEA were enabling legislation - it made zoning less liable to legal challenge (Supremacy clause). And the GI bill provided the financing. But the government operations don't stop there. The whole paradigm of modern suburbia relies on government planned and funded freeways. How we did it was a bit tricky. Federal government can't legally own roads, so they passed legislation saying that any State with a DOT was eligible for a 90% construction subsidy for highways and also added a fuel tax. Lots of freeways were build, and combined with expanding auto-ownership, moving to a semi-rural suburban idyll with big yards and lots parking became available to many. (And for most boomers, that era is the Golden Age of their childhood). However, it came to a crashing end in 1973 with the Arab Oil Embargo, and the formation of OPEC. 

Canonically, when I think Chicago or New York, I think (maybe imagining) paper streets as far as the eye can read on maps read across miles of undeveloped land, or whatever the original townsite was. I know Jason Barr has some blog posts at building the skyline about the mapping and surveying of Manhattan, but it's light on the when, where and how of the actual infrastructure construction timing and its relation to the when, where, and how of the related building construction.

The Wikipedia Article on the 1811 Commissioners Plan is a good place to start. But It's critical to realize how minimal city infrastructure was until the Victorian era. The Croton aqueduct (1842) bringing fresh clean water to Manhattan was major civic achievement.  You don't have paved roads, water mains, piped gas, or even sewers for quite a long time. A road was where it was illegal to build, and it was dirt or mud with a ditch in the middle for stormwater for when it rained. Water came from the well in the back yard, probably with a latrine nearby, which probably emptied into the local creek. London itself doesn't get sewers until 1865. 

The building construction (multiple stories, half lot coverage) ran long before any kind of public infrastructure. Much the same in smaller towns. The house my dad grew up in dumped its sewerage directly into a local creek, via a cast iron pipe from the toilet, and had an old on-site well. You tended to see public infrastructure investment when property-specific system collapsed. Culinary water typically at the forefront - once the local watershed is polluted, there is no way to fix it. Sewers are an easy sell to voters - less smell. For paving, roads were paved using a system that looks very much like a Public Improvement District, levying a tax on houses fronting onto them. We owe a certain amount of paving to streetcar companies, for whom the franchise agreement allowing them to build a railway in the public right of way required them to pave it as part of the deal, and since they were already doing a lot of grading, earthwork, and water management to their own project, it wasn't a big deal. 

Highway paving was erratic and ad-hoc. The AAA maps don't refer to thinks as 'auto trails' without reason, and a journey from LA to Long Beach was an all-day excursion and mostly off-road. There was nominally a national highway system from 1926, but without attached funding it was a bit conceptual, and mostly a matter of signage, connecting bits of roads. 

Suburbia relies on highways. Suburban development relies on being able to link local suburban roads to the broader public network. Without public highways, travel to a new subdivision would be along a rutted rural dirt road, and thereby much less comfortable and far slower. Which meant such a location was less attractive, and so less rentable, and so not worth developing.

But really it was the scale of suburban development that mattered--building a subdivision meant an efficiency of scale that supported the develop of local infrastructure networks. By splitting the cost of a water main and sewer main over 30 houses with a sort of minimum spanning tree, you could afford to connect everyone to a local creek or sewer main. 

But part of what makes suburbia work is that it is a process - it's not just the one suburb, but the assumption that future suburbs will emerge. And that makes it worthwhile to make public infrastructure improvements in things like substations and public schools that would not otherwise be reasonable for a single suburb. 

We used to build plenty and it might be related to how we built differently. How, exactly?

Well, no. For a brief period, we built plenty. But that period was pretty brief, only a few decades. It seems like it went on for a long time because we repeated the same cycle in new places (The interstate didn't reach everywhere at once, and viability of continued interstate widening has varied based on terrain, climate, and public opposition).

It's really critical to understand what Strong Towns is about, and the name should be a clue--they are about towns. A town is a place where, after the initial settlement boom, the increase in local population is largely dependent on local natural increase. Which tends to be gradual, and so new housing development tended to be incremental. A space previously used for an orchard or garden or poultry yard would become a new house.

The style of structure built was also different. Financing was limited (five years with 50 percent down) so everyone tended to build a small house and add to it over time, adding and enclosing porches to all sides. "Barnacling" as Strong Towns calls it.

Prior to mortgages, a starter home in the twenties might consist of a of a bedroom, kitchen, bathroom and living room (where the children would sleep). A larger house might have a front parlor, dining room, kitchen, dining room, and two bedrooms. Laundry was done out of doors, porches were the 'mud rooms', and play took place wherever. The panoply of rooms that characterizes our houses today didn't exist.

After the GI bill, rather than incremental additions, you could afford to be like a rich person and build it all at once. And if a garage was attached and integrated into the house, that counted as part of the house, and that could be financed as well.

Prior to the GI Bill, households were also different. You lived with family until you got married, and once you had your own house, you had lodgers--siblings and cousins and extended family who provided domestic labor. And if you had any kind of money, you had live-in servants for whom you provided bed and board. A household was not a matter of relation--it was an economic unit. (You can still see this in early zoning codes, which forbid unrelated persons living together, excepting domestic servants). You took in boarders or lodgers inverse to your number of kids, and your youngest kid probably never moved out and stayed to care for you in your dotage. Or, if your daughter got married, you might move in with her to her new house.