The Best-Laid Plans - Randal O'Toole

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as she was criticizing urban planning as a pseudoscience, she herself was creating another pseudoscience. One person who was aware of this irony was Herbert Gans, a sociologist whose research far exceeded Jacobs’s amateurish efforts. Gans spent a year living in an inner-city neighborhood like Greenwich Village, and then spent a year living in a low-density suburb. His books The Urban Villagers and The Levittowners dispel many of the myths propounded by urban planners to this day, including some that were accepted or promoted by Jacobs.

      Like Jacobs, Gans was often critical of urban planners, whose “values are those of the professional upper-middle class.” Among other things, Gans found, planners acted as though lower-class people were simply people with middle-class values who lacked “access to opportunities and services available to the middle class.” So planners assumed “that cultural change can be induced by providing the improved residential conditions and … educational, health, and other facilities.”12 This is the design fallacy—the idea that urban design shapes human behavior—that pervades much of urban planning.

      In his 1961 review of The Death and Life, Gans admits that Jacobs’s observations of inner-city neighborhoods “are far more closely attuned to how people actually live than are those of orthodox city planning.” But he points out that Jacobs’s emphasis on such things as short blocks is simply another example of the design fallacy, and her claim that cities need diversity is “not entirely supported by the facts.”13

      Instead of focusing on design, Gans presents a cultural interpretation of inner-city neighborhoods. In the 1950s, ethnic, working-class families dominated these neighborhoods. “In this culture, the home is reserved for the family, so that much social life takes place outdoors.” Thus, the active street life in these neighborhoods “stems not so much from their physical characteristics as from the working-class structure of their inhabitants.” This active street life also attracts “intellectuals, artists, and bohemian types [such as Jacobs], contributing further to the street life.” The resulting “exotic flavor then draws visitors and tourists, whose presence helps to make the district even livelier.”

      Middle-class people enjoy the “charm and excitement” of such lively neighborhoods as tourists, but few—Jane Jacobs and Herbert Gans being exceptions—actually tried to live in them. Gans pointed out that those charmed by Jacobs’s description of Greenwich Village or their own visits to such neighborhoods often failed to see that, from the point of view of residents, “the houses in these traditional districts are often hard to maintain, that parking is often impossible, that noise and dirt are ever present, that some of the neighbors watch too much, and that not all of the shopkeepers are kind.”14

      “Middle-class people,” Gans wrote, “especially those raising children, do not want working-class—or even bohemian—neighborhoods.” Their social lives take place indoors, which leads people on the outside to erroneously conclude that their neighborhoods are dull. “But visibility is not the only measure of vitality, and areas that are uninteresting to the visitor may be quite vital to the people who live in them.” Middle-class people do not necessarily socialize with their neighbors; “their friends may be scattered all over the metropolitan area, as are the commercial and recreational facilities which they frequent.” This means they need a car, not pedestrian-oriented, mixed-use housing.

      Gans recognized, as Jacobs did not, that the inner-city neighborhoods “were built for a style of life which is going out of fashion with the large majority of Americans who are free to choose their place of residence.” Young people raised in these neighborhoods moved out as soon as they were old enough to have their own children. As working-class families moved to the suburbs, some were replaced by bohemians—mainly young people with no children who appreciated the lively streets. But it is likely that many of the lively neighborhoods would have disappeared with or without urban renewal.

      While Gans himself enjoyed living in one of these neighborhoods, he “made no recommendations for or against urban villages or ethnic enclaves, because they are desirable only if people want to live in them, and that is up to them.” His objection to urban renewal was “first and foremost economic and political” because it often imposed high costs on low-income people in order to subsidize high-income housing and because it deprived people of the right to choose how they wanted to live.15 He feared that Jacobs’s colorful descriptions of these neighborhoods would “win her the support of those who profit from the status quo” and those “who want to bring back the city and the society of the 18th and 19th centuries.”16

      This is exactly what happened when a new generation of urban planners read Jacobs’s book. Instead of finding in The Death and Life a warning that urban planning does more harm than good, planners used the book as a model for how they should do urban renewal. If Jacobs’s high-density, mixed-use communities were so good in the inner city, the planners reasoned, then they should be built everywhere else too, and particularly in the suburbs. Calling themselves New Urbanists, they proposed that all new developments be like Greenwich Village: high densities, mixed uses, with limited room for the automobile. They also urged that existing suburbs be redeveloped along these lines. “There’s no question that [Jane Jacobs’s] work is the leaping-off point for our whole movement,” says the executive director of the Congress for the New Urbanism, which was formed about 30 years after The Death and Life was published.17

      Few would question The Economist’s judgment that The Death and Life “was among the most influential and controversial books of the twentieth century.” However, the magazine erroneously added that the book “stopped America’s urban renewal movement in its tracks.”18 While it did help stop the Lower Manhattan Expressway, if it had stopped urban renewal, Susette Kelo would never have become famous as a U.S. Supreme Court case. Though Jacobs demolished the theory behind inner-city urban renewal, the tools that made urban renewal possible, including eminent domain and tax-increment financing, remained in place. As a result, cities continue to “renew” urban areas to this day, with results that are often as controversial and devastating to neighborhoods as they were in the 1950s and 1960s. Since New Urbanism is the current planning fad, much of that urban renewal aims to recreate Jane Jacobs’s vibrant streets in quiet suburban settings.

      While the Kelo decision set a precedent by allowing cities to use eminent domain even in areas that are not blighted, many state laws still limit the use of eminent domain and other urban-renewal tools to blighted areas. But to the New Urbanists, any low-density suburb is blighted simply because it does not have mixed uses or small blocks, or meet Jacobs’s other standards. For example, in 2002, the city of San Jose declared a full third of the city to be blighted. One neighborhood of Victorian and Craftsman-style single-family homes was considered blighted because planners found wet leaves on the tennis court behind one of the houses—which happened to be the home of San Jose’s representative in Congress.19

      if there is a difference between urban renewal in 1960 and urban renewal today, it is that highways are no longer a major tool to clear slums. This is partly because inflation in construction costs led cities and states to reduce their plans for new highways and partly because planners today are more interested in discouraging driving than in building new roads.

      Planners could use eminent domain to force sales of land in neighborhoods they considered blighted, but they still needed to pay for the land. With freeway funds out of the picture, they turned to another tool: tax-increment financing. Tax-increment financing allows urban-renewal agencies to divert all property taxes on new developments in an urban-renewal area to subsidies for that development. Typically, the agency designates an area an urban-renewal or redevelopment zone and makes specific plans for how that redevelopment should take place. Planners project the tax revenues from the new development and sell bonds that will be repaid out of those revenues. The money from the bonds is used to buy the land, build streets and other infrastructure, and provide other subsidies to the developers. First authorized in California in 1952, tax-increment financing is now legal in every state but Arizona.

      Armed with these tools—eminent domain; tax-increment financing; and various other federal, state, and local grants and subsidies—planners remain very much in the business of urban renewal. Only now they call it something

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