TRAFFIC ENGINEERS RECOGNIZED THE PROBLEM SIXTY YEARS AGO.

Our story begins nearly a hundred years ago, when the brains trust decided that self-amortizing, government-guaranteed mortgages were a Good Thing.

In 1934, Congress passed the National Housing Act, creating the Federal Housing Administration. The new government agency promoted homeownership by guaranteeing home loans with long repayment periods that lenders might have otherwise been unwilling to give (prior to this time, buyers usually had to pay off home loans within five years, meaning that monthly mortgage payments were quite high).

Since taxpayers would be on the hook if buyers failed to pay back these government-backed mortgages, the FHA went to great lengths to minimize the risk of the loans.

That article focuses on the Original Sin of redlining in that Act, which we have dealt with elsewhere, and with snob zoning, to which we shall return anon.

Our story concentrates on exurban and suburban tract housing after the War, when victorious veterans started families and wanted a little space to stretch out.  Many of those guaranteed mortgages were veteran benefits.  Much of the tract housing went up on the outskirts of existing cities, for example along County Highway U, otherwise known as 76th Street, on the southwest edge of Milwaukee.  Before the construction began, Highway U was your basic two-lane section road.  When the tract houses and four-plex apartments went up, the builders set them well back from the section road, and provided what we now understand as frontage roads.  The widening of 76th came later.

That's the west side of 76th, north of Morgan Avenue, with the frontage road, curb cuts leading to behind-the-building parking, and 76th is laid out as a boulevard, not a stroad.  There is a mix of multiple and single family housing on the east side, where there is also a frontage road.

As the various municipalities widened 76th, they took different approaches.  West Allis built a boulevard with frontage roads from Beloit Road to their city limits at Oklahoma; Milwaukee provided these frontage roads from south of a retail complex at Oklahoma to Morgan; they did something different from Morgan to the Greenfield city limits at Howard, which we will see subsequently; then Greenfield provided something more like a stroad environment, as did Greendale from Layton Avenue to Grange Avenue.  At one time, the Greenfield and Greendale segments looked like value capture: these days, though, the Spring Mall shopping center and Southridge enclosed mall are moribund.  South of Grange, 76th is more like a limited access highway, there's less business development and it can act like the section road it always was.

Those frontage roads suggest, though, that the highway engineers understood getting to the supermarket or apartment was different from getting to work or going on a road trip.

Civil engineering students across the country learn these principles when studying about the geometric design of highways. They learn about the impact of shoulder widths, clear zones, slopes, and drainage features, as well as how to mitigate the dangers of fixed roadside objects through the use of barriers and crash attenuators. I have no doubt that lives have been saved on our high-speed highways as a result of these concepts, but they have been misapplied — resulting in negative unintended consequences — elsewhere.

I think at least part of the problem stems from the fact that minimal attention or training for engineers is given to the design of urban and local streets, resulting in a tendency to apply highway design principles to these streets in the name of safety. This backfires, because forgiving design features encourage speeding in places where people should be driving slow. When drivers see wide, straight stretches of pavement with no obstructions on either side, they intuitively think that it’s safe to drive fast. This is a big problem on streets (as opposed to highways or roads), because streets are places where people walk, bike, shop, live, work, etc. These activities are incompatible with and downright dangerous when mixed with high speed traffic. The bottom line is this: On streets, the design objective needs to flip from forgiving design to the forgiveness of slow speeds.

The problem, though, is that the mile roads are useful places to do business, and perhaps to live.  The transition from one sort of use to another isn't easy.  Those Milwaukee frontage roads have stop-sign controlled crossings with cross streets, as the first photo illustrates, and they end short of the crossing mile roads, with a stop sign controlling the exit.  For something more convoluted, check out stretches of Palatine Road northwest of Chicago: there the frontage roads continue across the intersecting section roads, and the traffic signals allow the section road to cross all of Palatine, then the signals allow traffic across the section road on the frontage road, and after that across the section road on the through lanes of Palatine.  Throw in the left arrows and prepare to be patient.

From above, the Morgan Meadows neighborhood fits into the grid of section roads laid out long ago.

Image retrieved from Google Maps.

Morgan Avenue runs east-west near the bottom of the image, 76th north-south in the middle.  The mile road to the top of the image is Oklahoma Avenue, and there are a few frontage roads visible along it.  Honey Creek runs through the quarter-section southeast from 76th and Oklahoma, leading to some suburban-looking street patterns either side of the parkway along the creek.  There's a Cold Spring Shops boyhood home somewhere in that picture.  Generally, the apartment buildings are along the section roads, and the tract houses in the interior of the quarter-sections.  That was by design, as that Curbed article notes.

[T]he FHA discouraged loans in areas where commercial buildings and apartment complexes abutted single-family homes—the idea being that a mix of building types made the neighborhood more susceptible to physical changes and demographic shifts that could negatively affect property values.

In response to these lending policies, city planners across the United States sought to make urban neighborhoods more homogenous, clearly separating building types and creating lot size and setback requirements to make single-family neighborhoods as safe for investment as possible.

The effects of this were particularly felt in cities like Los Angeles, where there was plenty of vacant land.

So much contemporary technocracy, undoing the efforts of previous cohorts of technocrats.  "Vancouver policy for at least the past decade has been to force new apartments onto busy and polluted arterial roads, even as they are banned next to parks and schools, and on quiet, tree-lined streets inside residential neighborhoods."  That article complains, "Nobody’s home should be a 'buffer' against traffic noise and pollution for someone else’s."  Yesterday's technocracy becomes today's inequity.

Block people tended to be homeowners and their tenants, middle-class and stable. Avenue people were low-income renters in poorly maintained housing. They came and went, and the implication was that they were responsible for most of the neighborhood’s problems.

I’ve thought about that dichotomy a lot since, because it’s a neat way of summing up the way that zoning, architecture, and social class interact. It not an accident that American neighborhoods tend to have apartment buildings on their busy thoroughfares and one- or two-family homes on the side streets. Ironically, Bed-Stuy is a bit of an exception in this regard, since much of the neighborhood was built before the zoning that formalized what kind of structures would go where: In Brooklyn, there are apartments on side streets and rowhouses on big avenues.

The distinction between Block People and Avenue People is alive and well, however, in most American neighborhoods, where it’s a planner’s article of faith to encourage dense development along major corridors and nowhere else. Unfortunately, big streets are not nice places to live. Their traffic is noisy, dirty, and dangerous. Allowing apartment buildings to be built at all is progress, but ensuring they rise only in the worst locations is not fair to the people who live in them.

That might be so, and yet, wouldn't transit oriented development imply some sort of density along the major corridors, which, once the car lines and later the bus lines started running along the section roads, be along the section roads?  The motor vehicle is a way for people to disperse themselves.  So many tradeoffs.

We'll close with yet another tradeoff: if streets are for local activities, where do you store the cars?  There are a few alleys in the Morgan Meadows quarter section, but might there be a more productive approach?  Let's go east from 76th along Morgan Avenue.

Here, we're looking east along Morgan Avenue from 75th Street.  It's a boulevard with a frontage road along the south side.  Those are primarily single family houses both sides of Morgan.  The frontage road once provided biking and walking space for students heading west from Bell Junior High or Hamilton High.  To the south, though, is an interesting neighborhood, Wedgewood Park.

Image retrieved from Google Maps.

The pin marks the location of Hamilton High.  Honey Creek affects the placement of many of the streets in the Hamilton quarter-section, but what's going on with that grid to the west?

Milwaukee’s Wedgewood Drive and the Wedgewood Park Subdivision were given their names because developer Sid Dwyer lived on Wedgewood Circle in Elm Grove, which had named streets with a British theme. The Milwaukee subdivision with this name, bordered by W. Morgan and W. Howard avenues and by S. 68th and S. 76th streets, was planned in 1953 on the former farm of Oswald and Clara Gugler, which had been recently annexed by Milwaukee.

Oswald B. Gugler was the grandson of the founder of Gugler Lithographic, which dated to 1857. After Oswald died in 1949, his widow, Clara, decided to develop the 160 acres where horses and cows roamed on her husband’s hobby farm. She initially worked with two real estate men and house builders, Dwyer and Harris K. Evans.

The two planned a subdivision unique for Milwaukee. The new tract followed the Radburn Plan, advanced in Radburn, New Jersey, in the 1920s. The development included curving streets instead of a grid pattern and eliminated sidewalks along the streets. Instead, sidewalks were placed behind the houses where alleys would normally be.

The plan called for houses to face the sidewalks, which ran through a grassy, parklike swath, and for the rear of the homes to front on the streets. Evans and Dwyer mandated that living rooms should face the sidewalks and that kitchens look out over the streets. The advantages they claimed were safety and aesthetics. Children and adults could safely use the sidewalks and stay away from the streets, and the living rooms would look out onto the park-like sidewalk area.

The sidewalk and street arrangements were well-received, but the requirement that living rooms face the rear and kitchens face the front were not. But Evans and Dwyer only developed a small part of Wedgewood Park. Developer and builder Warren B. O’Connor and his associates developed large sections of the subdivision and they did not have the same requirements. Their homes could have the normal layout.

I enjoyed going bike riding in that neighborhood, as even sixty years ago kids on bikes and adolescents or adults in cars didn't mix well.  Those Radburn plan sidewalks have some promise as a way to provide more direct walking distances in subdivisions with lots of culs-de-sac.  Whether Radburn plan sidewalks these days would mean householders apprehensive about youthful hellions cutting through their front, er, back, yard is another matter.  But putting the garage side of the house along the street obviates the alley, as the street serves that purpose; now the front side of the house doesn't have a snout; and trick-or-treating along interior walkways that come to the front door could cut down on the youngsters avoiding traffic, although, again, these days there's a lot of drive-along trick or treating.