Strong Towns contributor Daniel Herriges
studies a series of old maps.
At Strong Towns, we’ve often drawn a sharp distinction between the “traditional” development pattern of cities around the world and the post-World War II “Suburban Experiment.” The traditional pattern is highly incremental and emergent: development is mostly small-scale and undertaken by many participants over time, and the resulting places are fine-grained and oriented toward people who walk. The suburban model, by contrast, consists of places built all at once to a finished state, using large amounts of up-front financial capital, and designed for mass, if not universal, motor vehicle use.
We often get accused of being ahistorical for insisting upon this distinction. That criticism has merit. Let’s be clear: I believe the “traditional” vs. “suburban” distinction is useful and meaningful. But we can’t use it to draw a firm dividing line between an imagined, pure, or organic past and a corrupted present. There was no single Rubicon, in 1945 or any other year. We have to try to understand the cities of the past as real, messy places, as their inhabitants might have understood them, if we want to learn the right lessons from them.
Mr Herriges previously remarked on
the path-dependence of Kansas City on its streetcar lines. He now has more maps to work from.
By the 1880s, though, St. Paul’s population was exploding, and land speculators began carving up the city’s hinterlands at a rapid pace. They were aided in this by the new technology of electric streetcars (and often lobbied for the extension of those very streetcar lines). What unfolded was a pattern of developer-led suburbanization that is surprisingly modern in its basic outlines.
The streetcar suburbs of the 1880s through 1920s, though we no longer call them “suburbs,” comprise most of what is today within St. Paul’s boundaries, including the neighborhood where I grew up and that I saw pictured on my vintage map. They accommodated extremely rapid growth. St. Paul’s population quadrupled between 1880 and 1900, from about 40,000 to about 160,000. (Its present day population is about double that again: 311,527 in the 2020 census.)
There were lots of places in the U.S. where the poor were building shacks on the edge of town in the 1880s, but that wasn’t how St. Paul, or other large Midwestern cities, grew. Large-scale speculative developers were an integral part of our history, and there’s no point pretending otherwise. In fact, the names of the real-estate barons of the time are immortalized in many of St. Paul’s street names today.
As you follow a rough line between downtown St. Paul and Minneapolis, you pass a series of neighborhoods—even today—with “park” in their name: Union Park, Merriam Park, Desnoyer Park, St. Anthony Park. The description of how the “Parks” came to be is not at all unlike the origin of modern suburban subdivisions. They were master-planned and mass-marketed communities for the upper middle class. Their developers sold them with an appeal to values that are basically suburban: healthy air, peace and quiet, a pastoral refuge from the chaos of the city.
That "park" appellation was common in many cities; for purposes of today's essay whether those
signalled segregated "sundown" neighborhoods is irrelevant. Planned use developments have long been with us, as have rent-seekers, and when it became clear that
the private automobile was a Marshallian improvement, the rent-seekers started to push for expressways, and to set land aside for shopping centers (what we understand today as a strip mall was a Big Deal seventy years ago) that's where the political action went, and
the neighborhood structures changed accordingly. That the technocrats of the zoning boards could work with the technocrats of the highway commission and the rest of the
Urban Planning Conceit simply made
selling the latest concepts easier.
A master developer would subdivide a neighborhood into individual streets and lots, and then separate builders handled homebuilding on those lots. The developer typically provided for a commercial center, and designated space for civic features such as schools, parks, and churches. Neighborhoods were largely built out over the course of a couple decades. Here’s the thing: this is still a basically accurate description of suburban development today, whether you’re in The Villages, Florida; McKinney, Texas; or Maple Grove, Minnesota.
Years before zoning became a standard feature of every city’s bylaws, these incipient suburbs used deed restrictions to impose a standardization and predictability that was lacking in the city’s earlier (1850–1880) phase of growth. We see here the first glimmers of a different way of understanding the city.
"Are you concerned about the kind of improvements that may be placed on the lot adjoining your home?" asked a 1909 advertisement for lots in the Roblyn Park subdivision, in which “no duplex, double house, store, flat or tenement house was allowed.” In other streetcar suburbs, restrictive covenants established a minimum sale price for any house that could be built.
The streetcar suburbs are the prototype not only of the economic entity that is a commuter suburb, but of the ideology that would come to characterize American suburbia. This ideology would later be articulated by real-estate titans such as J.C. Nichols of Kansas City, whose 1948 speech, “Planning For Permanence,” to the National Association of Realtors is as close to a manifesto for the Suburban Experiment as I’ve ever seen. Nichols sought to do away with what he perceived as the senseless waste wrought by the incremental redevelopment and evolution of cities. Instead, he proposed that places be carefully and scientifically planned, every detail accounted for from the placement of parks and shopping centers to the size of homes—and then, said Nichols, they should remain unchanging.
“We are the men to lead the attack” on incremental city-building, Nichols told the assembled real-estate professionals. This attitude did not begin with him. Its seeds lie far earlier, carried on the winds of the broader modernist transformation of society, and the ascendant 20th-century cultural belief that there was nothing organic that could not be perfected with scientific management.
Yes,
High Modern Authoritarianism was the ruling ideology, from the founding of the United Nations up until at least Model Cities and the War on Poverty, and
it lives on with those national house building companies and their Fordist building techniques (identical from behind, three or four front profiles) and sometimes even
slicing up the subdivision by price (do you put the priciest ones out front or inside?) Mr Herriges suggests the streetcar suburbs have more "charm" these days because a century ago, neither the Fordist Impulse nor the Technocratic Imperative yet operated on a national scale.
Neighborhoods contain more diversity of housing sizes, styles, and price points, and don’t suffer from the problem typical to blocks of identical homes, in which they all physically deteriorate at the same time. Connectedness to the street grid reinforces the value of location: while the marketing brochure for early suburbia might have emphasized pastoral serenity, these places worked because they were accessible to more established neighborhoods and the amenities and businesses to be found there.
In a modern gated or otherwise walled-off community, on the other hand, you’re selling exclusivity and isolation, not connectedness. And this means that each new home nearby only degrades the value of that sales pitch, instead of enhancing it. It’s a perfect recipe for NIMBYism and stasis.
Truly small-scale developers and individuals could participate in the growth of the streetcar city, in a way that they can’t today. The bar of entry was lower. You could buy a single lot and custom-build your house, and you could probably even put up a small apartment building, have an ADU in the back or a retail storefront downstairs. Zoning had yet to shut down those options in these St. Paul neighborhoods, though we were already seeing the beginnings of the desire for homogeneity and control as a marketing approach.
That sounds like
the development plan of Milwaukee's Polonia, which we will be returning to in a few days. I have to be contrarian, though, in noting that residents along the gridded streets that are not section roads, traffic taming measures including closing some intersections to create impromptu culs-de-sac are not unknown. Yes, the sidewalks remain in place, and kids don't have to go the great way 'round to visit a neighbor or play in the local park.
That's on
Mitch "Shot in the Dark" Berg's mind, and moreso on some of his commenters. "My faith in the social cohesion of left-wing cities is thinner than the social cohesion of left-wing cities – but hope sprang eternal, and until 2020 history obliged." Thus do the dealers in Executive Boxes and sport-utes continue to make their money.
