Everything In Its Place: Social Order and Land Use in America

by Constance Perin

Overview

Interviews with bankers, civic leaders, politicians, and architects provide the basis for this searching analysis of the ways in which the physical arrangement of land expresses American ideals, assumptions, and beliefs.

Originally published in 1977.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691616445
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #408
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	310
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)

Read an Excerpt

Everything in Its Place

Social Order and Land Use in America

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By Constance Perin

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1977 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-09372-7

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CHAPTER 1

— All's Right with the World? Land Use in American Society

Land Use and Social Order

What have been thought of as singularly technical concerns in land-use matters I take to be value-laden, that is, moral. American land-use classifications, definitions, and standards — alongside all their concrete tasks — name cultural and social categories and define what are believed to be the correct relationships among them. Why are some kinds of land-use relationships regularly prohibited? Why do zoning districts contain the specifics they do? Why do changes in land-use categories meet with widespread resistance, and on whose part? What implications are there for the way society is and should be organized in the definitions used to estimate how one land use will affect the value of another? Once made explicit, these beliefs and categories reveal much about our social structure and our moral world.

Land-use planning, zoning, and development practices are a shorthand of the unstated rules governing what are widely regarded as correct social categories and relationships — that is, not only how land uses should be arranged, but how land users, as social categories, are to be related to one another. In undertaking to decipher the glyphs of this shorthand, I have discovered several conceptions being used to define these social relations and assign them their different values. These have to do with the life cycle, transition, renting and homeownership, citizenship, social homogeneity, social conflict, newcomers — and ideas about the consequences each entails. Not idle thoughts, these conceptions are used as principles of social organization in metropolitan areas. They are different in kind from those factors more familiarly used to explain metropolitan growth and change, such as income, race, occupation, nationality, and prestige.

I have found those conceptions by examining the maps of society, as it were, guiding those who today largely control the form of metropolitan development. Their ideas about how society is and ought to be organized — not as the ideas of a single "interest group," but as American ideas — influence profoundly the entries in our catalog of land use. From my understandings of these assumptions, beliefs, and definitions I draw most of my interpretations of still other sorts of social and cultural data.

In current analyses of land-use matters, most often the grounds on which — the principles by which — social relationships exist are discussed as: economic, through exchange in markets; political, through mechanisms allocating power; legal, through the distribution and enforcement of rights, obligations, and sanctions; ideological, through the conflict and consensus of diverse interests; governmental, in the distribution of authority and taxing powers. Less familiarly, the grounds I examine are cultural in the sense of the criteria used to define categories, social in the sense of people who occupy the categories, and sociological in the sense of kinds of relationships among the categories.

For the very reason that we understand them less well than we can see the political and economic patterns they result in, if left unexamined, these criteria and categories can continue to produce the less-than-ideal conditions so clearly manifested in the built landscape of metropolitan areas, still best described in older metropolitan areas (where the majority of the population lives) as a white noose around the blacks and poor of central cities. Citizens everywhere have been asking whether our system of land use helps in creating a social order — social categories and the relationships among them — consonant with the ideals of a great industrial democracy, and have been finding that system wanting, importantly.

These findings provide a perspective on the land-use system as a moral system that both reflects and assures social order.

The social order of a society is its amicable coherence apparent to its members. American social order includes its Constitutional ideals for non-discrimination in the opportunities to share in its material and social goods of wealth, esteem, and power. The actual distribution of those resources and opportunities, without asking how it relates to the ideals — that is the status quo. The continuous evaluation of the disparity between actuality and ideals, together with shared strivings to lessen it is implicit in this definition of American social order.

Cultural and social categories and our ideas about their relationships both shape and result from the distribution of those goods. Why these categories are as they are is, then, the basic question. At the end of the French monarchy in the nineteenth century Lamartine declared: "It is a problem of this time to classify things and men. ... The world has jumbled its catalog." With all we know about the consequences of our land-use catalog, we know too little about the sources of its entries.

In anthropology and in general, conventional assumptions and beliefs are often termed "world views," "values," or "ethos." I find those inadequate tags for the problems of explanation we face in industrial societies. In working the way I do, I am trying at the same time to breathe into the construct "culture" the vitality it actually has in social and economic systems. Those systems, too, are constructs; their subjects are only believed to be more specific, phenomenal, and measurable. Culture, as values, beliefs, assumptions, rules, and definitions, should not be regarded "on the one hand," as inexorably given, static, and abstract while, "on the other," social events are dynamically generated, variable, and concrete. By identifying those definitions and rules as the principles underlying events, I hope instead to convey how actively, variably, and concretely "values" and "world views" are at work. If the organizing principles were different, the events would be different: only by artifice do we separate thoughts from actions and their observable, sometimes measurable, consequences.

Those items covered by the construct culture — beliefs, premises, rules, assumptions, definitions: Social scientists have been reluctant not to name them but to study them, largely because they have not resolved the issue of how to "concretize" them. What I now understand about the American cultural system from studying the system of land use is put into a context of current action and historical events. As I will show, there are many kinds of evidence with which we can assure ourselves that this complex of items we call culture has real effects and is justifiably analyzed in its own right.

Measuring the incidence of those elements is, however, the least and last of our worries: whether cultural analysis brings to the fore worthwhile variables is the more important, and difficult, challenge. Later in this chapter I explain more about the analytic approach I take.

I claim not much more than a partial glimmering of the cultural elements with which Americans construct social order. The whole collection is a great circulating library of public assumptions, premises, beliefs, and lore from which we all borrow. We would need parallel investigations of major institutional systems such as education, health, religion, and politics to discover still other elements of it: the shared understandings from which the social categories important in those systems are shaped, together with the sociological principles by which they are evaluated. Then we would begin to have the data from which an integrated theory of American culture might be formed. If and how these might be transformed or combined into a single, consistent "pattern" must remain an empirical question. This book is an annotated bibliography, as it were, of the collection of cultural conceptions as used in this one American system, land use. It demonstrates how far still there is to go.

Culminations: Scarcity, Justice, and Change

An unusual coalition of interests among the producers of new housing, consumers, and groups pursuing some public interest has recently arisen, unusual because historically these interests have been antagonists. One consists of the environmentalists and conservationists, who favor land-use practices that reduce air pollution resulting from the levels of automobile use that suburban sprawl imposes and that leave undeveloped areas of natural beauty, wildlife preserves, streambeds, and land for recreation to serve regional needs. Supporters of the enforcement of open housing and civil rights laws are another significant group finding the inhibition on suburban sprawl rewarding, in that high prices for single-family housing by definition exclude those with lower incomes, and blacks are a population group whose incomes are, occupation by occupation, generally lower than whites'. Producers wanting to sell to a lower-income market tend to favor both environmentalists' and civil libertarians' goals: higher density, more compact development — now that well-located land is scarcer and prices higher — and an end to the exclusionary zoning in city neighborhoods as well as in suburbs which amounts to de facto discrimination in housing.

De facto housing discrimination arises from housing prices only whites can afford; racially discriminatory practices via restrictive covenants were declared unconstitutional in 1948 and 1953, and in 1962 the first federal action to prohibit discrimination in housing took the form of an Executive Order on Equal Opportunity in Housing, applying only to housing receiving federal financial assistance (National Committee Against Discrimination In Housing and The Urban Land Institute 1974: 7-9). Under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, no government benefit may be provided on a discriminatory basis, including any of those provided through the programs of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, as in federal mortgage insurance, housing subsidies, urban renewal and community development funds, sewer and water grants, and so on. Under Title VIII of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 all housing, except that sold by an individual without the assistance of a broker or advertising or that rented by an individual in a house in which he/she lives (and which does not contain more than four units), must be made available without discrimination on account of race, color, religion, or national origin.

An interest group so far not heard from: fuel conservationists, who, it might be thought, would be in favor of development patterns that create a pool of people among whom public transportation becomes a feasible and attractive alternative in their job commuting. With about 73 percent of Americans now living in metropolitan areas, whether energy conservation at an effective scale can actually ever occur depends on changing the structure of their consumption of energy. That has to mean changes in the framework of consumers' living patterns — not changing their habits through exhortation or incentives alone but also through the concrete reorganization of home, work, school, transportation, and recreation. In one form or another, future land-use patterns attentive to conserving gas will tend more to concentrate than scatter population. Transit depends on large numbers of people to make it a good public investment. Shorter driving distances will also mean that work and shopping are not so far from home. Green breathing spaces, as recreation or beauty spots, take on ever greater importance, and they should be accessible quickly for frequent refreshment. But ecological preserves also decrease the supply of land for development. So, circularly, higher prices for land more often than not necessitate higher densities — and development more compact than suburbanites, whether in rolling acres or the sprawl of tract subdivisions, have been accustomed to.

With ever higher prices of land in metropolitan areas, and with population growth, together with greatly increased building costs, in labor and in materials, compact development has also become the only certain route to housing most consumers can afford. It most often implies higher density housing, in the form of row houses or townhouses having two or three levels, shared walls, no front yard to speak of, and a private, walled patio or backyard. The Federal Housing Administration has been making available a special form of mortgage insurance covering developments of this kind: called a Planned Unit Development, or PUD, the row houses are clustered together under overall density regulations in order to lower the costs of spread-out sewer, water, and road systems. The land area thus saved becomes common open space, shared by all those living there, and the residents must also work out ways of taking it over from the developer and subsequently maintaining and operating it. The establishment and operation of community homeowner associations are an intrinsic aspect of PUD developments, and the FHA provides developers with written guidelines for forming them.

Historically, wherever higher density development is to be found, it is in response to land prices high enough to make it impossible to sell or rent housing at an affordable price, so it is clear that one feature of our economic system for so long making possible the single-family-detached house has been pervasively low land prices. In contrast, city land prices, set as they are by the values attaching to quick and inexpensive communication — whether in the form of comparison shopping or the efficiencies of manufacturing with ready access to railroads and labor supply — are, almost by definition, always higher, hence the customary urban high density apartment buildings or town and row house developments.

Although the increasingly expensive single-family-detached housing with its four private yards continues to be built and sold, it is within reach of an increasingly smaller group. The Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development reported in 1975 that in three years the prices of new houses had risen 33 percent:

From the first quarter of 1971 to the fourth quarter of 1974 land costs went up 62 percent; construction financing 148 percent; labor costs 39 percent; materials 36 percent; overhead 54 percent; and marketing costs 73 percent. Put all of these figures in the hopper, sift in the leveler of competition, and prices of new homes have risen 33 percent in these three years ... the median family income today is $13,000 which by rule of thumb tells you that the median affordable house should cost no more than $32,500. In truth the median new home today actually costs $39,000, and the median existing home is priced at over $35,000.

Looking back a decade, in 1965, prior to the current inflationary spiral, 44 percent of American families had sufficient income to purchase a new home as compared with 31 percent today, and 46 percent could buy an existing home as compared with 32 percent today. (Hills 1975: 2, 3)

The costs of maintenance, not to mention heating and cooling, have increased drastically too: maintenance and repair are estimated to have jumped 105 percent in ten years, mortgage interest up 56 percent, fuel and utilities 70 percent, and property taxes 70 percent (Hills 1975: 3).

The lower prices of more compacted housing may attract the middle-to-low-income consumer, but suburbs have been repelling its construction, especially suburbs having mostly single-family-detached housing. These suburbs have zoning laws that permit only more of the same, in regulations setting forth minimum house-size requirements, minimum lot size and minimum frontage requirements, the outright prohibition of multi-family housing or more subtle restrictions on the number of bedrooms, prohibition of mobile homes, and zoning land for nonresidential use to prevent its residential development. Singly or in combination, these may be present in local zoning ordinances.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Everything in Its Place by Constance Perin. Copyright © 1977 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• Preface, pg. ix
• Acknowledgments, pg. xv
• Chapter One. —All's Right with the World? Land Use in American Society, pg. 1
• Chapter Two. The Ladder of Life: From Renter to Owner, pg. 32
• Chapter Three. Domestic Tranquillity: The Sociology of Sprawl and Transition, pg. 81
• Chapter Four. Many Wagons, Many Stars: The Uses of Land, Zoning, and Houses, pg. 129
• Chapter Five. A Place for Everyone: Negotiating Social Space and Social Order, pg. 163
• Chapter Six. Principles of Social Order, pg. 210
• Appendices, pg. 219
• Tables, pg. 251
• Bibliography, pg. 261
• Index, pg. 281