Urban Planners Give Award to St. Louis, Part 2

October 29, 2010

Urban Planners Give Award to St. Louis, Part 2

A few days ago, the American Planning Association (APA) named Wydown Boulevard, which runs through Clayton and the city of St. Louis, as one of the great streets in America.

This post I wrote three years ago is part one of the series on urban planning that I’m continuing today. The theme of this post is different from the first, because although planners had almost nothing to do with the success of the Delmar Loop, they certainly did with Wydown Boulevard. But the planning that shaped Wydown was the work of private industry and individuals, not the government. I want to make that clear.

“Planning” today is intimately linked in most people’s minds with government oversight and regulation. At the APA’s website, both the “What is planning?” and “What do planners do?” questions immediately begin with a reference to government.

Many of the subdivisions that were built along the St. Louis central corridor (Wydown is in the heart of that corridor) were built in a unique, intensely private style found throughout St. Louis. That includes private roads, sewers, and other infrastructure paid for by internal assessments and fees from property owners, not by general taxes for government provision of those services. I don’t think Wydown was ever a private road, but many of the neighborhood streets along it were (some still are), and I believe the streetcar that served Wydown was likely a private company, too, although I have been unable to find conclusive information about that particular streetcar that reveals whether or not it was actually private.

As the APA itself says:

Subdivisions along trolley line originally developed as “private places,” characterized by large 1- to 3-acre lots with traditionally designed single-family estates, mature trees, and native plants

Yes, some of the more recent cited reasons for issuing this award involve government planning — the bike lanes, for example. But the neighborhoods of St. Louis’ central corridor have historically been some of the most privately operated urban subdivisions in the country. Wydown is a beautiful street that I have enjoyed traveling many times. It deserves an award for planning. But it’s important to remember that it was private planning, not government planning, that made Wydown what it is.

« Read Previous Entry Read Next Entry »

8 Wordpress Comments »

How “great” would Wydown be if Forest Park had factories or farms in its place, there was no I-64 or Forest Park Parkway connecting it to jobs centers, and Washington University had always been required to pay taxes and not received hundreds of millions in federal research grants? Although privately planned, it would be incorrect to say that the central corridor was a totally private undertaking. Real estate is a basket of goods. A lot of what makes property in the area valuable and worth investing in are those goods that involved public funding — the park, the university, connectivity to jobs.

Private interests did make the area what it is, but this involved wielding influence in government to allocate public resources in a way that benefited primarily themselves. This is and always has been the way land gets developed. Check out Logan and Molotch’s “growth machine” — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Molotch#The_City_as_a_Growth_Machine

And I think just about all of St. Louis’ streetcar lines were privately-run. And some might still be in existence today if it weren’t for the National City Lines antitrust scandal ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_City_Lines ) where government failed to protect the market from anticompetitive dealings.

Comment by Rob — October 30, 2010 @ 10:49 a.m.
You’re arguing against something other than what David said here. We don’t have many, if any, purely private spaces that stand far enough apart from the results of public intervention for us to tell what such infrastructure might look like entirely absent from any government-granted subsidy, privilege, or externalities. I, for one, would love to find out.

Public spaces and infrastructure have observable benefits for surrounding private investments, true enough. It doesn’t necessarily follow, though, that those benefits outweigh the much-harder-to-see costs of dampened economic activity and investment in private sectors that have fewer resources at their disposal than they might otherwise have had, because a portion of their wealth was taken in order to fund public works.

Businessmen are usually enemies of truly freed markets, as you point out, because they seek government privilege to bolster their investments. It’s important to counteract that sort of rent-seeking wherever possible. Still, the fact that we don’t have any extant fully market-based communities to serve as examples doesn’t mean we can’t draw lessons from the forms of investment we do see around us.

When we look at the successes and failures of urban planning, the communities that flourish and best adapt to changing conditions over time are usually those that have less top-down micromanaging from bureaucrats who have an overarching vision for how others should live. Private interests, even though not purely private or isolated from the effects of public intervention, can better respond to the actual wants and needs of community members because they’re sensitive to profit and loss signals — even when those signals are muted by the public sphere.

Also, the National City Lines scandal wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Comment by Eric D. Dixon — October 30, 2010 @ 11:45 a.m.
I am arguing against this point: “But the planning that shaped Wydown was the work of private industry and individuals, not the government. I want to make that clear.”

No planning made Wydown what it is — public investments made continued private investments worthwhile. Who platted the street grid or designed the utility systems doesn’t matter. Privately-planned streets that would have rivaled Wydown in greatness in North city have been demolished or abandoned because they don’t have the publicly-supported anchors near them that Wydown does.

I’ll agree with you on the problems of urban planning being paternal and overreaching. Planning should exist only to protect property rights and provide a reasonable level of health and safety. At the turn of the century, this was pretty simple. But as life and business have become more complex, so too has planning. In 2010, I personally believe that planning departments should exist primarily to provide timely information, like the City of St. Louis’ Geo St. Louis site, so that citizens can make informed decisions and organize for or against private plans on their own. So I appreciate that there are others who think that planning can be done better, but let’s not re-write history to make the point.

Also, I’ve read that CATO piece and don’t buy everything in it. I’ll admit that streetcars were doomed anyway. But I had to head off any arguments that the public sector killed the private streetcars. However serious or legit the antitrust claims, the fact is that the private sector killed private streetcar lines.

Comment by Rob — October 31, 2010 @ 12:52 p.m.
So I’m curious, what do you think the proper role of government in urban planning is?

Comment by David Shane — November 1, 2010 @ 1:59 p.m.
(I was recently appointed to a U. City task force on improving the city’s walk-ability and bike-ability, so I am twice as curious as usual.)

Comment by David Shane — November 1, 2010 @ 2:02 p.m.
I would actually cite Rob’s second comment, third paragraph, as a perfectly valid role for modern urban planning:

“Planning should exist only to protect property rights and provide a reasonable level of health and safety.[...] In 2010, I personally believe that planning departments should exist primarily to provide timely information, like the City of St. Louis’ Geo St. Louis site…”

I think the primary role for government planning should be related to transportation. That planning should focus on how we move about, though, and not how some planners might want us to move about.

I appreciate many of Rob’s points, but if I understated the public role in keeping the Wydown area attractive, I think he overstates it. Washington University is a private university, not a public one, after all. If Washington U. were a smaller, less prestigious university, I don’t think Wydown would be any less of a desirable area to live. If it were taxable, I also don’t think that would make any difference as long as it was treated the same way as all universities. (This gets to Eric’s points about not really being able to know what an entirely private society would look like.)

I certainly didn’t re-write any history. Wydown was a successful area before the interstate system was built. The transportation asset that likely benefitted the area the most was the privately run streetcar. Just because Wydown had publicly supported bookends that aided its growth and populatity (Forest Park and the county courthouse / county seat in Clayton), does not take anything away from my point that the “planning” it just received an award for was (mostly) privately done.

Comment by David Stokes — November 1, 2010 @ 5:00 p.m.
“Re-write” may have been too strong. I just don’t believe that planning of any kind is responsible for making most places great – and I didn’t understand the APA designation to be all about planning. Its the other institutions (private or public) that make private and public investments worthwhile.

I don’t think I understate the public sector’s role in these institutions at all. WU is tax exempt but where the public really comes in is that they, like any major research university, receive hundreds of millions in federal research grants, to the products of which they owe a good piece of their notoriety. Wydown was great before interstates, but how long before Forest Park Parkway (which I believe Lana Stein’s political history of STL notes was constructed through a controversial bond issue)? And how long after the demise of streetcars would the area have lasted without good automobile access?

I think we agree more than not, but just looked at the purpose of the APA list a bit differently. I’d be interested in talking more about the “how” versus “want us to” in transportation planning some time, because I think that once you take externalities associated with public spending into account, the line between the two becomes pretty blurred.

Comment by Rob — November 2, 2010 @ 7:11 a.m.
^I don’t think I OVERstate the public sector’s role . . .

Comment by Rob — November 2, 2010 @ 7:13 a.m.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL

Or you can use our new Facebook commenting system!

Categories

How “great” would Wydown be if Forest Park had factories or farms in its place, there was no I-64 or Forest Park Parkway connecting it to jobs centers, and Washington University had always been required to pay taxes and not received hundreds of millions in federal research grants? Although privately planned, it would be incorrect to say that the central corridor was a totally private undertaking. Real estate is a basket of goods. A lot of what makes property in the area valuable and worth investing in are those goods that involved public funding — the park, the university, connectivity to jobs.

Private interests did make the area what it is, but this involved wielding influence in government to allocate public resources in a way that benefited primarily themselves. This is and always has been the way land gets developed. Check out Logan and Molotch’s “growth machine” — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Molotch#The_City_as_a_Growth_Machine

And I think just about all of St. Louis’ streetcar lines were privately-run. And some might still be in existence today if it weren’t for the National City Lines antitrust scandal ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_City_Lines ) where government failed to protect the market from anticompetitive dealings.

Comment by Rob — October 30, 2010 @ 10:49 a.m.

You’re arguing against something other than what David said here. We don’t have many, if any, purely private spaces that stand far enough apart from the results of public intervention for us to tell what such infrastructure might look like entirely absent from any government-granted subsidy, privilege, or externalities. I, for one, would love to find out.

Public spaces and infrastructure have observable benefits for surrounding private investments, true enough. It doesn’t necessarily follow, though, that those benefits outweigh the much-harder-to-see costs of dampened economic activity and investment in private sectors that have fewer resources at their disposal than they might otherwise have had, because a portion of their wealth was taken in order to fund public works.

Businessmen are usually enemies of truly freed markets, as you point out, because they seek government privilege to bolster their investments. It’s important to counteract that sort of rent-seeking wherever possible. Still, the fact that we don’t have any extant fully market-based communities to serve as examples doesn’t mean we can’t draw lessons from the forms of investment we do see around us.

When we look at the successes and failures of urban planning, the communities that flourish and best adapt to changing conditions over time are usually those that have less top-down micromanaging from bureaucrats who have an overarching vision for how others should live. Private interests, even though not purely private or isolated from the effects of public intervention, can better respond to the actual wants and needs of community members because they’re sensitive to profit and loss signals — even when those signals are muted by the public sphere.

Also, the National City Lines scandal wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Comment by Eric D. Dixon — October 30, 2010 @ 11:45 a.m.

I am arguing against this point: “But the planning that shaped Wydown was the work of private industry and individuals, not the government. I want to make that clear.”

No planning made Wydown what it is — public investments made continued private investments worthwhile. Who platted the street grid or designed the utility systems doesn’t matter. Privately-planned streets that would have rivaled Wydown in greatness in North city have been demolished or abandoned because they don’t have the publicly-supported anchors near them that Wydown does.

I’ll agree with you on the problems of urban planning being paternal and overreaching. Planning should exist only to protect property rights and provide a reasonable level of health and safety. At the turn of the century, this was pretty simple. But as life and business have become more complex, so too has planning. In 2010, I personally believe that planning departments should exist primarily to provide timely information, like the City of St. Louis’ Geo St. Louis site, so that citizens can make informed decisions and organize for or against private plans on their own. So I appreciate that there are others who think that planning can be done better, but let’s not re-write history to make the point.

Also, I’ve read that CATO piece and don’t buy everything in it. I’ll admit that streetcars were doomed anyway. But I had to head off any arguments that the public sector killed the private streetcars. However serious or legit the antitrust claims, the fact is that the private sector killed private streetcar lines.

Comment by Rob — October 31, 2010 @ 12:52 p.m.

So I’m curious, what do you think the proper role of government in urban planning is?

Comment by David Shane — November 1, 2010 @ 1:59 p.m.

(I was recently appointed to a U. City task force on improving the city’s walk-ability and bike-ability, so I am twice as curious as usual.)

Comment by David Shane — November 1, 2010 @ 2:02 p.m.

I would actually cite Rob’s second comment, third paragraph, as a perfectly valid role for modern urban planning:

“Planning should exist only to protect property rights and provide a reasonable level of health and safety.[...] In 2010, I personally believe that planning departments should exist primarily to provide timely information, like the City of St. Louis’ Geo St. Louis site…”

I think the primary role for government planning should be related to transportation. That planning should focus on how we move about, though, and not how some planners might want us to move about.

I appreciate many of Rob’s points, but if I understated the public role in keeping the Wydown area attractive, I think he overstates it. Washington University is a private university, not a public one, after all. If Washington U. were a smaller, less prestigious university, I don’t think Wydown would be any less of a desirable area to live. If it were taxable, I also don’t think that would make any difference as long as it was treated the same way as all universities. (This gets to Eric’s points about not really being able to know what an entirely private society would look like.)

I certainly didn’t re-write any history. Wydown was a successful area before the interstate system was built. The transportation asset that likely benefitted the area the most was the privately run streetcar. Just because Wydown had publicly supported bookends that aided its growth and populatity (Forest Park and the county courthouse / county seat in Clayton), does not take anything away from my point that the “planning” it just received an award for was (mostly) privately done.

Comment by David Stokes — November 1, 2010 @ 5:00 p.m.

“Re-write” may have been too strong. I just don’t believe that planning of any kind is responsible for making most places great – and I didn’t understand the APA designation to be all about planning. Its the other institutions (private or public) that make private and public investments worthwhile.

I don’t think I understate the public sector’s role in these institutions at all. WU is tax exempt but where the public really comes in is that they, like any major research university, receive hundreds of millions in federal research grants, to the products of which they owe a good piece of their notoriety. Wydown was great before interstates, but how long before Forest Park Parkway (which I believe Lana Stein’s political history of STL notes was constructed through a controversial bond issue)? And how long after the demise of streetcars would the area have lasted without good automobile access?

I think we agree more than not, but just looked at the purpose of the APA list a bit differently. I’d be interested in talking more about the “how” versus “want us to” in transportation planning some time, because I think that once you take externalities associated with public spending into account, the line between the two becomes pretty blurred.

Comment by Rob — November 2, 2010 @ 7:11 a.m.

^I don’t think I OVERstate the public sector’s role . . .

Comment by Rob — November 2, 2010 @ 7:13 a.m.

October 29, 2010