3—
Maximizing Internal Benefits

"There are 10 million people up there," the Southampton homeowner warned, pointing to New York City 85 miles to the west, "and make no mistake about it, they're on their way here."^[1] As in many suburbs in the New York region during the 1960s and 1970s, the cause for concern in affluent Southampton was a proposed garden apartment project. And like communities throughout the region faced with growing demands for more intensive land use, Southampton responded negatively, in this case with an amendment to the zoning ordinance which made the cost of garden-apartment development prohibitive.

Growth has been the basic influence on the politics of development beyond the inner ring of the New York region. Few communities can insulate themselves from the pressures for new homes, shopping centers, offices and factories, and from the changes that follow in the wake of these developments. With growth comes mushrooming demands on the newer suburbs for schools, roads, and sewers. In older suburbs, growth and change frequently produce increased residential densities, an influx of lower-income families and ethnic minorities, and commercial decline. Nor can any suburb escape the general rise in demand for increasingly expensive public goods and services. And all must grapple with the crucial questions of who will settle where under what kinds of restrictions, questions whose answers shape the political economy of each of the region's 775 suburban jurisdictions.^[2]

From the regional perspective of many planners and urban specialists, development in suburbia represents a massive lost opportunity. As a consequence of local control of land use, hundreds of small-scale governments employ zoning codes and other regulatory devices to pursue parochial development goals. In the view of the critics, the uncoordinated and often contradictory development strategies that emerge from the suburban mosaic ignore sound planning principles and broad regional needs. The result, in the eyes of the Regional Plan Association, environmentalists, and like-minded groups and individuals, is a recurring pattern of inefficient development and disor-

[1] Quoted in Francis X. Clines, "Housing Curbed in Southampton," New York Times, March 6, 1966.

[2] The term "suburbs" as used in this volume refers to the municipalities of the New York region, minus the large older cities (New York City, Elizabeth, Jersey City, Newark, Passaic, Paterson, and Trenton in New Jersey, White Plains and Yonkers in New York, and Bridgeport, New Haven, Stamford, and Waterbury in Connecticut). Under this definition, a number of smaller cities such as New Brunswick, N.J. and Mt. Vernon, N.Y. are considered suburbs in the discussion in Chapter Three and Chapter Four.

derly growth, characterized by monotonous housing tracts, highly limited residential options for the lower and middle classes, vanishing open spaces, misplaced industry, overcrowded schools, congested highways, polluted air and water, overburdened utility systems, and spiraling taxes. In the absence of fundamental change in the system of land-use control and perhaps broader governmental reorganization as well, regional planners foresee more of the same in the spreading metropolis, as well as even greater inequalities in the distribution of costs and benefits among the residents of the tristate area.^[3]

Most suburbanites perceive development politics in a different light. At the grass roots, development issues tend to be viewed in a narrow frame of reference focused largely on home, family, and local taxes. The typical suburban homeowner sees little need for change in local political institutions, since small-scale government usually provides a political system relatively responsive to homeowner interest in maintaining property values, preserving the residential character of the community, stabilizing local taxes, and providing adequate public education. This broad base of shared values among homeowners does not, however, always produce consensus on development issues. Thus, some in a residential suburb will favor new commercial or industrial development as a means of stabilizing local property taxes, while others will oppose such development as undermining the community's residential character. Moreover, not everyone in suburbia shares the values of the homeowning majority. Apartment dwellers are less sensitive than homeowners to the impact of locally financed public services on property taxes. Large-scale landowners and developers are primarily interested in maximizing the return on their investments. Managers of commercial and industrial establishments are more concerned with providing adequate access to their facilities and with the availability of labor and customers than with maintaining the residential character of a particular suburb. And a growing number of less fortunate residents of suburbia enter the political arena to seek low-income housing, access to jobs, and public schools more responsive to their needs.

Despite these crosscurrents, the development policies of the vast majority of suburban governments in the New York region have reflected the overriding interest of most of their constituents in protecting an investment in a home and its environs. As a result, most suburbs seek to control changes within their boundaries in order to maximize the benefits and minimize the costs of any new development to existing residents. They also try to minimize adverse effects within their jurisdiction of the activities of other public agencies, such as the state highway departments and planning agencies.

This chapter and the next analyze the efforts of suburban governments as they pursue these often elusive goals. Maximizing internal benefits is the primary concern of this chapter, while Chapter Four explores the suburbs' efforts to minimize the intervention of outside agencies. Before turning to this analysis, we examine briefly the capabilities which suburban governments in the New York region bring to the task of concentrating resources effectively to influence urban development.

[3] See, for example, Regional Plan Association, Spread City, RPA Bulletin No. 100 (New York: 1962); and Tri-State Regional Planning Commission, Proceedings: Tri-State Regional Conference (New York: 1976).

Suburban Capabilities

Almost all of the region's suburbs bring similar advantages to the complex task of shaping development along desired lines. These developmental assets are formal independence, control over the use of land, and a relative lack of conflicting constituency demands. Each faces the same basic set of constraints: limited areal scope, limited political skills, reliance on the property tax, and at least formal dependence upon the state government. Moreover, location, topography, socioeconomic composition, and the pattern of previous development strongly influence the ability of any particular unit to overcome its inherent shortcomings and to concentrate its resources effectively. As the discussion in this and the next chapter indicates, great variations exist in the ability of suburban jurisdictions to shape development. Equally important, given the nature of suburban capabilities, some kinds of development decisions are far more susceptible to suburban influence than others.

The Constraint of Size

Most suburbs in the New York region are small. More than half of the 775 suburban jurisdictions encompass less than five square miles. In 1970, the average suburb had approximately 14,000 residents. But almost 10 percent of the suburban units had fewer than 1,000 inhabitants. And only eight had 100,000 or more residents, all of which were two-level local jurisdictions in Nassau and Suffolk counties.^[4] (See Table 11.)

The limited areal scope and small population of the typical suburb shapes to a considerable degree its role in the politics of urban development. Small size means limited financial resources and, perhaps more important, limited political skills. Because of the resource constraints imposed by size and reliance on the property tax and state assistance, most suburbs are rarely able to use their construction and other investment decisions to influence development. Instead, they rely primarily on zoning and other regulatory devices in their efforts to shape development along desired lines. Limited financial resources also combine with restricted area to increase the reliance of suburban jurisdictions on special agencies to provide water, sewage dis-

[4] The suburban jurisdictions with populations over 100,000 in 1970 were the towns of Hempstead, North Hempstead, and Oyster Bay in Nassau County and the towns of Babylon, Brookhaven, Huntington, Islip, and Smithtown in Suffolk County. All of these large towns encompassed villages, as discussed below and indicated in Table 12.

Bergen County's 78 MunicipAlities Map 3

posal, and other public services that are beyond the fiscal and territorial capacity of the individual municipality. As for political skill, few suburbs are large enough to support full-time elected officials, specialized bureaucracies, or professional planning agencies; and many are so small as to have no effective administrative capacities at all. Nor is the average suburb large enough by itself to have much influence in the political arenas of the region, state, and nation. To some degree, however, these political weaknesses are offset by

common interests among suburbs on many development issues, the responsiveness of state legislatures to widely shared suburban interests, and the availability of financial and technical assistance from the states and the federal government. A good example of the latter is the federal 701 program, which has provided funds to many suburbs for professional planning assistance they could not otherwise afford.

Limited areal scope also greatly restricts a suburb's sphere of action. For the typical suburban unit, the small amount of territory under local control makes it highly vulnerable. The decision of one of New York City's neighbors to change the character of territory adjacent to the city may adversely affect the fortunes of one or two neighborhoods, but it will not disrupt the city as a whole. Similarly, construction of the Cross-Bronx Expressway cut a wide swath through a section of New York City, but had little impact on the overall pattern of development in the city. This is not the case with small suburban jurisdictions. A six-lane expressway may take a sizable proportion of the taxable property in a three-square-mile municipality, as well as permanently bifurcate a residential community. The efforts of a small suburb to exclude garden apartments or industry may be undermined by a neighboring community's decision to accept such development in order to increase the amount of taxable property (or tax ratables). Because the suburb in question is small, the actions of adjacent municipalities can have as much effect on the character of the community as its own land-use controls.

Illustrative of suburban vulnerability is the impact of large shopping centers on surrounding areas. One of the attractions for local officials in Wayne Township of the massive Willowbrook shopping center located on Wayne's border has been that neighboring Little Falls gets "all the traffic and harassment. We get all the taxes."^[5] Given this kind of mismatch between costs and benefits, residents of adjacent communities typically oppose such developments. Plans for the construction of a large shopping center in Yonkers adjacent to its boundary with Hastings-on-Hudson were vigorously denounced in Hastings. "We would not benefit from the shopping center but it would cost us a lot," argued the opponents. "Tax revenues would all go to Yonkers while our shops would be wiped out. We would need more police and wider roads. Our property values would drop too."^[6] Increasing the vulnerability of suburbs such as Hastings-on-Hudson is their lack of any direct role in the decisionmaking processes of neighboring communities.

Variations Among Suburbs

One of the most striking features of the New York region—another product of its size and scope—is the great variation among the 775 units of general government in suburbia. In addition to differences in size that affect suburban development capabilities, important variations in the structure and function of local government result from the tristate nature of the New York region. The most complex local governmental arrangements are found in New York

[5] Harry Butler, former mayor of Wayne, N.J., quoted in Jack Rosenthal, "Suburbs Abandoning Dependence on City," New York Times, August 16, 1971.

[6] Mrs. Richard Evans, Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., quoted in James Feron, "Huge Shopping-Mall Plan Stirs a Battle in Yonkers," New York Times, June 18, 1973.

State where, as Robert C. Wood points out, "no hard and fast rules exist with respect to the division of functions among . . . governments."^[7] In suburban New York, the primary units of local government—cities, towns, and villages—have varying degrees of independence, although all have power to control land use. Cities have more autonomy than towns, which depend on county government for a number of important functions. Villages are subdivisions of towns, empowered to control land use and other local functions within their boundaries. Towns are particularly important on Long Island since large portions of Nassau and Suffolk counties have not been subdivided into villages. As indicated in Table 12, only 23 percent of the population of the eight largest towns on Long Island lived in villages in 1970.

Further complicating the picture in New York is the widespread use of local special districts in suburban counties. (See Table 13.) In addition to six cities, eighteen towns, and twenty-two villages, Westchester had ninety special districts in 1977 empowered to raise local taxes to finance education, fire protection, garbage collection, street lighting, water supply, and other public services. Another important feature of the New York system for the politics of development is the subdivision of the towns for the provision of public education. In Suffolk, for example, the county's ten towns contain seventy-five school districts, each with its own local tax base. This means there are substantial tax differentials among school districts within a town, as well as competition within a town for development that will contribute to the financing of public education.

[7] Robert C. Wood, 1400 Governments (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), p. 24.

County government plays a more significant role in New York than in New Jersey (or in Connecticut, where county governments were abolished in 1960). The three large New York suburban counties—Westchester, Nassau, and Suffolk—have developed strong county-government units. Each has a full-time elected political executive, a substantial budget, an active and professional planning agency, and major responsibilities that affect development policies, including highways, water supply, sewage disposal, and recreation. A counterweight to these centralizing forces was provided prior to 1970 by the direct representation of towns (and cities in the core of Westchester) in the county legislature, which tended to make the New York counties particularly responsive to the interests of their component local governments.^[8]

In New Jersey, all general purpose local units—cities, boroughs, villages, towns, and townships—have been delegated approximately the same functions by the state legislature. These primary units of local government share few powers with county governments, which have considerably less responsibility than in New York. Also in contrast with New York, school-district boundaries in New Jersey generally coincide with those of municipalities. And local special districts are relied on less than in the New York suburbs. In the Connecticut corner of the region, cities and towns function in the absence of county government, and independent school districts are less numerous than elsewhere in the region, but special districts for other functions are extensively used.

As indicated in Chapters One and Two, suburbs in the New York region also vary in terms of their pattern and time of settlement, state of development, socioeconomic composition, and property tax revenues per capita. All these factors influence an individual suburb's development goals and capabilities. Most of Bergen County's seventy municipalities are residential communities whose development interests and resources differ from those of "atypical" Bergen municipalities like Teterboro, a completely industrial borough, or Hackensack, the county seat and an older commercial center, or Paramus, a booming industrial, commercial, and residential community at the juncture of several major highways. But just as significant for the politics of development are the differences among Bergen's many bedroom communities. Lower-middle-class Waldwick, slowly recovering from the trauma of rapid expansion in the automobile age, inevitably views development strategies such as the attraction of industry more favorably than neighboring Ridgewood, a stable upper-middle-class municipality settled more than a generation ago by rail commuters whose principal development goal was the maintenance of a comfortable status quo. A different set of development problems preoccupy Englewood—an older suburb of large homes a few miles to the east of Waldwick and Ridgewood—because Englewood includes an increasingly militant low-income black neighborhood. And along the urban frontier, in northwest Bergen's Oakland, the politics of development are framed in terms

[8] The county legislatures, which were known as boards of supervisors, were reorganized after a court suit overturning the apportionment of seats on the basis of local governmental units rather than population. Suffolk and Westchester replaced their boards with county legislatures based on single-member districts, thus eliminating the direct representation of local governments and their officials. Nassau retained direct representation of local units by providing each of its town supervisors with a vote on the board of supervisors weighted according to population.

of larger-lot zoning designed to insulate the town's affluent suburbanites from the adverse consequences of urban growth and change.

Homogeneity and Heterogeneity

The differences among communities like Waldwick, Ridgewood, Oakland, Englewood, Paramus, Hackensack, and Teterboro make Bergen County as a whole—or for that matter, almost any other suburban county in the New York region—a varied aggregation of people and jobs. During the past quartercentury, the overall heterogeneity of suburbia has been enhanced, as large numbers of blue-collar workers and an increasing number of low-income families have followed the middle class into the suburbs. Because of the aging process in the inner suburbs, the growth of apartment living outside the cities, and the influx of blacks and Puerto Ricans into many areas, a growing number of municipalities in the suburbs have more in common with the older cities than with the newer suburban areas. Almost 62,000 of Nassau County's 1.4 million residents were below the poverty line in 1970; and one-third of the county's $270-million budget was devoted to welfare. Almost one-half of Westchester's population lives in four older suburban cities—Yonkers, Mount Vernon, New Rochelle, and White Plains. Thus, from the regional perspective, suburbia increasingly shares the socioeconomic diversity of the older cities, leading some observers to speak of "the City of New Jersey," and to comment that "Long Island Is Becoming Long City."^[9]

But suburbia certainly is not a city in the political sense of being a single heterogeneous municipality. Upper-income families cluster in a few suburban jurisdictions, middle-income families predominate in a large number of suburbs, others are populated mainly by blue-collar suburbanites, and blacks and other low-income groups are concentrated in the municipalities which contain suburbia's older and less desirable housing. Thus it is not surprising that most suburbanites do not perceive their communities as becoming more city-like. In a 1978 survey, 63 percent of the suburban dwellers responded negatively to a question which asked whether their area was becoming more like a big city.^[10]

In general, the socioeconomic variations among suburbs tend to be substantially greater than the variations within any one community. The relative homogeneity of the individual suburb results from superimposing the typical urban pattern of neighborhood differences along income, ethnic, and racial lines on the small scale of the average suburban municipality. Reinforcing this tendency has been the uniform pricing of large-scale housing developments and local land-use policies, which tend to set similar housing patterns within a town, thus homogenizing income levels within any one community. Consequently, the growing heterogeneity of suburbia as a whole rarely is reproduced in individual suburbs.

The socioeconomic homogeneity of the typical suburb has important consequences for development politics in the New York region. Compared

[9] See Joe McCarthy, "Long Island Is Becoming Long City," New York Times Magazine (August 30, 1964), pp. 17, 65–67; and John E. Bebout and Ronald J. Grele, Where Cities Meet: The Urbanization of New Jersey (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1964), pp. 91–111.

[10] New York Times, "1978 Suburban Poll" (1978), p. 8.

with the older cities, the residents of any one suburb exhibit greater consensus on development goals, and generate fewer conflicting pressures on local policymakers. Internal consensus on goals helps many suburbs overcome some of the constraints imposed by restricted areal scope, limited resources, and the internal fragmentation of formal governmental authority among general-purpose units, semiautonomous planning boards, school districts, and other special-purpose agencies. When, as is often the case, these agencies share the same constituency, and the constituency largely agrees on community goals, policy determinations in each agency tend to be consistent and mutually reinforcing.

The importance of homogeneity in suburban politics also is illustrated by the fact that goal conflict is most common in the more extensive jurisdictions and the older suburbs, both of which typically encompass more varied populations. Finally, limited areal scope and homogeneity tend to structure many development issues along "external" rather than "internal" lines. More often than not, development contests involve conflict with outside parties—other municipalities, state highway agencies, garden-apartment developers, or blacks who desire to purchase homes—rather than conflict among groups and individuals within a particular suburb.

The Central Fact of Autonomy

All of the distinguishing features of the suburban political arena—fragmentation, small-scale government, variation among suburbs, and homogeneity within them—are rooted in the considerable autonomy delegated to the primary units of local government by the states of Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York. Independence is the most significant political resource of most suburbs in the struggle to shape development along lines desired by residents, to maintain freedom of action in the competition for revenue sources and desirable development, and to avoid situations in which the costs to a community outweigh the benefits. Through incorporation and other forms of state delegation, local communities in the region are protected from the territorial ambitions of other jurisdictions, are shielded from unattractive joint ventures, and are given varying degrees of control over local services, expenditures, taxes, and land use.

Suburban independence is, of course, limited rather than absolute. As is the case with the older cities, suburban municipalities are creatures of state government. Although the patterns vary from state to state, local autonomy is limited by the setting of state standards, the mandating of local expenditures by the state legislature, the assignment of responsibilities to counties and special districts, and the retention of activities by the state itself. The state agencies that build highways, colleges, parks, and other public facilities are not subject to local land-use controls. And the state courts are the principal arbiters of disputes that arise over the actions of state agencies within suburbia and over the use by local governments of state-delegated powers.

Local control, however, is practically complete with respect to the regulation of land use, the most significant aspect of suburban autonomy for the politics of development. Like all local powers, control over land use is derived from the state government. But state legislatures, responsive to suburban inter-

ests, have been reluctant to interfere with local prerogatives in this extremely sensitive area of public policy. With only a few exceptions, state agencies have no active policymaking role in land-use regulation. Moreover, the courts in the three states traditionally have been wary of substantive challenges to local land-use regulations, confining themselves instead until recently to procedural issues.^[11] As a result, over the past quarter-century suburban regulatory bodies in the New York region have enjoyed great freedom in using zoning and building codes, subdivision regulations, and other devices to control lot size, the area and height of structures, and the location and use of buildings for specific purposes. Through their ability to regulate land use, suburban governments strongly influence population densities, settlement patterns, the location of commerce and industry, tax rates, and the overall quality of life.

Local regulation of land is hardly an accidental consequence of political independence. On the contrary, the desire for local autonomy in the development process has been a primary cause of the fragmentation of the New York region into independent small-scale jurisdictions during the past century. Between 1860 and 1930, 450 municipalities were created in New Jersey largely in response to the desire of land owners, real estate agents, and residents for local control over land use and public services. In 1894 alone, twenty-six local government units were organized in Bergen County, whose seventy municipalities in the words of a recent chairman of the county planning board "are mostly the handiwork of politicians, lawyers, and real estate agents who each had his own interest to look after."^[12]

The benefits promised by community control continue to generate pressures for the creation of new primary units of local government, particularly in the unincorporated villages of New York's sprawling towns. For example, in 1963 demands for autonomy over local land use led tiny Hampton Bays (population 1,512) to consider breaking away from the town of Southampton in Suffolk County. A few years later, residents of Strathmore, a Levitt development, sought political independence as a way to escape the zoning and planning controls of Brookhaven, Suffolk's largest town. In Rockland County, the prospect of a $75 million garden apartment complex prompted homeowners to incorporate Pomona in 1967 to protect their neighborhood against development decisions by town governments they considered unresponsive to their interests.^[13] During the same year, estate owners in Purchase attempted unsuccessfully to secure local land-use control through incorporation as a village, in order to prevent the development of a $12 million corporate headquarters in

[11] Of the three states, New Jersey's courts were most active during the 1970s in restricting local freedom of action in controlling land use, particularly when housing for lower-income families has been at issue. The most important ruling was handed down by the New Jersey Supreme Court in Southern Burlington County N.A.A.C.P. v. Township of Mount Laurel, 67 N.J. (1975). The Supreme Court concluded that "developing municipalities" like Mount Laurel—which is located outside the New York region in Burlington County, one of the most rapidly developing parts of the Philadelphia region—have an obligation to consider the housing needs of all categories of people in devising and applying local land-use regulations.

[12] Edward Erarich, quoted by Robert Houriet, "Many Motives Created State's Small Municipalities," Newark Sunday News, August 28, 1966.

[13] The area incorporated as Pomona was located in the towns of Hayerstraw and Ramapo. In 1970, Pomona's population was 1,792, while Haverstraw had 25,311 residents and Ramapo 76,702.

their unincorporated section of the sprawling town of Harrison. In 1979, voters in North Tarrytown and Pleasantville in Westchester County overwhelmingly approved referenda directing local officials to seek independence. In the case of North Tarrytown, local autonomy promised $220,000 in tax savings and $90,000 in additional federal and state aid, at the cost of only $43,000 in new expenditures.^[14] The fact that almost all of these efforts failed indicates that the political geography of the region is far less malleable than in the past, largely because existing suburban jurisdictions are increasingly unwilling to lose control over areas whose development promises tax or other advantages to the community as a whole.

The Pervasive Influence of the Property Tax

Local dependence on the real property tax also plays a crucial role in the suburban quest for political autonomy and community control over land use. More than 60 percent of all suburban revenues in the New York region are derived from local property taxes, state assistance providing the only other major revenue source for most municipalities. Since property tax revenues are a function of the way land is used, as are the public expenditures necessitated by development, the power to regulate land use is the key to fiscal planning in most suburban jurisdictions. Commercial and industrial development normally generates more property tax revenues than local expenditures, and thus is considered profitable by most suburbs. Some kinds of housing—expensive single-family dwellings on large lots and apartments that are too small to accommodate families with school-age children—also generally produce local "profits." On the other hand, apartments with two or more bedrooms, most single-family housing developments, mobile homes, and subsidized housing projects almost invariably involve local expenditures that are substantially greater than the local taxes paid by these forms of housing.

As the New York region developed, suburban communities sought with considerable success to stake out local boundaries that would maximize property-tax revenues and minimize high-expenditure development. Discussing the creation of sixty-four new municipalities in New Jersey during the 1920s, John E. Bebout and Ronald J. Grele observe: "Tax avoidance was a main reason for setting up new municipalities . . . both newcomers and old settlers tried to escape social responsibility and higher taxes."^[15] Similar objectives motivated the more recent efforts to incorporate villages in New York, already noted. The wealthy residents of Purchase in Westchester hoped to lower their property taxes by fencing themselves off from more intensely developed sections of Harrison. In Suffolk, the advocates of Strathmore's incorporation sought residential tax relief by folding most of the area's industrial development into their proposed municipality.

The significance of political autonomy and fiscal zoning grows as the spiraling costs of suburban government produce steady increases in property taxes. Especially important is the fact that educational costs, the principal component of suburban expenditures, have been rising much faster than other

[14] See Ronald Smothers, "'Breakaway' Villages Worry Albany," New York Times, May 13, 1979.

[15] Bebout and Grele, Where Cities Meet: The Urbanization of New Jersey, pp. 61–62.

outlays. Restrictions on development designed to limit the size of the schoolage population are the most effective means of controlling education costs. Although school-district budgets are frequently rejected by the public in referenda, particularly in the rapidly developing suburbs, these expressions of voter discontent rarely produce significant cuts in educational expenditures, and have little effect on the upward climb of school taxes. While state assistance underwrites a growing proportion of local school costs, state aid to date has not been sufficient to reduce significantly suburban efforts to employ land-use regulation as a means of limiting families with school-age children.

Political fragmentation, the property tax base, fiscal zoning, and rising educational costs combine with neighborhood differentiation and the locational decisions of commerce and industry to produce a significant mismatch of resources and needs in the region's suburbs. Consider the impact of land-use regulation and settlement patterns on two of Harrison's four school districts. The district encompassing Purchase, largely composed of estates and four-acre minimum lots, had $99,000 in property for each of 204 pupils in 1967, while the district embracing the more intensively settled section of Harrison backed each of its 2,450 students with only $19,000 worth of real estate. Moreover, the municipal beneficiary of a major commercial or industrial facility rarely has to bear anything approaching the full costs of educating the employees' children or providing other public services. For example, one of IBM's Westchester plants happens to be located in the Ossining school district, while most of the school costs generated by the IBM development fall upon the neighboring Yorktown school district. A beleaguered local school official complains: "The wealthier get wealthier and we get the additional children to educate. Now people perhaps will understand why I want the four districts to merge."^[16]

Of course mergers, zoning changes, and other schemes designed to bring suburban resources into line with needs are strenuously resisted by jurisdictions that benefit from the existing system. A typical example of the response of the "haves" to the needs of the "have-nots" is provided on Long Island's North Shore, where the New York State Department of Education pressed for a merger of a number of school districts with varying tax bases into a single district. The ironic response was a merger of the two wealthiest districts, Stony Brook and Setauket, in order to foreclose consolidation with the poorer districts.

The Logic of Exclusion

Throughout the region, the developmental and fiscal pressures generated by the outward movement of people and jobs have produced increasingly restrictive zoning ordinances and building codes, outright bans on multiple-family housing or severe limitations on the size of apartment units, prohibitions on cluster developments and mobile homes, and highly selective strategies to attract industrial and commercial taxable property. The primary goal of

[16] Louis Klein, Superintendent of Schools, Harrison, N.Y., quoted in Merrill Folsom, "Westchester Finds Influx of Business a Worry," New York Times, August 18, 1967.

these suburban strategies is to maintain or achieve favorable ratios of property-tax revenues to demands for public services, while preserving or upgrading the residential amenities.

In a suburban political economy where local taxes are highly sensitive to land-use decisions, and where constituency concerns tend to be localistic and conservative, efforts to maximize the internal benefits of development constitute a rational course of action for the local policymaker. As Paul Davidoff points out, "they act perfectly rationally to protect their interests by keeping everybody else out. And you can see their success by looking at the number of development projects turned down by any suburban government. They only change zoning if they desperately need industry to help pay the tax bills."^[17] Of course, what is rational for a local community may be highly disadvantageous for individuals whose housing opportunities are limited by the actions of suburban governments, or for developers whose prospects for profits are diminished, or for those who seek a more regionally oriented "rational" pattern of development.

Nor is a rational local strategy necessarily effective, even for the individual community. The patterns of past development and topography play a role in determining the relevance and effectiveness of particular strategies for maximizing internal benefits, as do political and technical skills used in devising and implementing policies suited to the particular circumstances. The influence of local land owners, developers, and corrupt officials can undermine local plans and zoning ordinances. But perhaps the most important factor of all is foresight. As Wood emphasizes, "the real effectiveness of land-use policies hinges on their timing: the date when comprehensive programs are applied."^[18]

The Westchester Approach

Certainly foresight accounts for much of Westchester County's success in developing and applying public policies designed to maximize internal benefits and minimize the impact of the forces of regional growth and change. In 1912, the Bronx Parkway Commissioners forecast that "Westchester would rapidly become no more than an extension of the Bronx."^[19] But Westchester's leadership, as pointed out in Chapter One, was determined to prevent the "Bronxification" of their largely unsettled county. The basic strategy was devised under the guidance of county Republican leader William L. Ward, whose goal was to attract "class" rather than "mass" to Westchester. Instead of rapid transit or typical highways, the county built parkways that restricted

[17] Quoted in Richard Reeves, "Land Is Prize in Battle for Control of Suburbs," New York Times, August 17, 1971. Davidoff was one of the founders of the Suburban Action Institute, a public interest advocacy organization that has brought court actions against a number of exclusionary suburbs in the New York region, and has pressed the Tri-State Regional Planning Commission to play a more assertive role in expanding housing opportunities for lower-income and minority families in the region's suburbs. For Suburban Action's view of its mission, see Linda Davidoff, Paul Davidoff, and Neil N. Gold, "The Suburbs Have to Open Their Gates," New York Times Magazine, November 7, 1971, pp. 40–50, 55–60.

[18] Wood, 1400 Governments, p. 111.

[19] See Robert Daland, "A Political System in Suburbia" (typescript, 1960), pp. 111–115. The discussion in this and the following paragraph draw heavily on Daland's excellent case study.

commercial traffic and strip development while preserving a rural atmosphere. Land use was controlled by autonomous suburban jurisdictions that jealously guarded the integrity and residential image of individual communities far more than would have been possible if zoning had been in the hands of a large-scale countywide jurisdiction with a heterogeneous constituency. With the encouragement of a talented county planning agency and the assistance of professional consultants, Westchester's local governments developed and applied sophisticated regulatory techniques in advance of major development pressures, and long before most other suburbs in the region.

Because of the timely and skillful application of appropriate policies, along with a powerful assist from topography, what Robert Daland calls "the image of Westchester" has been substantially preserved. Outside of Yonkers, New Rochelle, Mount Vernon, and White Plains, contemporary Westchester is characterized by "rural appearance, low population density, a high standard of amenities for the good life, and an elite citizenry."^[20] Low-density development has given many Westchester communities a favorable balance of property tax revenues over demands on the public exchequer. Consequently, high levels of service have been maintained without undue burdens on the local taxpayer. Under these conditions, indiscriminate pressures for industrial and commercial development to relieve local tax burdens have been rare. The most successful and affluent communities, like Scarsdale and Bronxville, want no industry or large-scale commerce at all. Elsewhere in the county, highly selective industrial and commercial strategies have been pursued in recent years with considerable success.

In no other suburban county in the New York region have so many municipalities successfully pursued the goal of maximizing internal benefits. At the other end of the scale in terms of overall success in moderating the forces of suburban growth is Nassau County, where primitive land-use controls in most municipalities were overrun by the postwar surge of development eastward. Nassau's governmental structure was much like that of Westchester, but its political leaders and their constituents showed little of the foresight and interest in controlling development found in Westchester. The early suburbanites in Westchester were more affluent than those in Nassau; most tended to define their interests in terms of the preservation of an attractive residential locale for themselves, and the county's political system reflected these interests. In Nassau, on the other hand, the pressures for mass development represented an opportunity for profits rather than a threat to a way of life for most potato farmers and other land owners. Moreover, even if Nassau had used sophisticated planning techniques in advance of development pressures, its topography would have reduced the prospects for success in comparison with Westchester. With much of its terrain fiat and treeless, Nassau inevitably was far more susceptible to mass development, and considerably less attractive to the affluent than hilly, wooded Westchester.

On the other hand, a few communities within Nassau, particularly those along the scenic North Shore of Long Island, have followed the Westchester

[20] Ibid., pp. 111–114. The diversity of Westchester's various communities and the implications of this diversity for contemporary housing are examined in John Levy, "The Politics of Housing in Westchester," New York Affairs 5(1979), pp. 95–102.

strategy with considerable success. Other municipalities that have emulated Westchester are scattered throughout the region, and their ranks are growing as development pressures encompass more and more communities. Within their boundaries, timely application of land-use controls has combined with other factors—topography, convenient access to the Manhattan central business district, or the pattern of past development—to produce upper-income sanctuaries effectively insulated from many of the pressures and costs of regional growth. For these communities, like Short Hills in Morris County and Princeton Township in Mercer County, the key to the good life is the use of governmental powers to ensure the maintenance of a "single-family residential area of high-quality amenity and visual attractiveness."^[21]

Planning for Fewer People

In all suburban areas, the power to regulate land use is the primary means available to direct growth, protect the tax base and property values, and preserve amenity and community character. Throughout the New York region, more restrictive zoning and building codes have been the typical suburban response to population growth. A large developer explores possibilities for tract housing in Cranbury in southern Middlesex, and quickly is faced with the rezoning of most of the township's vacant land upward to one-acre parcels. In Millburn, in Essex County, the local government examines development trends and responds with two-acre and five-acre zoning in order to "make sure that the type of township we have now will be preserved in the future."^[22] In addition to increases in minimum lot sizes, suburbs seek to limit intensive and inexpensive development by requiring minimum house sizes, forbidding mass-produced housing through such devices as "no look-alike" provisions in local zoning ordinances, enacting building codes that drive up the costs of housing construction, prohibiting the construction of multiple-family dwellings, restricting the number of bedrooms in apartment units, and forbidding mobile homes.^[23]

The region's richer suburbs have the most restrictive codes and the most successful development policies, but almost every suburb with vacant land has sought to maximize internal benefits by zoning for fewer people. Over the past quarter-century local planning throughout the region has become far more sensitive to the costs and benefits of residential development, in part because state and especially federal planning assistance have provided resources for professional staff and consultants. Along the region's frontier, planners teach the contrasting lessons of Westchester and Nassau to those who still harbor the "misconception that the more houses you build, the more ratables you have, and the lower your tax burden."^[24] Sophisticated plans are developed to limit population, with increasing attention given to environmen-

[21] Princeton Township Planning Board, 1967 Annual Report (Princeton, 1968), p. A-3.

[22] Mayor Ralph F. Batch, quoted in the Newark News, December 21, 1965.

[23] See Michael N. Danielson, The Politics of Exclusion (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), especially pp. 50–74; Mary Brooks, Exclusionary Zoning (Chicago: American Society of Planning Officials, 1970); and Norman Williams, Jr., and Thomas Norman, "Exclusionary Land Use Controls: The Case of Northeastern New Jersey," Syracuse Law Review 22 (1971), pp. 475–507.

[24] Donald McCoy, planning board secretary, Hopewell Borough (Mercer County), quoted in Trenton Times, August 15, 1967.

tal factors that are seen as severely constraining future development. In intensively settled suburbs like Madison Township in Middlesex, new homeowners in their tract houses soon grasped the rudiments of suburban political economy. Faced with rapidly mounting costs caused by mass development on 50-by-100-foot lots with no offsetting industrial or commercial property, Madison residents sought relief by rezoning undeveloped land for one-half and one-acre lots, so that people like themselves would no longer be able to settle in the municipality.^[25]

Largely as a result of these pressures in suburbs rich and poor, the average lot size in five inner- and intermediate-ring counties—Fairfield, Bergen, Middlesex, Passaic, and Westchester—more than doubled between 1950 and 1960. In 1952, Westchester was zoned for 3.2 million people; nineteen years later upzoning had reduced the county's residential capacity to 1.8 million. By 1962, two-thirds of all the vacant land in the New York region was zoned for one-half-acre or larger lots, while two-fifths of the total was reserved for parcels of one acre or more. Over half of all the land in Westchester's towns—which encompass most of the county's undeveloped acreage—was zoned for lots of two acres or more by 1968. (See Map 4.) By 1970, in the New Jersey suburban belt which encompasses Morris, Somerset, Middlesex, and Monmouth counties, over three-quarters of the undeveloped residential land was zoned for one acre or more, and houses of at least 1,200 square feet were required on 77 percent of the total acreage available for single-family dwellings.^[26]

The trend toward more restrictive land-use controls in the New York region drew increasing fire in the late 1960s. Civil rights groups, fair housing organizations, labor unions, and other critics attacked the exclusion of blacks, lower-income groups, and blue-collar families from housing opportunities in the suburbs. Among the more vocal opponents of restrictive zoning are institutions with a regional perspective, such as the Regional Plan Association and the New York Times . The RPA's report on "Spread City" scores suburban land-use policies for promoting social irresponsibility, exporting costs and problems to others, wasting land, increasing the costs of public-utility systems, and undermining public transportation.^[27] Similar concerns have been voiced by state officials in New Jersey, who have advocated a reversal of municipal land-use trends in the face of the state's growing housing crisis.^[28]

[25] Madison Township's zoning restrictions were successfully challenged in state court in 1971 by a developer and Suburban Action Institute; see Oakwood at Madison, Inc. v. Township of Madison, 117 N.J. Super 11 (1971) and Oakwood at Madison, Inc. v. Township of Madison, 128 N.J. Super 438 (1974). During the course of the extended court fight, Madison Township changed its name to Old Bridge Township.

[26] See Regional Plan Association, Spread City, RPA Bulletin No. 100 (New York: 1962); Economic Consultants Organization, Zoning Ordinances and Administration (New York: 1970); Westchester County Department of Planning, Interim Report 6, Residential Analysis for Westchester County, New York (White Plains, N.Y.: 1970), pp. 8–15; and State of New Jersey, Department of Community Affairs, Division of State and Regional Planning, Land Use Regulation: The Residential Land Supply (Trenton: 1972), pp. 14–16.

[27] See Regional Plan Association, Spread City, passim .

[28] See State of New Jersey, Department of Conservation and Economic Development, Division of State and Regional Planning, The Residential Development of New Jersey: A Regional Approach (Trenton: 1964); State of New Jersey, Governor, A Blueprint for Housing in New Jersey, A Special Message to the Legislature by William T. Cahill, Governor of New Jersey (December 7, 1970); and State of New Jersey, Governor, First Annual Message to the Legislature, Brendan Byrne, Gover-nor of New Jersey (January 14, 1975). Efforts by the Cahill and Byrne administrations to ease suburban zoning restrictions are discussed in Chapter Five, as are earlier proposals made during the administration of Governor Richard J. Hughes.

Map 4
Zoning in Westchester county, 1968

Vigorous support for these proposals comes from most of the region's residential developers, who have little love for the land-use practices of the "tight little islands with a stay-out sign for home builders [and which] are unconcerned about the population explosion."^[29]

[29] John B. O'Hara, President, New Jersey State Home Builders Association, quoted in John W. Kempson, "Zoning Called Bar to Full Land Use," Newark News, March 4, 1965.

But this criticism has little direct impact on the policies of suburban governments. While pockets of local opposition to fiscal zoning are found in the region, particularly in suburbs with more heterogeneous populations, those who favor liberalization rarely succeed in their encounters with local planning or government bodies. In Princeton Township, for instance, liberal Democrats, civil rights groups, teachers, and moderate-income members of the ItalianAmerican Federation sought in vain during the 1960s to alter restrictive landuse policies in order to foster a balanced and diversified community. Among the opponents of liberalized zoning in 1966 were two successful candidates for local office, one of whom did "not see the point of providing housing for anybody and everybody," while the other "certainly [didn't] want this Statue of Liberty in Princeton."^[30] During the same year, a campaign to rezone a large area of Greenwich downward to one-half-acre lots failed, despite the support of local firemen, nurses, post-office employees, and some owners of large parcels of undeveloped land. Defenders of four-acre zoning insisted that their resistance to change had "nothing to do with racial or religious factors. It's just economics. It's like going into Tiffany and demanding a ring for $12.50. Tiffany doesn't have rings for $12.50. Well, Greenwich is like Tiffany."^[31]

Local government agencies like Princeton's planning board and Greenwich's zoning commission successfully resist pressures for more intensive land use because they are responsive to the desires of the majority of their constituents. Opposed to rezoning in Greenwich in 1966 were thirty-four local organizations, ranging from taxpayer groups and neighborhood associations to garden clubs. "In Greenwich," observed a landowner who favored change in local four-acre zoning, "no one can get elected unless he swears on the Bible, under the tree at midnight, and with a blood oath to uphold zoning."^[32] Once in office, such officials are strongly guided by community sentiment and local self-interest. As the chairman of Princeton's planning board explained in 1966: "Unless there is a groundswell or sentiment for high-density zoning, or through court action, Princeton will remain a residential town of relatively large home lots. . . . [The people of Princeton] would rather live in a low-density suburban area than in a town or city. . . . "^[33] As the 1970s came to a close, no groundswell had yet appeared in the vast majority of the region's newer and richer suburbs, most of whose residents continued to prefer spacious zoning.

The Dilemma of Apartments

Zoning for fewer people in single-family residences has accelerated demand for apartments in the suburbs. The rapid rise in apartment construction in the region results both from the growing unavailability of moderately

[30] John D. Wallace and David Thomson, Republican candidates for Township Committee, quoted in Jacqueline Pellaton, "Issue of Low-Cost Housing Divides Princeton Candidates," Trenton Times, October 27, 1966.

[31] Everett Smith, Jr., quoted in Ralph Blumenthal, "Pressures of Growth Stir Zoning Battles in the Suburbs," New York Times, May 29, 1967.

[32] Williams H. Hernstadt, quoted in the above article.

[33] Hans K. Sander, quoted in "Planners Set Forth Objectives," Princeton Packet, March 2, 1966. A few years later, local advocates of lower-income housing were able to prevail over bitter local opposition to secure approval of two small federally subsidized moderate-income housing projects in Princeton Township.

Garden apartments developed in the mid-1960s
in Middlesex County, adjacent to single-family
housing on the small lots typical of suburban
development in the 1950s.
Credit: Louis B. Schlivek, Regional Plan Association

priced single-family homes and changes in the age and income structure of the suburban population. The planning process in suburbia, however, gives relatively little consideration to the role of apartments in meeting the housing needs of the newly married, the elderly, single individuals, and moderateincome families. Instead, as is the case with single-family residences, the realities of the suburban political economy dictate that local officials consider apartment proposals in the context of localized values, with a narrow calculus of costs and benefits.

Apartment construction, however, raises more complex issues within suburban jurisdictions than those posed by moderately priced homes on small lots. Some suburbanites, including local officials who must balance municipal budgets, see apartments as valuable tax ratables whose development can be regulated to produce a net contribution to the local treasury. Others, usually in the majority, consider apartments a threat both to municipal solvency and to community or neighborhood character. As a planner comments concerning the opposition of a Bergen County suburb to

high-rise apartments: "The residents feel they have a sanctuary in Tenafly and they're literally afraid of people moving in. They feel that they have successfully escaped from the central city and they don't want the central city to pursue them."^[34] Most suburbanites polled in a 1978 survey opposed new apartment construction, with 76 percent responding negatively to the question "would you approve of more apartment buildings being built in your area?"^[35]

Because of these different perceptions within individual suburbs, apartment proposals often become highly contentious issues, at least in comparison with single-family housing questions where internal consensus usually is high, and where conflict tends to be external rather than internal. And because the question of apartments poses a choice between two key suburban development goals—maximizing internal benefits and maintaining the suburban residential image—conflict often is intense and bitter.

The issues and conflicts generated by apartments have produced a common scenario in a number of the region's suburbs during the past decade. The action begins when a developer seeks a building permit or a zoning variance, in order to construct a garden-apartment project in a suburb dominated by single-family residences. Mayors, councilmen, and school-board members often find the proposal attractive because it promises to stabilize or lower the tax rate. But many of their constituents think otherwise, and groups like the Livingston Citizens Against Apartments, the Hillside Homeowners Action Association, and the Madison Township Political Action Group Against More Apartments, are quickly organized. The chief complaints are that school costs and other public expenditures will skyrocket, that traffic congestion and parking problems will intensify, that the character of the community will be changed, and that apartments will attract blacks and soon become slums.^[36] The most vehement reaction comes from those in the immediate vicinity of the proposed project who fear that apartments will depreciate the value of their homes. In most jurisdictions, as a Long Island builder notes, "public opposition is unbelievable. There's a desperate need for this kind of housing, but people just go crazy when you talk about building in their town. Four out of five projects I've started have been stopped—people scream that they'll increase traffic, put more kids in the schools, change the neighborhood. They're afraid of any kind of change out here."^[37]

In many instances, adverse public reaction kills the initial apartment proposal. Sometimes opposition also sweeps an incumbent administration out of office, as in East Brunswick in Middlesex County and Clark in Union

[34] Isadore Candeub, Candeub-Fleissig and Associates, Newark, N.J., quoted in Gary Rosenblatt, "1962 Dispute Still Persists on Tenafly High-Rise Plan," New York Times, March 19, 1972. The Candeub firm prepared a plan for a New York developer involving the construction of 4,000 apartments and 2.8 million square feet of office space in high-rise buildings on a 274-acre tract in Tenafly. Local opposition prevented the rezoning needed for the project, and led to an effort by Tenafly to acquire the land through condemnation for use as a park.

[35] New York Times, "1978 Suburban Poll" (1978), p. 9.

[36] See State of New Jersey, County and Municipal Government Study Commission, Housing & Suburbs: Fiscal and Social Impact of Multifamily Development, Ninth Report, October, 1974 (Trenton: 1974).

[37] Alvin Benjamin, quoted in Richard Reeves, "A Changing L.I. Is Opposed to Change," New York Times, June 3, 1971.

County. Often public antipathy to apartments and the kinds of people who live in them produces prohibitions on future apartment construction. In the 1960s, only I percent of the residential land in the region's suburbs was zoned for multiple dwellings, and much of this was located in the older suburban jurisdictions. In Westchester, apartments could be built on almost 5 percent of the 55,000 acres of all land zoned for residential use in cities and villages, but on less than 1/2 of 1 percent of the 198,000 acres assigned to residential use in the less-intensely settled towns where most future development would occur. Only 2,000 of the 400,000 acres of undeveloped residential land in Morris, Somerset, Middlesex, and Monmouth counties were zoned for multiple dwellings in 1970.^[38]

In many communities, prohibitions on multiple dwellings are only a prelude to the second act of the apartment drama. This phase often starts when a developer or landowner brings suit after his application to build apartments has been rejected. Court orders sometimes result which force a locality to rezone for apartments or remove a moratorium on apartment construction. In other suburbs, rising municipal burdens produced by intensive single-family development lead to renewed interest in apartments on the part of local officials, who seek to demonstrate to their constituents that under the proper conditions apartments will provide a favorable ratio of local property-tax revenues to public costs, especially for education. One source of reassurance is a study by George Sternlieb which found that a community can profit from one-bedroom and efficiency apartments, but must severely limit the number of multiple-bedroom units if it does not want school costs to exceed property tax revenues from the project.^[39] These and similar findings are reflected in the garden apartment regulations drafted by suburban planners and their private consultants. A typical ordinance, like that of Hillside or East Brunswick, requires 80 percent of the apartments to have one bedroom or less. Table 14 shows the pattern of restrictions in Middlesex County in 1970.

[38] See Economic Consultants Organization, Zoning Ordinances and Administration, p. 16; and Williams and Norman, "Exclusionary Land-Use Controls: The Case of Northeastern New Jersey."

[39] See George Sternlieb, The Garden Apartment Development: A Municipal Cost-Revenue Analysis (New Brunswick: Bureau of Economic Research, Rutgers—The State University, 1964), p. 14.

Once an apartment ordinance is proposed, another battle ensues, with the threatened neighborhood leading the opposition, frequently taking the conflict to the courts. Nor does the controversy end with the construction of an initial apartment project, since pressures often develop for a moratorium on further apartment development so that the local government may evaluate the impact on taxes and municipal services of those that have been built.

In a few suburbs, high-rise apartments produce a third act, replete with renditions of many familiar themes from earlier conflicts over tax ratables, school costs, and community character. Given the limited amount of land available for multiple dwellings in the region's suburbs, the issue of high-rise apartments may follow hard on the heels of garden-apartment settlements. This was the case in Cedar Grove in Essex County, where acceptance of garden apartments was followed by a developer's proposal to build high-rise apartments on the crest of First Mountain. And when high-rise controversies are resolved, the zoning regulations closely resemble those designed to maximize suburban revenues from garden-apartment development. In Port Chester in Westchester County, for example, only 253 of 981 units in three apartment towers have as many as two bedrooms.

Of course, many variations in this scenario are found in a region as large and complex as New York. Prohibitions on apartments have been maintained successfully by some communities, typically those that can afford to value their single-family residential character more highly than the municipal profit promised by one-bedroom apartments. Others have demonstrated skill and foresight in adopting restrictive apartment regulations that effectively foreclose the typical garden apartment, with its monotonous box-like buildings, crowded acreage, and unattractive site planning. At the other end of the spectrum are less sophisticated suburbs whose initial response to apartments has been highly permissive. These communities typically already had severe fiscal problems arising from intensive single-family development, so indiscriminate apartment construction threatens municipal disaster. In Parsippany-Troy Hills, minimal controls on garden apartments led to explosive growth that doubled both the population of the Morris County community (from 25,000 to 50,000) and many municipal costs between 1960 and 1967. This led the hard-pressed local government to adopt a two-year moratorium on new apartment development in 1966.

For many suburbs, however, the scenario has been shortened, as knowledge about the costs and benefits of apartments is spread through the region by planning consultants, county planning agencies, and professional journals, as well as by the well-publicized experiences of Parsippany-Troy Hills and other unfortunate suburbs that failed to adopt apartment controls designed to maximize internal benefits before the arrival of the developers. Almost every suburban jurisdiction that permits multiple dwellings has by now adopted bedroom restrictions. And for most, garden apartments constructed under these constraints have proved to be profitable in terms of tax revenues. Madison—a Middlesex County suburb that limited two-bedroom apartments to 20 percent of the total in a development—collected 13.5 percent of its 1970 school taxes from its ten garden-apartment developments, which housed only 5.8 percent of the school population. As a result, apartments contributed $326 per unit to school taxes each year while generating educational outlays of only $135 per unit, for a school surplus of $191 for each

The quest for additional tax revenues stimulates aggressive
efforts to lure industrial development to the suburbs.
Credit: Louis B. Schlivek, Regional Plan Association

apartment. By contrast, an average of $675 in school taxes was collected from single-family homes in Madison, while $955 was spent to educate the children housed in the typical single-family dwelling.^[40]

The Right Kind of Industry

In the great suburban game of increasing taxable property without assuming responsibilities for the education of large numbers of children, the most dramatic opportunities for the maximization of internal benefits are provided by industrial and commercial decentralization. As indicated in Chapter Two, such opportunities are increasingly numerous, since almost every form of economic activity in the region has been moving outward. To be sure, a few suburbs continue to value their residential character above the potential benefits of industrial parks, corporate headquarters, research laboratories, and shopping centers. But most cannot resist the lure of valuable properties that by themselves add no pupils to the local school rolls. As the mayor of a suburb that attracted a major office facility in 1971 explains: "With rising costs, a town can't survive anymore strictly on residential property taxes. I.B.M.'s coming was very timely. While it hasn't lowered our tax rate, it certainly has stabilized it."^[41]

[40] See Marshall R. Burack, "Apartment Zoning in Suburbia," Senior Thesis (Princeton University, 1971), pp. 112–114.

[41] Mayor Thomas Pawelko, Franklin Lakes, N.J., quoted in "I.B.M. Is Proving a Good Neighbor in Affluent Bergen Town," New York Times, May 20, 1973.

Because of these considerations, large amounts of vacant land in the suburbs have been zoned for industrial development—far more, in fact, than industry is ever likely to need, especially considering the inaccessibility of some suburban "industrial" zones. For many suburbs, however, zoning land for industry that will never materialize is also an attractive strategy, since it serves as an effective way to prevent or forestall unwanted residential development.

Because the objective of attracting industry is to maximize internal benefits to the particular community rather than to serve the interests of employers or employees, suburbs that zone land for industrial purposes rarely make provision for housing those who will work in the community. In 1970, for example, in the area around Princeton, local governments had reserved enough land for business uses to support 1.17 million jobs. But under existing zoning, housing could be constructed for only 144,000 families, and almost all of it would be priced far beyond the reach of the average industrial wage-earner.^[42]

Furthermore, most suburbs want only certain kinds of industrial or commercial development. The typical suburban goal is to attract industry that will provide tax revenue without compromising the community's residential character. Under these circumstances, the ideal industry, as a Westchester planner wryly notes, "is a new campus-type headquarters that smells like Chanel No. 5, sounds like a Stradivarius, has the visual attributes of Sophia Loren, employs only executives with no children and produces items that can be transported away in white station wagons once a month."^[43] The trouble with this kind of industry, of course, is that the supply falls far short of the demand. Moreover, the most desirable industrial and commercial facilities seek the most attractive locations. Consequently, factors such as favorable topography, high-quality residential development, and good transportation facilities tend to overshadow local industrial strategies in decisions concerning the location of suburban office and research facilities. In the process—as with other aspects of suburban development politics—the wealthier communities tend to secure the most desirable development, while the poorer suburbs have great difficulty in maximizing internal economic benefits without seriously compromising residential goals.

At the other end of the scale in terms of suburban desirability is heavy industry, with its pollutants, heavy transport requirements, and unskilled work force. Given the inhospitality of the suburban value structure and political economy to lower-income residents, the latter factor is particularly important. As former Westchester County Executive Edwin J. Michaelian explained: "We do not have a pool of personnel available for heavy industry . . . [we] wouldn't know where to put, where to house a large group of people who were to come in with a manufacturing industry. . . . "^[44]

Occasionally, however, geography and restrictive zoning permit a residential suburb to obtain the benefits of heavy industry without sacrificing

[42] See Middlesex-Somerset-Mercer Regional Study Council, Housing and the Quality of our Environment (Princeton, N.J.: 1970).

[43] Sy J. Schulman, Westchester County Planning Commissioner, quoted in Merrill Folsom, "Westchester Finds Influx of Business a Worry," New York Times, April 18, 1967.

[44] Quoted in Martin Arnold, "Westchester Cites Industrial Goals," New York Times, February 20, 1967.

residential amenities or incurring the burdens of servicing blue-collar residents. This is the case in Mahwah in northwest Bergen County, whose major source of revenue has been a Ford Motor plant that is isolated from the remainder of the residential suburb by the Erie-Lackawanna Railroad and a major highway. Within Mahwah, land-use restrictions ensured that local housing would be beyond the means of Ford's 5,200 workers. Confronting similar restrictions in neighboring communities, most of the Ford workers had to travel long distances to their jobs. On the other hand, the factory's presence helped provide Mahwah's middle-income residents with high-quality public services at relatively low property tax rates compared with neighboring communities.

For their part, business firms are just as eager as suburban officials to avoid the tax burdens imposed by a surfeit of families with school-age children. When space, market, transportation, and labor-force requirements offer business a choice of sites—as they frequently do in a region as large as New York—lower taxes are often the determining factor in industrial and commercial locational decisionmaking. A study of the effects of local taxes on the location of business by the U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations concludes:

among local governments within a State and especially within a metropolitan area, tax differentials exert discernible plant location pull—the industrial tax haven stands out as the most conspicuous example. In almost every metropolitan area there exist wide local property tax differentials—a cost consideration that can become a "swing" factor in the final selection of a particular plant location.^[45]

As a consequence, lower-tax suburbs enjoy an initial advantage in the quest for attractive industry and commerce. Moreover, municipal success in securing industrial and commercial development tends to be cumulative, since the lower taxes made possible by the initial successes help attract additional industry. Finally, taxes combine with transport, topography, and other factors to produce clusters of suburban industry and commerce, which in turn contribute to the mismatch between resources and needs discussed earlier in this chapter.

From industry's perspective, of course, the ideal suburb would have no residents at all. In the New York region, a number of companies enjoy the manifest benefits of such a location in Teterboro in Bergen County. Teterboro was the brainchild of Alexander Summer, a real-estate developer who reasoned correctly that business would be eager to buy land in a municipality whose lack of residents would ensure a low and stable tax rate. Summer's thesis was that if he and his associates purchased most of the homes in sparsely settled Teterboro, "along with all the remaining undeveloped land in the borough, we could reasonably expect full municipal cooperation instead of the bickering and frustrations that a developer usually encounters in dealing with the governing bodies of small communities." Once the homes were

[45] Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, State-Local Taxation and Industrial Location (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1967), pp. 78–79. Italics in original omitted.

purchased, rents were drastically reduced to secure the support of the tenants, who included the mayor, most of the councilmen, and a majority of the municipality's residents. After Summer and his associates acquired the land, "the first official action of the mayor and council (at our request) was to zone the whole community against residential use."^[46] In 1977, two dozen people lived in Teterboro, which has no schools, one of the lowest municipal tax rates in New Jersey, and public services devoted almost exclusively to servicing the needs of its thirty-five major industries, which employ 24,000 nonresidents.^[47] For an official of the Bendix Corporation, Teterboro's largest employer and major landowner, the borough was not "a tax haven," but rather "a community designed for industry."^[48]

Not the least of the advantages offered by a municipality like Teterboro is the absence of residents worried about the encroachment of industry on residential values. When industry comes to a suburb with people, on the other hand, opposition is common and conflict often intense. The prospect of industrial and commercial development, like apartments, forces suburbanites to choose between maximizing tax revenues and preserving the residential character of their community. "We realize that there are a lot of problems in living with industry," acknowledges the mayor of a suburb that has attracted a number of major firms, "but we were willing to do it because of the tax benefits to residents of the community."^[49] Also resembling the apartment controversies is the conflict engendered by industry between the interests of the community as a whole and the particular neighborhood most affected by industrial or commercial development. The result, as illustrated by the recent experiences of Pepsico, Inc., E. R. Squibb & Company, and the Western Electric Company in the New York region, is that even the most desirable industrial property rarely receives a unanimous welcome in the suburbs. In each of these cases, the corporation sought an attractive location in a high-quality residential area, and was strongly opposed by affluent local residents determined to preserve the character of their neighborhood.

For the estate owners in Purchase, in Westchester County, Pepsico's plan for a $12 million office building for 1,000 employees on a 112-acre site zoned for 2.5-acre residences was "progress with desecration."^[50] For the rest of the town of Harrison, however, Pepsico was a prize that would generate four times as much local revenue as residential development on the same site,

[46] Quoted in John R. Lancelotti, "Albanese Demands End of Teterboro," Newark News, January 3, 1966.

[47] In 1976 Teterboro's tax rate was 65¢ per $100 of property, the second lowest rate in northern New Jersey. All 24 of Teterboro's residents lived in housing owned by the Bendix Corporation, including the mayor, all the members of the borough council, and a number of municipal employees. Teterboro's one school-age child in 1977 was enrolled in nearby Hackensack, at a cost of $4,400 for the community's industrial taxpayers.

[48] Martin Paskoff, northeast regional counsel, Bendix Corporation, quoted in William Tucker, "A Taxpayer's Camelot in New Jersey," New York Times, February 20, 1977.

[49] Mayor Frederick Knox, East Hanover, N.J. Located in Morris County near the junction of I-80 and I-280, East Hanover was the site of major facilities of Sandoz Chemicals, Norda Chemicals, and Tempco, as well as the international headquarters of Nabisco Corporation. As a result of its substantial business tax base, East Hanover had the lowest tax rate in Morris County in 1976.

[50] Lawrence Robbins, Purchase Association, quoted in Merrill Folsom, "New Zoning Voted for Pepsico Site," New York Times, May 23, 1967.

without requiring new schools or other public service improvements. In the past, opposition from Purchase residents had excluded International Business Machines, a racetrack, and a shopping center from their manicured acres. But the campaign against Pepsico—which included an abortive attempt to secede from Harrison—failed as the town's broader interests prevailed over those of its wealthiest residents. Three months after Pepsico revealed its plans, the Harrison town board approved a zoning change to permit commercial buildings in areas previously restricted to private estates, provided the facilities were surrounded by at least 100 landscaped acres.

Squibb's goal was 213 acres of hilly, wooded land in Lawrence Township, a bedroom suburb of 18,000 located between Princeton and Trenton in Mercer County. On this site—zoned for 1.5-acre residences and surrounded by expensive homes—Squibb hoped to build a $9 million research and administrative center to house 875 employees. Although Lawrence's master plan zoned 700 acres for light industry and research facilities elsewhere in the township, Squibb wanted "a quiet contemplative, campus-like atmosphere which our creative people would find pleasant and stimulating. We do not wish our employees to be bothered with noise, smoke, odors, traffic jams or any other disturbing elements."^[51] To the residents of the affected portion of northern Lawrence, Squibb was the disturbing element. Supported by Citizens for Good Planning, the adjacent Educational Testing Service, the Lawrenceville School, and neighboring Princeton Township, the North Lawrence Citizens Association protested the rezoning of the area, arguing that "the master plan and zoning is in jeopardy in the whole township."^[52] After reversing itself once in the wake of an acrimonious five-hour public meeting, attended by hundreds of angry residents, the township committee, supported by the Lawrence Committee to Reduce Taxes through Economic Growth, finally rezoned the land in favor of Squibb and its $300,000-a-year contribution to the local exchequer. As the committeeman who cast the deciding vote to create the 200-acre minimum lot commercial and industrial zone explained: "I think it is an attractive ratable; the majority of the people in Lawrence wanted Squibb."^[53]

In the case of Western Electric, local opposition prevailed, and the corporation's request for rezoning to permit the development in Bedminster of a $10 million office complex employing 1,500 people on 300 acres was denied by the local government. A public hearing on the Western Electric proposal was attended by more than 400 of the Somerset County community's 2,700 residents; and the vast majority were committed to maintaining the status quo in the affluent and sparsely settled township that had no industry, no apartment houses, and five-acre minimum lot sizes. Also distressing to local residents was the presence at the hearings of critics of Western Electric who contended that the projected move to an exclusionary suburb would discriminate against minority groups, who would be denied access to jobs because of

[51] "The Squibb Message," circular distributed by E. R. Squibb & Company in Lawrence Township, June 1967.

[52] William G. LaTourette, president, North Lawrence Citizens Association, quoted in Leonard Sloane, "Squibb Planning to Move to New Jersey," New York Times, June 24, 1967.

[53] Committeeman Edward T. Converse, quoted in "Squibb Move Approved, Residents Plan Appeal," Town Topics (Princeton, N.J.), August 3, 1967.

the unavailability of moderate-income housing in or near Bedminster.^[54] After its rebuff in Bedminster, Western Electric acquired 440 acres further west in rural Readington Township in Hunterdon County, whose less affluent residents found the attractions of a large industrial property to outweigh its liabilities.

The Results of the Maximizing Strategy

The fact that most suburbs seek to maximize internal benefits does not mean that all are successful. As the preceding discussion illustrates, political and planning skills, timing, homogeneity, areal scope, amount of vacant land, nature of previous development, location, and topography all affect the ability of a particular jurisdiction to influence development within its boundaries. In the New York region, many suburbs have had relatively little influence on market forces, whose net effect is to undermine the municipal political economy. In much of the area settled during the first decade after World War II, land-use controls were adopted in the wake of rather than in advance of intensive suburbanization. Maximizing the profits of individual landowners rather than net internal community benefits often was the guiding principle in these areas. Also, in some developing areas—especially where location, topography, and other factors have not been favorable to low-density, high-cost development—economic pressures and the lure of profits have broken down the barriers erected by land-use controls, or prevented them from being erected. Because the stakes for landowners, speculators, and developers are high, the pressures on local officials often are intense and the temptations substantial. For example, in the past twenty years, land values in Wayne have risen from $700 to well over $100,000 an acre, and charges concerning the "profitable relationship between politics, land speculation and zoning" in the Passaic County suburb have filled the air.^[55] Conflicts of interest on the part of suburban officials in a position to profit from land-use changes are common, and bribery has been a factor in the turbulent land-use politics of a number of suburbs.

Although some suburbs are successful in their efforts to maximize internal benefits, it might be argued that in suburbia the public sector as a whole has little impact on the pattern of development. The successful suburbs might be too few in number to influence the overall trend. Or their success might be counterbalanced by the failures of other jurisdictions, leaving the overall thrust of the marketplace unaffected. This is the position of Wood in 1400 Governments:

Not one of these strategies . . . has important implications for the private sector of the Region taken as an entity. An industry barred from one locality can in all probability find a hospitable reception in another with

[54] One of those who testified was Kenneth Patton, New York City's Economic Development Administrator; another was Frank Allen, chairman of the Plainfield chapter of the NAACP. See also the discussion below in the section, "Excluding the Less Affluent."

[55] See Richard Reeves, "Land Is Prize in Battle for Control of Suburbs," New York Times, August 17, 1971.

equivalent economic advantages. High-income families take refuge in Westchester, southern Putnam, and Fairfield, while mass developers make breakthroughs in Nassau or Monmouth or Rockland to provide middle-class housing. With so many different constituencies, many options are open for firms and households alike, and though the process of industrial and population diffusion may occasionally be skewed, the forces are not, in general, thwarted, turned aside, or guided.^[56]

Wood argues that the cumulative impact of suburban governments is negligible, in contrast to the private market forces he sees as determining the shape of urban growth. The logical corollary of this position seems to be that the overall pattern of suburban development would be about the same if there were no suburban governments seeking to maximize internal benefits. If the policies of suburban governments rarely "thwarted, turned aside, or guided" the forces of the marketplace, it would be reasonable to expect commercial enterprises with the greatest stakes in the marketplace for, say, suburban housing, to be relatively satisfied with the existing pattern of public policy. But this is not the case. Home builders, landowners, real estate brokers, financing institutions, and prospective home buyers are highly critical of suburban development policies that decrease the opportunities for home building, reduce the prospects of profits based on more intensive land use, and help to prevent a growing majority of the region's families from obtaining new housing in the suburbs. Thus, a New Jersey builder attacks large-lot zoning as "devastating" and speaks of the need for suburban development policies geared to meet the needs of all groups in our population, while a Long Island banker urges suburban governments to shun "localism and pettiness" in order to meet housing problems in the suburbs.^[57]

The private sector is critical of the public sector in suburbia because suburban governments, in fact, do often "thwart, turn aside, or guide" the forces of the marketplace. The primary concern of developers and large landowners in the suburban housing market is the maximization of profit. In general, profits to landowners and developers correlate directly with intensity of development. Because of the region's income structure, family-size patterns, and the nature of the existing housing stock, the potential suburban market for moderately priced housing on small lots and for multibedroom apartments is larger than the market for expensive homes on large lots and for one-bedroom apartments.^[58] But private actions to meet this demand are not in the interest of local governments, whose revenues and expenditures are extremely sensitive to the nature and intensity of land use. And in the process of thwarting moder-

[56] Wood, 1400 Governments, p. 112.

[57] Nazario Paragano, president of the Home Builders Association of Metropolitan New Jersey, quoted in "Large Lot Zoning Declared Handicap," Newark News, February 28, 1964; and Arthur T. Roth, chairman of the board of directors, Franklin National Bank, quoted in Ronalo Maiorana, "Changes Urged in L.I. Land Tax," New York Times, February 16, 1964.

[58] A Regional Plan Association study of housing needs in the New York State portion of the region concluded that 83 percent of the households in the region whose head was in the "prime" home-buying age bracket (30 to 34 years old) could not afford the average single-family house on the market in Putnam, Rockland, and Orange Counties, 89 percent could not afford housing in Nassau and the two western towns of Suffolk, and 92 percent were priced out of the market in Westchester County; see "Housing Opportunities," Regional Plan News (September 1969), p. 7.

ately priced residential development and encouraging more expensive housing, suburban governments have influenced the pattern of development in the New York region in a number of significant ways. Their cumulative actions tend to accelerate the outward growth of the region, to discourage innovation, and to restrict the housing opportunities (and thus the employment opportunities) of a substantial proportion of the region's residents.

Accelerating Spread

Much of the confusion over the influence of suburban governments on development arises from the rapid outward growth of metropolitan areas. The coexistence of strong market forces pushing development outward and suburban policies that foster decentralization has led many observers to conclude that suburbia's public sector primarily responds to the private sector. But the fact that two components of the urban system have similar effects does not necessarily mean that one is wholly dependent on the other. Instead, as pointed out in Chapter One, both may be responding to the same set of pressures, and in so doing they may reinforce one another. This appears to be what happened in most of the suburbs of the New York region during the initial postwar decade. The private and the public sectors both responded to the demand for a vast increase in suburban housing generated by the growing number of families with the resources to satisfy their desire for space, privacy, and mobility. The marketplace supplied land, federal and state governments provided mortgage subsidies and major transportation facilities, the private sector constructed housing, and the public sector (especially local governments) provided a variety of services for the new residents. By and large, these were complementary activities, each influencing the other, and all reinforcing the basic outward trend.

Since the mid-1950s, however, land development policies have increasingly modified rather than reinforced the thrust of the marketplace. As the interests of residents, rather than entrepreneurs, have come to dominate more and more suburban governments, and as planning techniques and resources have become more widely available, the newer suburban strategies have promoted a more rapid rate of decentralization than would have occurred if market forces, coupled with the governmental service-providing roles noted just above, determined the pace of outward movement in the region.^[59] A similar conclusion emerges from the Regional Plan Association's study entitled Spread City :

the effect of the mosaic of the Region's local zoning ordinances is to spread the population far from the present and projected jobs which are likely to be relatively concentrated toward the center. First, because vacant land is zoned for such large lots that the cumulative effect of developing these lots would be to consume vast areas, hence to push residences great distances outward. Second, because small lots zoned

[59] While these trends have become increasingly important in the 1960s and 1970s, they were present and gathering force during the previous decade, the period examined by Wood and analysed in 1400 Governments . Therefore, our differences with Wood with respect to the impact of suburban land-use policies on the overall pattern of regional development do not result simply from the fact that we examined a longer period of time than did Wood.

What the Regional Plan Association has termed "spread city"
is illustrated in this view of suburban development
in lower Middlesex County in 1970. Large amounts of open
land separate scattered single-family  housing developments,
garden apartments, a factory, and a shopping center.
Credit: Louis B. Schlivek, Regional Plan Association

for the outer fringes of the Region are likely to attract people who cannot afford or do not like large lots.^[60]

In short, the land-use policies of suburban governments produce lower residential densities than would result if the market were unconstrained. Suburbs adjacent to employment centers and to major transportation arteries have not been settled as intensively as they would have been, while those at the fringe of the region have been developed more rapidly than would have been the case if suburban governments permitted housing development to be determined solely by market forces. Scatteration is also enhanced by the irregular pattern of local regulation. Multiple dwellings may be built in one community, but not in another. One-acre lots prevail on one jurisdiction, while a neighboring municipality permits half-acre lots but requires a minimum house size of 1,200 square feet. As a result, developers move out to the far corners of the region in search of local governments that are agreeable to their plans, bypassing attractive sites in communities whose zoning ordinances are unsuitable.

While suburban residential zoning policies have played a primary role in accelerating spread, the industrial strategies of local governments also have

[60] Regional Plan Association, Spread City, p. 13.

influenced the diffused pattern of development. The widespread suburban quest for attractive taxable property has opened areas to industrial development that probably would not have been available under a different revenue system. Were it not for their heavy dependence on local property taxes, many residential suburbs would no doubt use their land-use controls to exclude industry rather than to attract it. Instead, the imperatives of their reliance on the property tax force many suburbs to compete for industry despite locational disadvantages and the opposition of residents. The result is more industrial scatteration in the newly developing areas than would be likely to occur in the absence of the pervasive suburban competition for industry.

By accelerating decentralization, these residential and industrial policies affect a wide range of other development issues at both local and higher levels. In fostering the outward movement and scatteration of residences and jobs, suburban governments contribute to the tremendous rise in demand for highway facilities, as well as to the incidence of conflict over the location of new roads in settled areas. Their actions also play a part in diluting the concentrations of riders essential for the economical operation of public transportation systems. On the local front, the sprawling pattern of development entails higher infrastructure costs than more intensive modes of suburban settlement. Longer water and sewer lines, more land for local schools and other public facilities to accommodate the automobile, and extensive street systems to serve low-density communities mean higher per capita costs. These in turn require higher property taxes, which of course stimulate renewed local efforts to exclude more intensive, less "profitable" forms of development.

Discouraging Innovation

Local government policies also have a strong conservative impact on development practices in the suburbs. Zoning ordinances and building codes are essentially negative instruments—they prevent developers from doing things. Moreover, since a basic objective of these regulations increasingly is to prevent the construction of moderately priced housing, they tend to discourage innovations that might cut costs significantly. The residential developer who seeks to depart from the conventional grid pattern of building lots, or to substitute major prefabricated components for traditional on-site construction methods, invites endless negotiations with local officials, organized protests from residents, lengthy and expensive litigation, and failure a good deal more often than success. The multiplicity of jurisdictions, each with its own regulations and modes of applying them, also works against the emergence of suburban development firms large enough to achieve economies of scale and to introduce industrial methods into home building. Consequently, the private sector, whatever its inclinations, is forced to adapt to the prescribed public patterns of land use and home construction.

It is possible, of course, that the conservative bias of suburban development policies merely reflects the orientation of the market that the local governments seek to regulate. Certainly many developers are content to work within the context of single-family checkerboard lots and to employ traditional construction methods and materials, even though they chafe at the bit of zoning restrictions that limit their market. But some builders have not been

satisfied with the status quo. In suburban locations throughout the region, efforts have been made to introduce cluster or planned-unit developments that depart significantly from the traditional manner of subdividing suburban land for residential purposes. Under the cluster concept, detached houses or townhouses are grouped together on a tract, with the unused land reserved for common residential usage or for green space. Even when densities are no higher than would have been the case with traditional lots, clustering cuts costs by reducing site preparation expenses, shortening utility lines, and requiring fewer streets. At Twin Rivers, a cluster development of 3,000 homes located on 700 acres in Mercer County, the developer had to put in "only 25 acres of roads, or three per cent of the total land use, compared to close to ten per cent in the standard subdivision." In addition, "at least 60 per cent of the quantity of collector mains—sewer, water, storm drainage—[was saved] because of the concentration of the housing."^[61] Clustering also is more likely than conventional techniques to spare trees, preserve interesting topographical features, and produce a distinctive community setting.

Despite its attractions, cluster development won little acceptance in the suburbs of the New York region during the period of rapid growth between 1950 and 1970. Unless changed, local zoning ordinances and subdivision regulations pose an insuperable obstacle to clustering since they almost universally prescribe minimum sizes for individual lots rather than maximum densities for tracts of land. Efforts to secure an amendment or variance to local land-use regulations to permit cluster design are often resisted by local officials and residents who equate clustering with more people and higher taxes. Projects calling for townhouses are particularly vulnerable because the average suburbanite sees little difference between a townhouse and a four-bedroom garden apartment. Resistance to change in many communities has also been prompted by the fact that some developers have sought zoning changes—under the guise of cluster design or planned-unit development—that would in fact greatly increase overall residential densities.

As a result, few builders were able to break through the nearly solid wall of local resistance to clustering prior to 1970. Even the region's largest developer, Levitt & Sons, was forced by local opposition to substitute conventional single-family housing for cluster design in Manalapan Township in Monmouth County. During the 1970s, however, suburban communities became more receptive to cluster development. By 1977, about a third of New Jersey's suburbs were permitting cluster housing. In part, this change reflected greater public concern with environmental protection and the preservation of open space. It also resulted from suburban awareness that clustering need not entail higher densities or lower-cost housing.^[62] Thus innovation which ad-

[61] Herbert J. Kendall, quoted in Alan S. Oser, "Planned Community Is Rising," New York Times, February 22, 1970. Twin Rivers is located in East Windsor, a rapidly growing suburb adjacent to an exit of the New Jersey Turnpike. The project was begun in 1969, following enactment of a special planned-unit development ordinance by the local government. For an examination of the political history of the Twin Rivers development, see Lucy Hackney, "A Political Analysis of the Development Process in East Windsor Township," Senior Thesis (Princeton University, 1975).

[62] See the comments of Stuart Bressler, New Jersey Division of State and Regional Planning, quoted in Carter E. Horsley, "In Suburbs, Quest for Space Pits 'Have-Nots' Vs. 'Haves,'" New York Times, February 6, 1977.

vances traditional suburban interests has become acceptable, although the suburbs continue to resist innovative techniques that might bring more people or higher local tax burdens.

Excluding the Less Affluent

Almost by definition, suburban efforts to maximize internal benefits influence the distribution of moderate and low-income families in the region. Families who cannot "pay their way" are the primary target of suburban development controls that foster higher housing costs. During the past twenty years suburban land-use policies have combined with the general rise in construction and mortgage costs to price the vast majority of the region's families out of the new suburban housing market. An analysis of housing opportunities in the region's northern and eastern suburbs by the Regional Plan Association in 1969 concluded that 80 percent of the region's population was priced out of this housing market.^[63] During the 1970s, housing prices rose faster than income in the region, thus further reducing the proportion of families able to afford new housing. By 1977, the minimum cost of a new single-family home built within 50 miles of Manhattan was $55,000. The rapid rise in housing costs has led many suburban owners to defer the purchase of new homes, thus slowing the "trickle down" process that traditionally has been the major source of improved housing for less affluent families in metropolitan areas.

Suburban land-use policies affect housing costs in a variety of ways. Larger lots are more expensive than smaller ones. Moreover, by reducing the supply of land available for more intensive settlement, large-lot zoning generates greater demand for the limited land available for smaller lots, thus contributing to higher prices for such lots. Higher costs also result from building codes that prohibit mass production and discourage the use of new materials and techniques. Minimum building-size requirements have an even more direct effect on housing costs since in practice they become a minimum cost requirement. Assuming construction costs of $35 per square foot and a conservative $15,000 for land and improvements, a 1,200 square foot minimum mandates a $57,000 house.^[64] And because of the higher investments required for utility connections and other infrastructure, low-density settlement itself increases housing costs.

Of course, suburban land-use policies are not the only major factor in the rapid rise of housing costs. It is extremely difficult to measure with precision the relative weight of increased building costs, tighter money, rising land prices, and local land-use controls on suburban housing costs.^[65] But certainly

[63] "Housing Opportunities," Regional Plan News (September 1969), p. 1. Racial discrimination is also an important factor in structuring housing opportunity in the region; see "Segregation and Opportunity in the Region's Housing," Regional Plan News (July 1979).

[64] Long Island builders estimated that required improvements for streets, sidewalks, curbs, and drainage cost $5,000 per lot in 1977; see William Tucker, "Why Production in Region Lags," New York Times, May 29, 1977.

[65] The problem has two main facets: first, the problem of separating the impact of zoning and building codes from the other factors causing rises in the costs of construction and land; and second, the question of what would have been built on a particular parcel if the land's use had not been constrained by local regulations.

zoning and building codes contribute significantly, particularly since they raise the base cost of housing, which in turn is escalated further by the rising cost of land, labor, materials, and money. Housing built on Staten Island, where local land-use controls were essentially nonexistent during the 1960s, cost 10 to 20 percent less than similar new construction on Long Island. Moreover, almost every suburb in the region bans mobile homes, the one kind of housing priced within reach of families with modest incomes. In short, it seems safe to conclude that if suburban governments did not seek to maximize internal benefits, there would be more moderate and lower-income families in the suburbs, as well as more elderly people and young couples, and, of course, more blacks and Puerto Ricans.

One of the most important consequences of the absence of inexpensive housing in the suburbs is the growing separation of the residences of lower-income families in the core from expanding job opportunities in the suburbs. The Tri-State Regional Planning Commission estimated in 1971 that the gap in the suburbs between middle- and low-income jobs and housing within the price range of the holders of these jobs was almost 700,000 dwellings.^[66] As the Regional Plan Association noted in its 1971 plan for Westchester County, "Westchester is adding to the Statue of Liberty message: 'Give me . . . your poor: but only during the day to man the factories, clean the houses and maintain the hospitals.'"^[67]

The mismatch between housing and jobs in the suburbs reduces employment opportunities for lower-income families, particularly for blacks and other minorities most concentrated in the core. Because of the inadequacy of public transportation in linking inner-city residences with suburban industry, those without automobiles are isolated from more and more blue-collar and service jobs. For those with access to automobiles, journeys-to-work of an hour or longer are common in a region as large as New York. And the growing travel between suburban jobs and lower-income residential areas augments the demand for additional highway facilities in the region.

Moreover, as a result of the lack of moderately priced housing in the suburbs, many suburban employers encounter labor shortages, particularly in recruiting for lower-paid jobs. In Somerset County, for example, over half the major employers were unable to meet their labor needs in 1970 because of residential restrictions. And almost 60 percent of the companies believed that inadequate housing would restrict their plans for expansion within the county. Despite these concerns, business interests have not been willing to bring pressure on suburban governments to lower housing barriers. Typical of the attitude of most corporations was the response of Western Electric to suggestions that the company had an obligation to insure that housing was available for its employees if it were to move to Bedminster: "Western Electric is not against low- or middle-income housing for anyone. But we do think that this is a matter that local zoning officials have to decide for themselves. . . . [We] don't think this is something we as a company can properly go to a community and say we want changed." In fact, in its effort to persuade Bed-

[66] See Tri-State Regional Planning Commission, "Jobs and Housing in the Tri-State Region," Interim Technical Report 4240–2223 (New York: June, 1971), pp. 5–7.

[67] Regional Plan Association, Westchester County Supplement to the Second Regional Plan (New York: 1971), p. 64.

minster to alter the local zoning code to permit the construction of a corporate facility, Western Electric emphasized not the need for more moderately priced housing, but the argument that its impact on the area would be very modest—since only about 25 of the 1,500 new employees would become residents of Bedminster or Far Hills, a nearby exclusive suburb.^[68]

Fear that industrial or commercial development might open the way to a modest flood of lower-income residents has fueled opposition to nonresidential development in some suburbs, such as that mounted by the Citizens Continuing Committee for Conservation against the construction of executive offices by the RCA Corporation in New Canaan in the Connecticut portion of the region. In some instances, opponents of industry (and of moderately priced housing) have argued that business development and lower-cost housing are part of the same package. State Assemblyman John H. Ewing, a Bedminster resident, opposed the Western Electric proposal because: "If we accept the ratables, we have the responsibility of providing adequate housing. If people want the offices, they have to take the housing problem with it."^[69] As it turned out, Bedminster wanted neither housing nor industry, and rejected the corporation's plea.

But most suburbs cannot afford to reject an attractive addition to the tax base such as Western Electric. Moreover, given the logic of maximizing internal benefits—as well as class and racial prejudices—most communities refuse to make any connection between the acquisition of industry and the easing of residential restrictions. The arrival of more than forty new industries between 1965 and 1971 brought no significant reduction in the zoning barriers of Nassau County's Oyster Bay. Similarly, despite the presence of a large Ford Motor Company assembly plant and lower taxes than neighboring communities, Mahwah in Bergen County rebuffed requests for zoning changes necessary to permit the United Auto Workers Housing Corporation to build federally assisted housing within the price range of Ford's 5,200 workers—40 percent of whom were black. In neighboring Franklin Lakes, which welcomed a large IBM installation but not garden apartments, the local beneficiaries of the taxes generated by nonresidential development are equally unwilling to provide housing for workers: "There is lots of empty land and cheap housing further out—there's no reason why people should feel that they have to live in Franklin Lakes just because they work here."^[70]

Because there is very little moderately priced housing in the suburban areas settled during the past quarter-century, most of the lower-income families who live outside the New York region's core are concentrated in a few older suburbs and smaller cities of the inner ring. Largely settled at relatively high densities before the advent of the automobile, these suburban jurisdictions contain most of the older housing stock in suburbia. And during the past twenty-five years these communities—such as Yonkers and Mr. Vernon in Westchester, Plainfield and East Orange in New Jersey—have attracted almost

[68] See David K. Shipler, "Western Electric Rebuts City on Relocation to Jersey Town," New York Times, November 11, 1970.

[69] Quoted in John L. Davnar, "Bedminister Committee Will Decide on Office Project," Newark Sunday News, November 15, 1970.

[70] See National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing, Jobs and Housing (New York: March 1970), p. 116.

all of suburbia's low-income migrants, an overwhelming majority of whom were black. Affluent white families, on the other hand, have been deserting these older suburbs for the newer or more expensive areas where the market and public policy combine to exclude the less fortunate. Thus, in addition to keeping the less affluent out of the suburbs in general, the individual suburb's quest to maximize internal benefits tends to concentrate lower-income groups in a relatively small number of jurisdictions that have to bear the primary burden of servicing the needs of an important component of the suburban population.

The exclusion and concentration of lower-income groups also means that most suburban jurisdictions lack a significant lower-income constituency. Few residents in the typical suburb question policies based on the desire to avoid the costs that come with lower-income residents. Almost everywhere in suburbia, constituency pressures for programs designed to improve housing conditions for the poor are weak. Moreover, proposals for low-income projects meet overwhelming opposition from residents who fear reduced property values, higher taxes, and neighborhood changes in the wake of an influx of poor black families into their suburb. All of the lower-income housing proposals developed in the early 1970s by the Suburban Action Institute—a public advocacy group located in Westchester County—were rejected by suburban governments.^[71] Because of the intense local opposition, few suburbs in the New York region have sought to participate in federal or state housing programs aimed at low- and moderate-income families. An exception in some jurisdictions has been subsidized housing for the elderly, which serves a local need and does not threaten a community with "outsiders"—by which suburbanites usually mean low-income blacks.

As a result, very little subsidized housing for low-income families has been built in the suburbs. Suffolk County, for example, had 48 family units and 100 elderly units in 1977, a far cry from the 27,000 low-income units the county estimated it needed. Moreover, almost all of the little low-income housing built in the suburbs since 1950 has been located in areas that already had concentrations of lower-income and black families. Even in these communities, the lower-income suburbanites rarely have a major influence on local development policies. In very few suburban communities are the concentrations of poor or black residents sufficiently large to produce an authoritative role for their spokesmen in the local political system. Moreover, as in the larger cities, ethnic and racial conflicts undermine the prospects for concerted action by the less affluent. And like their brothers in the inner-city ghettos, until recently suburban blacks have been unable to mobilize their political resources for an effective challenge of local development policies. As a result of the political weaknesses of these groups and the desire of their more affluent and influential neighbors to maximize internal benefits, older suburbs have been more interested in getting rid of low-income families and preventing more from coming than in improving conditions for (and thereby probably attracting even more) residents who are widely perceived as community liabilities.

[71] Suburban Action Institute proposed large-scale housing developments in Brookhaven, N.Y., Mahwah, N.J., New Fairfield, Conn., Readington, N.J., and Ridgefield, Conn. For a discussion of Suburban Action's program and the reaction of suburbanites, see Danielson, The Politics of Exclusion, pp. 118–123.

Like many of the region's cities, the older suburbs relied heavily on the federal urban renewal program in their efforts to maximize internal benefits at the expense of their low-income residents. The typical suburban redevelopment plan has sought to replace deteriorated commercial or industrial structures and adjacent low-income residences with attractive tax sources. In Morris County, for example, Morristown proposed an urban renewal program to replace a low-income residential neighborhood with two department stores, a shopping mall, movie theatre, motel, office tower, 100-unit apartment complex, and a 2,300-car parking deck. Englewood initially sought federal renewal assistance to clear for industrial reuse a tract of sixty houses occupied by poor blacks in the Bergen County community. Rarely is sufficient housing provided in the older suburbs for the low-income families displaced by commercial and industrial redevelopment schemes. In Westchester, the urban renewal programs of thirteen municipalities in 1967 called for the demolition of 1,200 housing units and the construction of only 700 low-rent dwellings.^[72]

As in the cities, low-income blacks pay the heaviest costs and receive the fewest benefits from urban renewal plans implemented in the suburbs. Blacks are most likely to have their homes bulldozed. For example, 50 percent of the dwelling units scheduled for clearance in Port Chester were occupied by blacks, as were 70 percent of those demolished in Huntington Station, and all of those in the target area in Englewood. Blacks also have the bleakest prospects when it comes to relocation, both because of the scarcity of low-rent housing in the suburbs, and because racial discrimination drastically reduces the suburban housing opportunities of blacks at all income levels. Consequently, urban renewal has been a major cause of racial tension in the older suburbs. Local black leaders and civil rights groups have denounced suburban redevelopment programs as "Negro removal," demanded more low-income housing, and insisted that such housing be dispersed throughout the community.

Few older suburbs, however, want urban renewal if the price includes dispersing low-income housing into areas currently white. Throughout suburbia, redevelopment schemes have been delayed or halted whenever implementation has been conditioned on the construction of public housing in white neighborhoods. In Port Chester, 2,400 signatures were collected in 1967 opposing "subsidized" housing for those displaced by redevelopment. During the same year, residents of one section of the sprawling Westchester town of Greenburgh sought to incorporate as a village in order to foreclose the construction of low-income housing for blacks.

In each instance, the arguments against low-income developments are the same as those heard in the white neighborhoods of Queens or Staten Island when City Hall proposes to scatter public housing. A resident of a $50,000 home near a proposed low-income site in Yonkers assured reporters that "it is not that I don't believe in racial or social integration, [but] really those people . . . would feel so out of place here," while the local councilman for the area never mentioned race in terming the proposal "outrageous" because it would increase crime, decrease land values, and "aggravate school

[72] Urban League of Westchester County, Housing Council, "Urban Renewal in Westchester County: Its Effect on the General Housing Supply and on the Housing Occupied by Negroes," (White Plains, N.Y.: November 1967), p. 3.

problems for the neighborhood."^[73] But as White Plains' Mayor Richard Hendy pointed out in discussing his city's urban renewal problems in 1965, "the crux of our . . . trouble is that residents just don't want colored people moving into their neighborhoods from the slum we have to raze."^[74] The attitudes of White Plains' white residents are shared by the vast majority of public officials, realtors, home builders, and private citizens—in suburbs large and small, rich and poor, from one end of the region to the other. Racial bias and a desire to maximize internal fiscal benefits work together to ensure that suburban blacks will be concentrated in a small number of jurisdictions. While 13 percent of the residents of Essex County outside of Newark were black in 1970, 89 percent of these black suburbanites lived in three municipalities—East Orange, Orange, and Montclair—where they accounted for 42 percent of the population. In the other 18 suburban communities in Essex, only two percent of the population was black. The Suffolk County Human Relations Commission concluded in 1967 that "about 95 percent of available housing [in the county was] closed, in effect, to Negro customers."^[75] In words that could be applied to almost every suburb in the region during the past two decades, a Bergen County fair housing committee found in 1965 that "discrimination is an ugly fact of life in Dumont and Bergenfield, practiced by many real estate agents, apartment owners, and homeowners."^[76] A decade later, these practices were still prevalent in much of Bergen County, prompting civil rights groups to file a sweeping antidiscrimination action in federal court.^[77]

By and large, suburban governments have been responsive to the views shared by so many of their constituents. Local officials typically have tacitly endorsed exclusionary practices in the private sector. Few have been eager to adopt fair housing ordinances, or otherwise assure blacks equal access to housing opportunities within their boundaries. Instead, as the previous discussion illustrates, they have fostered exclusion by bulldozing black neighborhoods and ignoring the housing needs of those displaced. In addition, suburban governments have rezoned for commercial use land adjacent to black neighborhoods; school officials have frozen and manipulated school boundaries in order to foster and preserve segregated schools; and welfare agencies in some suburban counties have concentrated black welfare recipients in suburbs with large black populations, thus accelerating the flight of whites and further concentrating suburban blacks. As a result of public policies that encourage discrimination and segregation and the fact that the maximization of internal benefits has a disproportionate impact on nonwhites, the behavior of suburban governments has an even greater influence on the settlement patterns of the region's blacks than on the distribution of less affluent families in general.

[73] City Councilman Nicholas Benyo, Jr., Yonkers, Westchester County, N.Y., quoted in Samuel Kaplan, "Yonkers Debates Slum Integration," New York Times, May 5, 1965.

[74] Quoted in Merrill Folsom, "Renewal Is Near for White Plains," New York Times, June 7, 1965.

[75] George B. Pettengill, executive director, Suffolk County Human Relations Commission, quoted in Francis X. Clines, "L.I. Housing Plan Stirs Fears of Bias," New York Times, April 30, 1967.

[76] Fair Housing Committee of Dumont, Bergenfield and New Milford, "Discrimination in the Twin Boroughs," May 1965.

[77] See Ronald Sullivan, "Sales of Homes by Race Alleged in a Bergen Suit," New York Times, March 8, 1976.

Suburbanization Without Maximization: The Case of Staten Island

Any discussion of the impact of public actions on the process of urban development inevitably is handicapped by our uncertainty about what would have happened if government had acted differently or not at all. Unfortunately, the events of a quarter century of suburban development cannot be rewound and replayed without local controls over residential densities, apartment sizes, and land use generally. Nor, given the great similarities in suburban political systems and development goals, is it easy to find a large suburbanizing area which has been settled under a different set of rules. During the 1960s and 1970s, however, one section of the New York region—Staten Island—was rapidly suburbanized in the absence of public policies which seek to maximize internal benefits for the local community. And on Staten Island, a largely unfettered private sector has produced a different pattern of residential development than that which occurred elsewhere in the region under much more stringent public regulation.

Staten Island (the Borough of Richmond) contains 18 percent of New York City's land area but in 1960 its 222,000 residents accounted for less than three percent of the city's population. About half its fifty-seven square miles were vacant, and the borough encompassed 60 percent of New York City's undeveloped acreage. Underlying Staten Island's lack of development was its relative isolation from the remainder of the city. No direct surface links with the other boroughs were available until 1964 when the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge was opened.^[78] The bridge unleashed a building boom that led to the rapid suburbanization of much of Staten Island's vacant acreage. Approximately 2,500 housing units, most of them single-family dwellings, were built annually between 1964 and 1979, adding 130,000 new residents to the borough during the 1960s and 1970s.

Compared with the region's typical suburb, Staten Island has been a paradise for the home building industry. Land use has been controlled by a distant city government with a city-wide tax base, rather than by a small-scale political system whose financial prospects were closely linked to local land use. As a result, City Hall has been far more responsive than suburbia to the pressures of the private sector and potential home owners. Minimum lot sizes on Staten Island are so small—40 by 100 feet, or less than a tenth of an acre—as to constitute virtually no regulation, since market considerations would prevent most builders from constructing "suburban" housing on plots any smaller. During most of the decade, other public constraints on development were virtually nonexistent. The city had no master plan for the borough. Subdivision regulations were not employed. And in many instances, building permits were issued for the construction of homes on unmapped land where neither street access nor water or sewer service were available. In fact, far from constraining the private sector, the city government fueled the boom by

[78] Before 1964, residents of Staten Island could reach the rest of New York City via ferries to lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, or via the Bayonne Bridge joining Staten Island to Hudson County, and then via bridge or tunnel to Manhattan.

New housing on Staten Island constructed in the mid-1970s
demonstrates the relatively high residential densities
that result when private builders are not restrained by
restrictive local zoning codes. Credit: Michael N. Danielson

selling city-owned land to private developers. About one-third of the borough's vacant land came into city hands because of nonpayment of taxes after the Staten Island land speculation bubble burst in the 1920s. Eager to raise money from any source, the hard-pressed city government sold $50 million of its holdings between 1960 and 1965, thus forfeiting a golden opportunity to guide development on Staten Island.

Freed from the constraints imposed by local government's typical strategy for maximizing internal benefits, the private sector has produced housing on Staten Island that is smaller, less expensive, more crowded, and less attractive than that built during the same period in the suburbs of the New York region. With eight or more houses to an acre, residential densities are far greater than in any of the suburbs developed in recent years. Small lots also mean lower land costs and moderately sized units, which together permitted Staten Island builders in the mid-1960s to construct single-family homes in the $15,000 to $25,000 range. At the same time, an unfettered private sector has sought with great success to maximize profit in exploiting Staten Island's undeveloped land. In practice, the minimum lot size became the maximum, and the 40-by-100-foot grid has been imposed indiscriminately on Staten Island's hills and dales. New housing has been scattered through the borough's 13,000 acres of vacant land, often with no consideration given to drainage, access, or the availability of city services. As for the housing itself, the City Planning Commission calls much of it "ticky-tacky housing [of the ] crackerbox variety," while the New York Times architec-

tural critic, Ada Louise Huxtable, writes contemptuously of the "jerry-built, rubber-stamp rowhouses."^[79]

What has been called the "sack of Staten Island" outraged planners, civic leaders, conservationists, editorial writers, and some top officials in City Hall, particularly in the administration of Mayor John Lindsay (1965–1973).^[80] During the Lindsay years, efforts were made without much success to enhance and coordinate city controls over the island's development, to encourage cluster and other innovative techniques, and to use urban renewal funds to build a planned community on 1,080 acres in the largely undeveloped Annadale-Hugenot section of Staten Island's south shore. None of these approaches aroused much enthusiasm among the moderate-income families who flocked to Staten Island from Brooklyn because a largely unregulated housing industry offered a reasonable facsimile of space, privacy, and "the country" at cut-rate prices. As Steven V. Roberts pointed out, "if better planning means larger lots, bigger houses, and increased costs, many people who want to find a better life on Staten Island would be priced out of the market."^[81] Just as clearly, if large sectors of postwar suburbia had been developed under the conditions prevailing on Staten Island during the past two decades, rather than under a system designed to maximize internal benefits, residential densities would be higher in the inner and outer suburban rings, housing costs would be lower, and moderate-income families would be more evenly dispersed throughout the region.

Maximization and the Passage of Time

For those who see the private sector as having the primary role in shaping suburban development, the analysis presented here may appear shortsighted. Demands from developers and potential suburban residents will continue to mount in the suburbs, they argue. As the pressures for more intensive development intensify, zoning restrictions will collapse, be subverted, or be swept away by higher levels of government more responsive to the interests of those groups who are disadvantaged by local policies. For example, in discussing the prospects for redevelopment at higher density in Nassau County, Edgar M. Hoover argues that "zoning regulation in most types of communities seem in the past to have been quite pliable in the face of really strong private incentives and fiscal and political pressures."^[82] Thus,

[79] New York City Planning Commission, Staten Island Development: Policies, Programs and Priorities (New York: 1966), p. 26; and Ada Louise Huxtable, "Staten Island's Beauty Losing to Builders," New York Times, August 9, 1965. In order to maximize housing supply and builder profits, some of the developments were semiattached units, with each unit on a 25-by-100-foot lot. By 1977, cost pressures had led developers on Staten Island to cut lot size further, with semiattached units now on 20 by 100 foot lots; see Alan S. Oser, "Soaring Costs Shrinking Homes," New York Times, February 13, 1977.

[80] The quotation is from a New York Times editorial entitled "Staten Island Down the Drain," January 22, 1966.

[81] "The Development of Staten Island: Will It Become Another Queens," New York Times, April 23, 1967. For a recent discussion of these issues, see Alan Richman, "A 'Forgotten' Staten Island Concentrates on Its Future," New York Times, March 9, 1979.

[82] Edgar M. Hoover, "Introduction: Suburban Growth and Regional Analysis," in Dieter K. Zschlock, ed., Economic Aspects of Suburban Growth (Stony Brook, N.Y.: Economic Research Bureau, State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1969), p. 3.

Hoover echoes Wood and Vernon in implying that suburban land-use controls are ineffective, or at least have no lasting impact on the distribution of people and jobs.

The passage of time, of course, will bring changes to all jurisdictions in the region. Market forces undoubtedly will continue to play an important role in the continuous process of urban growth and change, as housing demand increases, land values mount, structures age, neighborhoods rise and fall, and jobs move. Inevitably, these changes will have an effect on local land-use controls. But many local governments will be no more susceptible to pressures in the future than they have been in the past. Nor are the hundreds of local governments that control land likely to make uniform changes in their policies, unless local control over land is drastically altered by the state legislature or the courts, which seems unlikely. Moreover, unless the higher levels of government radically revise the rules of the development game, changes in land-use policies will not occur simultaneously throughout the region. Thus, local governments can be expected to respond to the market forces as in the past, but not everywhere in the same way at the same time. This differential pattern of local response will continue to exert considerable influence on the distribution of people and jobs.

Of course, even in the unlikely event that all local controls were swept away, the fact that they existed would leave an indelible mark on the distribution of people and jobs in the New York region. For example, the moderately priced housing that private developers were prevented from constructing by local restrictions cannot be built today without substantial governmental assistance because housing costs have risen much faster than family income. As a result, a permanent gap in the supply of such housing in the region is likely to persist, regardless of future changes in land-use control policies in the coming decades.