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J. C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City
Innovation in Planned Residential Communities
By William S. Worley University of Missouri Press
Copyright © 1990 The Curators of the University of Missouri
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8262-0926-9
CHAPTER 1
PROTOTYPES
The processes of subdividing urban land and building houses were usually two separate business activities in the nineteenth century. This differentiation was mainly the result of the types of work done and the businesses most closely related to these functions. In addition, the fact that land could be readily financed with a small amount down while houses usually required a 50 percent down payment made the two commodities sell much differently.
Land subdividing was—and is—basically taking an acreage and having the land surveyed to be broken up into lots of sufficiently small size to be salable for building uses. Given the fairly uniform manner of land subdivision into ranges and sections set out in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, it is a bit surprising to find that urban land subdivision has as much diversity as it does. Town building-site lots were as small as fourteen feet by forty-one feet or as large as a full acre. These lots were sold by the "front foot" in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, meaning that the price was so much per foot of frontage facing the street or road. Lot depths were not considered, except indirectly, in the price. This led to instances of lots too shallow for any practical use. Gradually the "square foot" method of sale, which placed a price on the entire area of the lot rather than on simply the amount of frontage, came into use.
The land subdivider oversaw the process of breaking larger pieces of land into smaller ones and was also primarily responsible for marketing the land. These responsibilities led him rather naturally into the real estate business if he was not already part of it. Residential housing construction, on the other hand, was a natural outgrowth of the building professions. Often, a carpenter would gain sufficient capital and experience to put together a crew to build one or more houses a year. Large, organized building companies were infrequent; only since World War II have major companies building hundreds and even thousands of housing units per year been very important. One student of housing theory suggests that another reason for this "Balkanization" in the housing industry was in the financing terms available to housing purchasers prior to the inception of the FHA and the widespread availability of the amortized long-term mortgage. Both were products of the New Deal. The less favorable terms available prior to FHA loans usually involved a maximum of 50 percent of the purchase price in a first mortgage with a five-year term, a second mortgage, often with the same five-year term, of 30 to 40 percent, and a down payment of 10 to 20 percent.
The result of this often massive activity by so many unrelated individuals was that housing and residential neighborhoods usually were built up without much concern for what was going on in the next block or even the next lot. Chaos was brought about by countless private decisions made with little concern for the common good of the future, or even the current, residents. Nevertheless, a few isolated planned residential communities were actually being developed in the nineteenth century. By examining some of these exceptions, the role of J. C. Nichols as a transitional figure emerges more clearly.
Some nineteenth-century examples demonstrated that real estate companies could offer something more of a finished housing product. The key to these instances lay in the rate of growth of the particular city. Where cities were growing rapidly, there seemed to be more demand for house-and-lot combinations on paved streets. This type of development occurred in San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Chicago, among other cities. In San Francisco, a group called the Real Estate Associates bought land and built houses in outlying districts of the growing city in the 1870s and 1880s. Some of the surviving "San Francisco Style" homes of that era, complete with gingerbread and cupolas, are examples of this early type of subdividing and homebuilding combination work. These disjointed areas of substantial construction in that city are hardly examples of coordinated building and planning, however.
In Chicago, the massive growth of the metropolis spawned several subdivisions and building contractors, some of whom developed rather large organizations for the times.
Samuel E. Gross was the most famous of the Chicago builders. It has been estimated that he laid out more than forty thousand city lots in sixteen towns and one hundred fifty subdivisions in and around Chicago between 1880 and 1892. In addition, his people built and sold over seven thousand houses ranging in price from under eight hundred dollars to more than four thousand dollars. In many instances he installed water, gas, and sewer lines and controlled building designs and construction quality guidelines. Gross's most interested supporter pointed out, however, that his influence was limited to certain areas of Chicago. Most other parts of town were put up by subdividers and builders who did not work together or coordinate improvements beyond what was mandated by city law, which was almost nil. This was the pattern in most developing residential sections around the country throughout the last third of the nineteenth century.
In Philadelphia the pattern was somewhat different. Wealthy residents laid out their small, exclusive planned community on the outskirts of the city along the main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Chestnut Hill, on the northern edge of the city, followed a similar pattern. Most of the housing in the city itself was built by men who put up a block of row houses at a time and sold them to workingmen and clerks. The degree to which planned communities were developed and flourished was minimal. Chestnut Hill, while no more planned than other sections, nevertheless had certain features that commended it to upper-income families. The provision of amenities such as the Wissahickon Inn, the Philadelphia Cricket Club, and the adjacent St. Martin-in-the-Fields Episcopal Church created sufficient levels of prestige and protection of values to ensure Chestnut Hill's survival as a picturesque enclave into the latter third of the twentieth century. However, the preeminence of Chestnut Hill owes more to the tenacity of its residents than to the farsightedness of its developer.
Several reasons account for the disjointed nature of urban residential development in post-Civil War America. One was most assuredly the reason cited by Sam Bass Warner: private interests pursued their own private plans. Any attempt at rationalizations by government or even trade associations would have been considered meddlesome interference. Another reason was the disinterest of American and foreign capital in investing in long-term projects with a great deal of initial cost. Until the entry of the United States into World War I, it was a debtor nation with more foreign investment coming in than U.S. investment going out. There simply was not enough money, foreign or domestic, to invest in large-scale development projects that offered only possible, rather than definite, financial returns in the future. Coincidentally, most of the planned communities developed in the nineteenth century turned out to be bad investments for the initial stockholders.
A third reason for the paucity of fully developed residential neighborhoods lay in the lack of trained personnel to perform the necessary planning. Real estate entrepreneurs had almost no experience in this area; building tradesmen and small contractors who put up most of the houses had even less. The profession of city planning did not exist, while the role of the landscape architect, which became crucial in this type of development, was just evolving through the work of Frederick Law Olmsted and a few others.
Finally, there was the question of what the consumers wanted. For coordinated housing, land, and development work to be successful, it was necessary to sell some of the developed commodity. There is little evidence that in the nineteenth century most housing consumers thought very much about the value of the surrounding neighborhood. The wealthy certainly clustered near each other and coerced the municipal authorities to provide them with needed services and amenities. Most of these affluent urban dwellers, even in the rapidly growing cities of the day, did not expect the shape of the cities to change as rapidly as they did. Only near the end of the century did even the wealthy, who could certainly choose where and how they wanted to be housed, begin to realize that some planning and protection might be in order. That is just the point in time when planned residential communities began to be seen as possibly useful and profitable endeavors.
"Under all is the land." This slogan of the National Board of Realtors speaks to the primacy of land development over all other forms of urban expansion. Land is the essence of urban space. Subdivision of the land by specialists into useful parcels is a uniquely urban endeavor that has been overlooked, for the most part. Because so much of our thinking and legal framework comes from English experience, the land development practices of the British Isles are important for comparative purposes.
The basic right of the individual to use real estate without restraint is based on British common law. Throughout most of England and her dominions this has been tempered by the concept of feudal obligations in which landowners have absolute sway in theory, but under which they had to accommodate the needs of their dependents, which meant all living on their land. In Kent County, England, however, a different sort of landholding held sway. Individuals did not receive land with the expectation of offering service, military or otherwise, in return. However, the Kentish men held their land by absolute title with no accompanying power or obligation over the people on or nearby their land. They were not kings of their domains, controlling the lives of others but also having to respond to their needs. They were, instead, clear title owners who could do to or with the land as they pleased. Only court injunctions might interfere with these rights. This sort of landholding practice became dominant in the English colonies in North America rather than the feudal style of landholding with reciprocal obligations.
During the nineteenth century, England experienced tremendous population growth in and around its urban areas, particularly London. One suburb, Camberwell, grew phenomenally in the last half of that century. In that instance a relatively small number of persons or institutions held the land. They almost never sold parcels to individuals for building or other purposes. Ground rents were the rule, with improvements (including all houses or other structures) retained in the title to the land. Landlords granted leases of up to ninety-nine years to builders who would put up houses to receive the income over the life of the lease. The way in which land was used for housing was determined by the lessee unless the owner, or lessor, restricted the use of the land through covenants attached to the lease. In practice, the use of covenants ranged from no use at all to prescriptions for the placement of houses and for the materials to be used in construction.
Probably the closest analogy to the London suburb of Camberwell in a United States setting is late nineteenth-century Boston and its closest suburbs. There the situation appears superficially very similar in that the homebuilders served as the determining agents of the physical shape of the city. The role of landowner and/or subdivider was almost entirely absent. The lack of attention given to the land subdivision process had the effect of focusing subsequent studies on the housebuilding aspect of urban development. The problem with this approach is that builders in Boston bought lots already subdivided by previous owners. They started building with lots, blocks, streets, and alleys already in place. The Boston builders thus determined the type and quality of housing stock, but they were not the designers of the city, whereas in the London suburb the lessee-builders were more the subdividers of Camberwell than the landowners or their agents.
In Boston and all other American cities, the builder could theoretically buy enough raw land to subdivide it and then build on it. As has been documented, however, most houses were constructed by small builders who did not have the resources to buy parcels of land large enough to subdivide. Thus, in North America, normally the owner of the acreage either subdivided his land himself or hired a subdivider who specialized in this endeavor. The landowner might, and often did, sell to the subdivider, who proceeded to carve out streets, building lots, and other physical features on which the builders could construct their dwellings. This pattern is important because it produced a specialized form of real estate business in the United States that was little known in England—land subdivision. Because of the speculative aspects of this type of business, this development has been a mixed blessing for North American residential life.
Some investigation into the origins of this specialization is essential to a study of J. C. Nichols and his work. The city-building process of laying out cities was normally gradual. In times of expansion, land subdivision "boomed," with hundreds of thousands of lots being carved out of the ranges and sections of former cropland. When the booms "busted," as they always did, several years might pass before enough of the excess subdivided land was utilized to stimulate further subdivision activity.
In the last third of the nineteenth century, the land development process was most commonly carried out by at least three different entities, including the subdivider. This real estate specialist took raw land in acre form and subdivided it into lots, streets, alleys, and the like. This was done by having a surveyor draw up a plat (essentially, a technical map showing relationships) of the land. The owner filed the plat with the county or city clerk; it was subsequently approved, amended, or disapproved in session by the city or county representative body. The governmental body based its approval on the recommendation of its civil engineer. In practice, the engineers and governing assemblies turned down very few plats.
Until the 1880s real estate agents marketed almost all the subdivided land. These individuals and firms completed all kinds of real estate transactions, from commercial land sales to the resale of houses and lots. The sale of vacant, subdivided land was normally a sideline that became profitable only at certain times, such as during booms. Most often throughout the nineteenth century, a third entity, the builder-contractors, did whatever improvement to the land was deemed necessary to sell it to the consumer. Yet the builders' low capitalization allowed them just enough funding to build houses. They simply could not afford to pay for water lines, sewers, or street and sidewalk pavement, let alone such niceties as landscaping or playground construction. The common practice was for little property development to be done until the residents could band together to lobby the city or county legislature to fund in whole or in part such improvements as street pavement, sidewalks, sewers, and even water connections. Most often, the municipal officials simply agreed to be responsible for the arrangement of financing and collection of funds to pay off the improvement debt.
Because these improvements were deemed to benefit the local landowner most of all, the special tax theory of special benefit districts evolved. Under this system, landowners paid most of the cost of these improvements over a period of time through special taxes levied by the municipality. Such taxes added to the cost of the land after the purchase and thus became for many a hidden cost of urban landownership. The manner in which this took place was quite uneven in different urban areas.
One of the reasons for the extreme specialization of function, then, was the limited capital held by any of the participants in the process. Subdividers did not have money to go into marketing. Real estate agents sold services, not goods, and were not capital intensive. The cities effectively loaned the money for improvements to new residents, who repaid the loans through the special assessment taxes. With the significant expansion of urban population and wealth in the 1880s, some instances of combining these functions occurred.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from J. C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City by William S. Worley. Copyright © 1990 The Curators of the University of Missouri. Excerpted by permission of University of Missouri Press.
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