Oregon daily emerald., May 28, 1971, Page 9, Image 9

Cities . . .
Continued from Page 8
their own property, then, on learning
that an interchange will be located to
benefit their property, become its
strongest supporters. We call it
“planning a city” when we permit them
to build high rise office buildings or
luxury apartments without adequate
mass transportation, and increase the
congestion of already congested
streets. We encourage the rich to move
into “retirement villages” and escape
most or all of their obligations to
support education and other public
services. We permit a landholding
minority to defeat the tax levies
required to support the education of all.
To “eliminate slums” we instead
eliminate most of a city’s supply of
lower cost housing, then subsidize the
building of sterile high rise prisons for
the poor displaced from these homes.
To “Renew” our “Urban” centers, we
destroy the hundreds of small
businesses, interesting little corners of
a city, bars, cafes, dives, bookstalls,
etc., which make a city interesting and
worthwhile, and replace them with
huge commercial buildings so ex
pensive that only a sterile, mass
marketing operation can pay the rent.
This is done in the name of “property
values”—read “economic values.”
Looking at the whole
So much of this results directly
from looking at the part, not the whole.
Yet we cannot blame the middle aged
couple who “invest” in a bit of land to
insure their old age against despair. We
have set our social security and pen
sions so low, we have permitted the cost
of medical care and other essentials to
spiral so high, that it would be cruel to
expect people to give up these hopes for
a secure future. But what about the
person who refuses to “invest,” or the
person who simply cannot afford to
“invest”? What will happen to him in
his old age? Somehow we must insure
the security of all; we must insure that
everyone can live, and can retire, in
comfort and security. Perhaps we
should provide a program whereby
every citizen could “invest in a bit of
land.” If we returned to the simple
system advocated by Jefferson, this is
what would result. For then, the rents
the land, which belongs to all, would
ensure the future security of all. No one
would need fear destitution in their old
age or sickness. Everyone could “retire
to Florida”—or wherever they wished.
Dependence on the land
Furthermore, if we all recognized
our dependence on all the land, not just
on the piece of land we claim, we would
all have a stake in the preservation of
the natural and human environment.
Our government would no longer be, as
it so frequently is now, an arena in
which the conflicting interests of dif
ferent property holders struggle
against one another. It would be a
forum in which different viewpoints of
how to achieve a common goal could be
resolved. It just might become a
democracy.
Immanuel Kant said that a good
basis for an ethical system would be,
for each person to judge each of his
actions on the following grounds:
“Would I want for everyone to do this
thing9" That may not have carried too
much weight in his day. when there
were a great many actions the
privileged few could perform with no
fear of being imitated by the masses.
But today there are few actions we can
perform without being certain that
thousands of others will perform the
identical action Today we are com
pelled by our ow n technological success
to subscribe to the Kantian Ethic. V\e
must subject each habit and each
pattern of consumption to this
‘popularization" test, and reject it if it
fails the test.
Individual priorities
Further, we must consider the
implications of each of our values and
goals; we must recognize that many of
them are mutually exclusive, and we
must set priorities among them.
Otherwise, we will be the victims of an
indifferent corporate structure, we will
be the victims of the habits and
decisions of four billion other people,
and we will be the victims of our own
inconsistency and irrationality.
Those who object to urban sprawl
and the exploitation of land for private
profit must recognize that their home,
their vactaion retreat, and their in
vestment decision are part of these
problems. Those who object to traffic
congestion, smog, the slaughter of
innocents in traffic accidents, the
failure of public transportation and the
destruction of the intricate scale of the
urban fabric, must forswear driving an
automobile, save when that is the only
way to get from where we are to where
we need to go. Wherever possible we
must ride a bus, walk, ride a bicycle,
take a plane, train, or boat. We must
insist on living within walking distance
of work, school, shopping; we must
insist that our cities be regulated and
I
plots—this is the type of provision
which we should demand, not the huge
quarter or half acre lots sprawling
endlessly across the landscape.
Properly planned, residences built
eight or ten to the acre, and even more,
provide more privacy and as much
usable living space as residences built
three or four to the acre; we should
demand proper planning and a
minimum density standard, so that a
higher density of residential areas will
support efficient, rapid and com
fortable transportation, neighborhood
employment, shopping, and cultural
facilities, and nieghborhood parks and
recreation facilities. Our current
zoning ordinances demand a large
minimum set back and side yard for ai!
single family residences; this wasteful
practice should be abolished, or left to
the discretion and taste of each in
dividual homeowner
Insistence
We can insist that no more land be
sold from public ownership to private
ownership, that public land be made
available for private use by a specified
term lease or a life lease, with land
rents replacing property taxes as a
source of public revenues. We can insist
that our government being a
systematic condemnation and purchase
of developmental control or,
1
our residential areas constructed in a
way which will permit us to find the
kind of living quarters we need, within
reach of these work, education, and
commercial areas. We must insist that
new residential areas be zoned and
built in sufficient density to support
public transportation, and existing
areas be rezoned and their density
increased as rapidly as possible. We
must insist that exclusive land use
zoning (which prohibits neighborhood
grocery stores, shops, employment,
etc.) be abandoned. We must insist on
the provision of a comprehensive
nationwide network of adequate and
accessible public transportation, we
must insist on public parks & recreation
facilities, shopping and employment
centers in the midst of the homes of
those who need these things.
Connections
Those who object to the destruction
of scenic values by hydroelectric
dams, to the pollution of the air by
steam generating plants and to the
construction of nuclear-electric plants
must recognize the connection between
the electric powered air conditioner,
electric super-appliance (self
defrosting refrigerators, for example)
and other such power gobblers, and the
need for multiplying electric
generation plants. The Trojan nuclear
power plant is my air conditioner and
yours, my computer and yours, my 500
watt super-hi fi and yours.
If we can do without a large private
yard and garden, we must insist on
living quarters built on as small a
parcel of land as possible. Our current
zoning ordinances specify a minimum
lot size on which a house may be built—
we need zoning ordinances which
specify a maximum lot size on which a
house mav be built A well planned
network of small neighborhood parks
would satisfy the outdoor living needs
of most of us. if supplemented by small
patio areas and. for some, small garden
preferably, outright ownership of all
land currently in private ownership—
preferably purchasing the land at the
original, uninflated purchase price.
The re-ordering and rationalization
of values and priorities 1 am suggesting
will not be without sacrifice on the part
of some. For most people, however, the
sacrifice will be slight and of short
duration, if we all get together on it, and
for everyone, the payoff will be a city of
the future, in which we can live in peace
and joy. What kind of city will it be?
People oriented
Anyone who has ever visited some
of the older European cities or wan
dered through San Francisco’s older
residential-commercial-cultural mix
tures can guess at the feeling one
would get in such a city. The streets
would be somewhat narrower and
parking lots would almost disappear.
Much of the space now occupied by
streets would be given over to wide,
spacious sidewalks, on which there
would be almost constant human (not
automotive) activity. Sections of
sidewalk would be leased for use by
sidewalk cafes and bars, marginal
retail ventures, street theater even.
These sidewalk enterprises would come
and go from week to week in an endless
mosaic of sight, sound, color, not unlike
the old ‘Saturday Market.”
Supermarkets, department stores,
cafeterias, drive-ins, and other off
spring of the Automobile-freeway love
affair would gradually disappear, or
thier form would be very drastically
altered These commercial forms are
geared to a motorist, driving at twenty
to fifty miles per hour; their size, form,
and appeal are out of scale and
repulsive to a pedestrian, moving at
four or five miles per hour.
In their place, small specialty
shops, such as those that flourish in
most older neighborhoods of San
Francisco, would spring up The new
trend, exemplified by the Saturday
Market and other related enterprises in
downtown Eugene, toward
"shoestring" businesses would grow
stronger. Service would be much more
personalized and diversified. This new
breed of downtown merchants would
welcome the same vendors of hand
crafted and exotic items that Eugene's
downtown businesses are now trying to
drive out. because these specialty shops
and street vendors would attract the
large volumes of pedestrian traffic
required for the economic success of all
the businesses.
Less lonely cities
Words such as "traffic fatality,”
“smog,” “traffic jam” would disap
pear from the lexicon. More people
would walk down almost every street,
and every block would have more
shopkeepers and others with a vested
interest in public order and safety; the
chances are that street crimes would
fall off sharply. On the way to work or
to the store, on stopping in for a beer or
a cup of coffee on the way home from
work, or on a morning walk to the park,
the city dweller would encounter dozens
of familiar faces, would be drawn into
the fringes of numerous spontaneous
people-fests. On the street we would be
in the midst of a rich and familiar
public life—in our home we might be as
private and excluded as we would. The
cities would be less lonely, their
dwellers less desperate.
Most people would live in a rented
flat; some might live in a luxury high
rise apartment, a few would own their
own home, on life-lease lots. These
might have a small patch of lawn and a
garden; the apartment dwellers might
lease a small plot of ground in the
nearest park and tend a bit of garden
there, or he might have a bit of garden
behind the apartment house—this is the
system now used in many of the three to
five unit buildings in San Francisco and
elsewhere. Most of us would probably
prefer to take the bus or the rapid
transit to the outskirts of the city,
where we could spend our Saturday on
the public golf courses or at the public
beaches. We might even belong to an
urban based gardening co-op, which
would lease a small farm not too far out
in the country and manage it for us with
our contributions of money and labor.
Our choice
Is this but a “pipe-dream”? As I
said earlier, we shall have it if we
want—or we shall have more of the
same, but dressed up with ever fancier
forms of private transportation and
ever more complex forms of land non
ownershipand mutual exploitation. The
choice belongs to us. We can blame
“capitalism,” “the government,” “the
establishment” for the manner in
which our cities are going to hell. But
ultimately, General Motors and the
Pentagon only give us what we
demand. (Granted they also create that
demand. But we are not enslaved to
them—not completely, not yet.)
“The population explosion is
everybody’s baby.” This bumper
sticker proverb applies equally well to
all our other problems. The mixed up
priorities of our society start with our
own mixed up priorities. I cannot,
immediately, effect the priorities of the
society. I can change mine.
It is easy for us to sit around
smoking dope and cursing the “hard
hat” or the “middle American” for
copping out on the city, moving to the
suburbs and messing up the coun
tryside with his car, his boat, his
camper, his “acreage.” But then we
dream of escaping “the establishment”
by moving to a farm-commune with a
big dog and a little garden, and we
commute to school: our dream of
peace and fulfillment is the blood
brother of the “hard-hat” or “middle
American” dream. Change doesn’t
start with the guy next door Change
starts here. Change doesn’t start
sometime in the future, when “the
government” finally makes it easier.
Change starts now.
David Kitchie