OFFICERS, AMERICAN CITY PLANNING INSTITUTE, 1925 John Nolen, President Edward M. Bassett, Vice President Flavel Shurtleff, Secretary and Treasurer Term expiring 1926: BOARD OF GOVERNORS Alfred Bettman, First National Bank Building, Cincinnati, O. A. C. Comey, Harvard Square, Cambridge, Mass. A. W. Crawford, Stephen Girard Building, Philadelphia, Pa. F. L. Olmsted, Warren Street, Brookline Mass. L. V. Sheridan, 214 Penway Building, Indianapolis, Ind. H. S. Swan, 15 Park Row, New York City. F. B. Williams, City Club, New York. Term expiring 1927: Thomas Adams, 130 East 22d Street, New York. Harland Bartholomew, Compton Bldg., St. Louis, Mo. George Gibbs, Jr., Redondo Beach Hotel, Redondo Beach, Calif. E. P. Goodrich, 130 East 22d Street, New York. Morris Knowles, 507 Westinghouse Bldg., Pittsburg, Pa. Lawson Purdy, 105 East 22d St., New York. Lawrence Veiller, 105 East 22d Street, New York. Term expiring 1928: E. M. Bassett, 233 Broadway, New York. E. H. Bennett, 80 East Jackson Blvd., Chicago, Ill. J. C. Nichols, 911 Commerce Bldg., Kansas City, Mo. OFFICERS OF THE NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CITY PLANNING FOR 1925 John Nolen, President Edward M. Bassett, Vice President Flavel Shurtleff, Secretary and Treasurer BOARD OF DIRECTORS Thomas Adams, 130 East 22d Street, New York City T. Glenn Phillips, 1201 Kresge Building, Detroit, Mich. Robert Jemison, Jr., 221 Twenty-first Street, Birmingham, Ala. Frederic A. Delano, 407 Hibbs Building, Washington, D. C. John Ihlder, Mills Building, Washington, D. C. Henry V. Hubbard, Robinson Hall, Cambridge, Mass. Noulan Cauchon, Ottawa, Can. Nathan W. MacChesney, 30 North La Salle Street, Chicago, Ill. ZONING ROUNDTABLE Conducted by EDWARD M. BASSETT THE REMARKABLE ADAPTABILITY OF MODERN ZONING The safeguard of the board of appeals in zoning was introduced to prevent the harshness of the application of the strict map provision to the exceptional situation. The board is supposed to extract the arbitrariness and to issue a proper permit as a variance. As the board may issue or deny the variance in its discretion, it may impose as a condition of the permit suitable requirements for protecting the surroundings. More variances are probably now granted with conditions than without. These conditional requirements accompanying variances produce remarkable results, results that could not possibly be attained by the comparatively broad regulations of the ordinance itself. A street on the edge of the business district was built up with apartment houses before zoning, with here and there a tailor shop or millinery store. It was properly zoned as residential. A piano concern bought a parcel of land running through from a business street to the street in question and consequently divided so that half was business and half residential. The board of appeals allowed a variance with conditions that only offices connected with the merchandising of pianos could front the residence street and that there should be no doors for loading trucks on the residence street. If the legislative body had changed the residence street to business, it would have thrown open the street to an invasion of all kinds of business, butcher shops, grocery stores and warehouses. Instead of this the variance protected a street of established homes. New public garages extending from a business district into a residence district are usually permitted, if permitted at all, by a variance on condition that the side and rear walls in the residence district shall not be pierced with either windows or doors. Sometimes face-brick construction is required. Recently in Manhattan the board of appeals, in passing on a demand for a business permit on the border of a residence district, allowed a variance on the condition that the first floor could be used only for banking and the upper floors for residence. This plan kept out the kinds of business that would injure the surrounding home use. Two stores were in a residence district before zoning, with a vacant lot between. The owner of the vacant lot applied for a change of the lot from residence to business on the use map. This was denied by the council. He then obtained from the board of appeals a variance on condition that the new store to be erected between the two non-conforming stores should be used only for the merchandising of dry goods at retail. This suited the owner, and protected the residential street from the sale of food products and the extension of harmful kinds of business. Nearly every variance affords its own appropriate method of protecting its surroundings. All that the applicant usually wants is a chance to erect some structure that will earn a fair return and he is glad to accept reasonable protective conditions. E.M.B. WHAT IS CITY PLANNING? City planning is the determination by public authority of the legal quality. of land areas for the purpose of adapting their use to community needs. Some will say this is an absurd definition. Let us look into it. Here is an allegory about a city. A great city was devastated by an earthquake and fire. No building, public or private, was left standing. The pavements of the streets were broken up or submerged. The subways and sewers were crumpled up and caved in. Nothing was left except the land where the city had been and the harbor that bordered the obliterated city. They thought that all was lost. But the city engineer produced the map or plan of the streets and parks, and the zoning maps showing the different height, area and use districts, all drawn to scale and identifiable; the city architect produced the plats showing the sites of public buildings; transit engineers produced the routes of all railroads and subways; sewer and water supply engineers produced maps showing all pipe lines; and the harbor engineer handed in maps showing the pierhead and bulkhead lines and the locations of deep channels. The people were only partly right when they said that all had been lost. All was lost except the city plan. What did these maps, plats and diagrams show? They showed the boundaries of land areas impressed with different legal qualities. The public land had a different legal quality from the private land. The street different from the park. The park different from the public building site. The land beyond the bulkhead line different from the land within the bulkhead line. The land affected by a public utility route different from the land not so affected. Even if the maps had been destroyed, the city plan would have been intact because the different land qualities were the same after the devastation as before. And what sort of differences were shown? Not those made by agreements between individuals. They were in every case differences in the legal quality of land areas that had been impressed by public authority. E.M.B. LEGAL NOTES Conducted by FRANK BACKUS WILLIAMS D ZONING DECISIONS URING the first six months of the present year five notable decisions with regard to zoning have been rendered by the courts of this country, three of which are in favor of and two of which are against the validity of zoning. In Goldman v. Crowther, Inspector of Buildings for Baltimore1 the point actually decided by the highest court of Maryland was that the record in the court. below was unsatisfactory, but the dictum of the court to the effect that the use provisions of the Baltimore ordinance excluding business from a residential district are not legitimate police regulations is emphatic, and will without doubt settle the law of Maryland on this point unless the court change their opinion. The chief justice dissented in an able opinion, in which one other judge joined. There is hope in the fact that the court take occasion to say that in the case as presented, no sufficient considerations of public welfare, security, health or morals appear, to them, to justify the use of the police power. It is thus left open to the defenders of use zoning in Maryland, in this case or some other, to produce arguments or evidence showing this relation. 3 In City of Aurora v. Burns: the decision which imperils zoning in Illinois turns upon a point peculiar to the Illinois constitution. Under the zoning ordinance of Aurora the erection and use of business structures was forbidden in residential districts. The Illinois constitution provides that no "local or special" law granting any special or exclusive privilege, immunity or franchise shall be enacted. There were, at the time the ordinance was passed, business structures in residential districts which were allowed to remain and be used as such; for to do otherwise would be unreasonable and therefore unconstitutional. The case holds that the exemption of these non-conforming structures was in effect a granting of a forbidden privilege or immunity. It would seem that on the same reasoning all the building ordinances and laws and ordinances creating fire limits are invalid. In other states, almost without exception-as for instance New York-it is the passing of a "private or local" law granting a special or exclusive privilege or immunity, that is forbidden; which is quite another thing. In the re-hearing which has been granted, no doubt these considerations will be presented to the Court. In California, in two important cases the highest court has established zoning, 1128 Atlantic 50. Not yet reported. Article Section 22. 4, Article III, Section 18. Miller v. Board of Public Works of Los Angeles, 234 Pac. Rep. 381; Zahn and Ross v. Same, 234 Pac. Rep. 388. 131 |