Introduction
At the end of World War II, America was transformed by rapid suburbanization which brought housing, retail and other development sprawling out in every direction around major urban centers. As the transformation proceeded, public and private leaders recognized that existing government structures were inadequate to deal with the problems that arose not the least of them, inadequate transportation, water and other infrastructure systems, the loss of open spaces and the decline of urban neighborhoods.
This recognition prompted the creation of numerous regional planning bodies. With regulatory and financial backing by the federal government, these bodies by the 1960s took on a variety of official planning functions for their regions. Still, they were seldom able to exert influence over the land use decisions of local governments or the transportation decisions of state agencies which helped drive the continuing suburban land rush.
This article traces the post-war developments in regional planning that set the stage for the formal establishment of MPOs in the early 1970s.
Preparing a New Future
During World War II, government and industry leaders were keenly aware of the need to plan for the post-war period. After a decade or more of pent-up demand for housing and consumer goods, the nation was poised for an unprecedented peacetime economic boom. However, the leaders knew that if this demand was not capitalized upon effectively, the nation could easily slip back into the unemployment and stagnation of the pre-war years.
Thus, alongside the patriotic fervor for the war effort, planning for a new post-war America became a national preoccupation. In a number of major cities regional alliances were launched in which public officials joined forces with private industry and surrounding local governments to chart strategies for their post-war future. Their efforts were supported at the federal level by the National Resources Planning Board (NRPB), until it was disbanded by Congress in 1943. The agency urged a "comprehensive" approach to post-war planning that would make use of surveys and community forums and recognize "the interrelatedness of problems of population, economic activities, social patterns [and] physical arrangements."
But by and large the alliances paid little heed to urgings of NRPB for comprehensive planning--or even to the lessons learned in the 1920s about the problems of unfettered regional growth. The dominant view was that, if regions were to seize the coming economic opportunities, bold initiatives would be required. Rather than engage in the cautious planning advocated by the NRPB, most regional alliances focused upon preparing housing, business development and infrastructure projects that could be quickly implemented with the war's end.
Planning new freeways became a favored activity. Many of the regional transportation systems envisioned were straight out of the General Motors' "Futurama" exhibit at the 1939 World's Fair--cities linked and served by networks of congestion-free, limited-access highways that presumably would make the nation's crowded and run-down mass transit systems a thing of the past. In 1944, Congress gave its endorsement to this "motor age" vision with initial authorization for construction of a nationwide interstate highway system. If the nation was to move boldly into the future, apparently it would do so solely by automobile.
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Suburban Land Rush
By the end of 1946, 10 million men and women were discharged from the armed services and new family formation rose to a record 1.4 million per year. The need for new housing to accommodate them reached near-crisis proportions. The national housing agency estimated that five million new housing units were needed immediately and 12.5 million would be needed over the next decade.
Private developers jumped at the opportunity. Using pre-fabricated materials, "cookie-cutter" plans and standardized construction techniques to create "tract" housing developments, the developers sought to attract veterans--with their generous GI mortgage benefits--and middle class urban dwellers eager to enjoy the privacy and amenities of new, detached suburban homes.
The most aggressive and successful of the private developers was Levitt and Sons, who transformed potato farms on Long Island into the 17,000-home Levittown, creating the model for similar communities in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. By 1950, according to one estimate, Levitt was producing one four-room house every 16 minutes.
Regional Planning Acts
In 1959 President Eisenhower created the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (ACIR) to explore new government structures and policies to address suburban growth problems and improve coordination of the increasing number of federally-aided projects and programs. A succession of major legislation in the 1960's helped realize many of the ACIR recommendations for replacing the largely ad hoc regional commissions in place with permanent and stronger metropolitan bodies:
• The 1964 Urban Mass Transportation Act, was the first major legislation to provide federal aid for development of mass transit systems. In doing so, it provided incentives for preparation of metropolitan transportation plans. A 1966 amendment created transit technical studies grants.
The 1965 Housing and Urban Development Act extended and broadened the "Section701" grants created in the 1950s to support mass transit planning by regional planning bodies, helping to improve the coordination of highway projects with transit systems.
• The 1966 Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act, and 1968 follow-up legislation, required all applications for federal aid for the planning and construction of housing, roads and other facilities to be submitted to an areawide planning agency for review and comment. The goal was to insure that the applications were consistent with regional plans and were coordinated with other federal aid projects. Many regional planning agencies and Councils of Government were entrusted with these "A-95" clearinghouse functions for federal-aid.
• The 1966 Federal-Aid Highway Act provided protections for historic buildings and natural resources in highway planning and required hearings to be conducted on the economic, social and environmental effects of proposed routes. Amendments in 1969 required citizen participation in all aspects of the three-C transportation planning process administered by regional bodies.
• The 1969 National Environmental Policy Act required Environmental Impact Statements to be prepared for major projects, inaugurating an environmental dimension to transportation planning that would take on growing importance in decades to come. |
In all, three-fifths of all new housing in the late 1940's was built in the suburbs. On the heels of the suburban housing boom, retailers, manufacturers and other businesses sought out suburban locations, resulting in an increasing dispersion of economic activity that had long been compacted in and around major cities.
The dispersion, in addition to meeting the material and employment needs of the new suburbanites, was viewed by military officials as having strategic benefits, making the nation's population and productive capacities less vulnerable to nuclear attacks against major cities. Architect Frank Lloyd Wright put it bluntly: "The urbanite must either be willing to get out of the city or be resigned to blowing up with it." This cold-war calculus provided further impetus to national-level support for a continuing suburban land rush.
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Federal Planning Aid
Inevitably, many rural communities faced growing pains in accommodating waves of new residents. In some areas, the pains became outright sickness. Symptoms included poorly laid-out housing developments and inadequate schools, roads and water and sewer systems. Many homeowners also faced their share of woes from slapdash building methods, including leaky roofs and faulty sewer hook-ups. Planner and historian Lewis Mumford, surveying the growing chaos in many areas, termed it "the suburban fallout from the metropolitan explosion."
The nation's cities, too, were shaken. The loss of middle class residents and business further exacerbated the social and economic problems that had received scant attention through the long years of economic depression and then war.
Congress responded with major housing legislation, first in 1949 and again in 1954. The acts primarily supported continued suburban development, with financing and insurance programs benefiting both homebuyers and builders. But the acts also authorized federal aid to cities for urban renewal and public housing and supported new regional planning efforts. Section 701 of the 1954 Act for the first time gave federal grants for councils of governments and other metropolitan planning agencies to promote cooperation in analyzing and addressing regional problems.
Testifying before Congress, urban planning professor Robert Mitchell argued that such planning aid was needed to build "awareness that central cities and suburbs are interdependent and cannot survive in the present governmental and physical chaos."
The federal aid proved popular, prompting the formation of nearly 100 metropolitan planning bodies. Yet, while the new agencies improved intergovernmental cooperation, they generally were hamstrung by their inability to directly shape local government land use policies. Indeed, many local officials supported regional planning only to the extent that it would help sustain their capacity to accommodate the windfall of development projects coming their way.
Some communities chose to go it alone, hiring consultants to develop master plans that would rein in the more disorderly aspects of growth. The extreme case was the community of Mountain Lakes, New Jersey, which purchased all the town's vacant, developable land to be parceled out only for those projects that fit the sensibilities of its wealthy residents.
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Interstate Highways
The ambivalence on the part of local officials towards regional planning changed dramatically with the 1956 Federal Aid Highway Act. The legislation authorized construction of the multi-billion dollar, 41,000 mile interstate highway system as well as providing aid for primary, secondary and lesser roads. The system constituted the largest construction program in the nation's history -- on the scale of 60 Panama Canals. With the choice of routes left up to state highway departments, many local officials found new cause to embrace cooperation through metropolitan planning agencies to avoid having routes imposed on them and to gain bargaining clout in negotiations with their states.
Still, the resulting cooperation had few of the features of the comprehensive regional planning advocated years earlier by the NRPB when the interstate system was conceived. Rather much of the "planning" was of a narrow, technical nature focusing on routing alignments. Despite the urging of the planning community, the Act did not require routes to conform to metropolitan plans already in place or to give consideration to crucial land use issues, such as how particular routes could open up wide areas to new waves of suburban development and sprawl. Also the Act all but neglected the further damage that could be done to urban transit systems, which already were pitched into a steep decline due to competition with the automobile.
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(Click for larger image)
Highways laid the path for the suburban housing boom: Land cleared for the Route 4 (later, Garden State) Parkway in Cranford, circa 1948. |
The decision to forge ahead with the massive interstate highway system with only dim recognition of its potential consequences partly stemmed from the influence on Congress of those with something to gain from the system -- the defense establishment, developers, auto manufactures, oil companies, state and local engineers and others.
But it also reflected a peculiarly-1950s outlook about the future. It was a decade of national self-assurance when American industrial and military might dominated much of the world. Any challenges which might appear on the horizon, the view went, would yield to technology and American ingenuity.
Faith in the future was also strong among transportation officials in the 1950s. Even the demise of mass transit systems was seen as amenable to technical fixes. For instance, a 1956 Brookings Institution report stated that "In the coming decade the development of regional mass transportation by helicopter or convertiplane may provide the longer distance commuting services now provided by interurban buses and commuter rail lines."
All this added up to a confidence in building large-scale projects in the name of progress, leaving the consequences to be sorted out later. It was an outlook personified in "master builder" Robert Moses who, from the 1930s on, oversaw the construction of major highways, bridges and parkways in and around New York City--as he lashed out at "ivory tower planners" for being preoccupied with potential complications.
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Three-C Planning
By the late 1950s, the effects of a decade or more of rapid suburban growth began to dampen the widespread "build it now" enthusiasm. Many planners and public officials were alarmed at the nation's changing landscape. In 1958, planner William Whyte noted that a traveler flying from Los Angeles to San Bernardino "can see a legion of bulldozers gnawing into the last remaining tract of green between the two cities." On a flight over northern New Jersey, he said, the traveler "has a fleeting illusion of green space, but most of it has already been bought up and outlying supermarkets and drive-in theaters are omens of what is to come."
These concerns led to studies during the Eisenhower Administration of new government structures and policies that could help improve local planning and coordination. Many study recommendations were enacted under the Kennedy Administration as part of the Housing Act of 1961 which provided grants for mass transit and open space preservation and expanded funding and incentives for metropolitan transportation planning.
A further, and historic, step in addressing the problems of rapid suburbanization came with the enactment of the Highway Act of 1962. It made federal highway aid to areas with populations over 50,000 contingent on the "establishment of a continuing and comprehensive transportation planning process carried out cooperatively by states and local communities." This required planning process--known as "three-C" planning for its continuing, comprehensive and cooperative features--established the basis for metropolitan transportation planning used to the present day.
While regional cooperation and comprehensiveness had been long-sought goals of the planning community, the Act's requirement for continuous planning recognized that in a rapidly changing and increasingly complicated environment - which included dramatic population growth resulting from the post-war baby boom - regional plans had to be dynamic documents, subject to revision based on continuing data collection and feedback. Advancements in computer technology and social science research techniques became important tools for conducting this continuous planning.
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Three-C in Practice
In the year following the adoption of the 1962 Act, governments throughout the country scrambled to put in place the required three-C process. The response of officials in the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut metropolitan region was typical of major urban regions. Since the late 1950's, the non-profit Regional Plan Association, with input from many of the area's officials, had been developing a comprehensive plan for meeting the region's infrastructure needs. As a result of the 1962 Act, a new official body, the Tri-State Regional Planning Committee (later the Tri-State Regional Planning Commission), was created to build upon this planning effort and administer the region's three-C transportation planning process. A number of similar metropolitan planning bodies were created across the country and some existing voluntary and quasi-official regional bodies gained official status.
Despite the high initial expectations created among many planners by the new organizations and the enlightened nature of the three-C requirements, the weaknesses of the Act became clear in subsequent years. Implementation of the Act was the responsibility of the federal Bureau of Public Roads (BPR) which was closely allied with state highway departments and organizations dedicated to roadway construction. According to Urban Planning Professor Thomas A. Morehouse, the three-C planning requirement was seen by these highway interests as "a potentially disruptive innovative force, threatening established policies, procedures, commitments and systems of decision-making." Of particular concern to highway interests was the possibility that local officials acting through new regional organizations -- with mandates for comprehensive planning in hand -- could block or slow construction of segments of the interstate system which were then were being pushed through densely populated metropolitan areas.
To avert the threat, BPR interpreted the Act in ways that preserved the authority of state highway departments. For instance, states were able to fulfill the "cooperative planning" requirement by negotiating agreements directly with local governments, bypassing regional planning organizations. These agreements typically allowed local officials to participate in technical studies, initiated and dominated by state highway departments, for planning the implementation of specific roadway projects or for establishing long-range regionwide capital plans. Land use, mass transit and social issues were usually given only passing consideration.
One result of BPR's "artful" interpretation of the required three-C process was that regional planning agencies were left largely as adjuncts to state highway departments which relied upon them for collecting and interpreting data and perhaps for input on how road construction within their regions should proceed. In effect, the 1950s "build it now" approach to project development lived on in the 1960s, though it was now tempered by somewhat greater local participation and informed by increasingly sophisticated technical studies.
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1960s Progress
While many of the hopes of the early 1960s were never fully realized, the cause of improved regional planning was by no means vanquished. With crucial support by President Johnson and his political allies, major transportation and housing legislation during the decade progressively expanded the role and authority of regional planning agencies (see box). In his message to Congress shortly after his election, Johnson noted that in confronting housing, transportation or other urban problems, metropolitan planning was needed to "teach us to think on a scale as large as the problem itself and act to prepare for the future as well as repair the past." In addition to new responsibilities in the areas of environmental and transit planning, regional bodies were entrusted with reviewing all applications for federal aid to insure they were consistent with areawide plans and were coordinated with other federal-aid projects.
Though carefully crafted to preserve the prerogatives of business and avoid the taint of "big government," these legislative requirements were a significant step towards comprehensive regional planning. Their enactment reflected an often grudging recognition among politicians that the nation could simply not afford to build major projects that would transform its landscape and communities without attention to the consequences that, more often than not, played out on a regional scale. This recognition sprang, on the one hand, from increasing sophistication in social and environmental sciences that brought to light the damage done by unthinking policies of the past and that offered important new tools and methodologies for planning the future. On the other hand, mass movements and upheavals -- including urban riots -- showed that narrow, technical approaches to problems could neglect critical social factors, with potentially devastating results.
The greatest impact of the legislative mandates was felt in the nation's largest metropolitan areas where regional agencies like the Tri-State Regional Planning Commission in New York and the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission took on multiple official functions in cooperation with states and local governments. However, across the country, the bulk of staff resources, engineering expertise and political influence needed to see plans through to implementation continued to reside in state bureaucracies. Particularly in many smaller urban areas, regional agencies found themselves going through the motions in fulfilling federal requirements while key decisions on transportation and other policies were made in state capitols.
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Looking Ahead
The federal initiatives to come in the 1970s would mandate the establishment of Metropolitan Planning Organizations in all urban areas to secure a realistic say over transportation decisions for local officials and provide minimum standards for transportation planning. Like the initiatives of past years, they would constitute incremental steps towards the ideal of effective regional planning, spawning their own share of controversies that would require a continuing series of legislative refinements.
Go to Part III
The "History of Metropolitan Planning Organizations" was written by Mark Solof and originally appeared as a series of articles in the NJTPA Quarterly. The third article in the series traces the evolution of metropolitan planning and MPOs from the late 1960s to the present. A pdf compiling the series is also available.