This volume is the fourth in the Franklin K. Lane series on the governance of major metropolitan regions. The series is sponsored by the Institute of Governmental Studies and the Institute of International Studies, University of California in Berkeley. Readers of these volumes and other relevant literature will no doubt agree with the authors of this book that similar patterns are found in New York, London, Toronto, Stockholm, and indeed in “every other major metropolitan region in the United States and in other advanced industrial societies.” The presence of such common factors and trends, although they assume different configurations in...

Cities grow and deteriorate, highways and houses spread across the urban landscape, racial and ethnic minorities cluster in ghettos, sources of water supply are polluted and reclaimed. These and other features of urban development are found in every major metropolitan region in the United States. And the basic elements differ little in other advanced industrial societies.¹ The patterns of development that characterize the modern metropolis are the product of the complex and continuing interactions of geographic, technological, economic, political, and other social factors which constantly mold and alter urban society.

Our central concern in this study is with the role...

To argue that governmental officials can and often do shape urban development is not, of course, to argue that other factors are unimportant. As noted in Chapter One, economic forces, technology, and other factors have combined with governmental activities to produce the patterns of development found in urban regions. And the interactions of these forces have been continuous and cumulative—laying down in each decade a further layer of transportation routes, housing, industrial and commercial structures, habits and traditions which constrain and help to direct future development.

In this chapter, we outline the main features of those interactions in the...

“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...

No matter how skillful or timely the application of local controls on private development, few suburbs are able to maximize internal benefits in a vacuum. Federal, state, regional, and county agencies locate roads and bridges, develop parks and colleges, and undertake a variety of other development projects that can enhance or undermine local plans. Unlike private developers, these outside public agencies are not subject to direct local control. Municipal zoning codes and master plans do not apply to state transportation departments and highway authorities, the U.S. Department of Defense, and other large-scale public users of suburban land. Over the objections...

Of all the governmental institutions in the New York region, those with very broad areal scope have the greatest potential to influence development, a potential that some have been able to realize through the effective concentration of resources. For example, while the Port Authority was prevented from building a fourth jetport, its extensive territorial jurisdiction and skill at focusing resources have enabled it to shape development in the New York region through a number of major projects.¹ Construction of the George Washington Bridge opened the northwestern sector of the region to intensive suburban development. Port Authority investments at Kennedy International...

Of the many public and private activities that shape the metropolis, transportation developments are perhaps the most significant. The rail lines that spread across the countryside from the largest American cities in the latter nineteenth century, together with streetcars, elevated trains, and subway systems, were powerful forces in determining the patterns of residence, employment, and recreation in urban areas. Similarly, during the past sixty years urban America has been reshaped by the automobile, the bus and the truck, and by the vast highway network that serves their needs as it encourages their proliferation. New highways, thrusting into unsettled areas, attract...

Even a cursory glance at the evolution of transportation patterns in the New York region during the past half-century reveals stark contrasts between the highway system on the one hand, and the facilities available for mass transportation—travel along fixed routes by rail or bus—on the other.¹ The road system, as well as highway trips by automobile and truck, have expanded geometrically, and the impact of these changes in reshaping the urban region has been extensive and dramatic. With respect to the principal concerns of this volume, the highway-building coalition obviously deserves close attention in order to determine the...

Without exception, governments in the region’s older cities are strongly committed to using public resources to influence the pattern of development. None has been willing to accept as unalterable the economic and demographic developments of the past three decades. Instead, every city government has sought to check the employment and population trends that have changed the fortunes of the older cities. The steady decline in the cities’ share of regional employment has produced a variety of public efforts designed to retain existing jobs and attract new ones. In response to the middle-class exodus from the core, cities have devoted substantial...

One major strategy to overcome the obstacles to concentrating resources in the older cities is the use of semiautonomous functional agencies. One of the region’s most influential governmental institutions—the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority—was organized as an independent functional agency operating entirely within the boundaries of New York City, as was the New York City Transit Authority.¹ The use of such functional agencies within older cities has been particularly extensive for public housing and urban renewal. All of the public housing in the region’s older cities has been developed by housing authorities. Functional agencies of one kind or...

Standing silent as two ghosts through most of this study, the twin towers of the World Trade Center now step forward. For in a curious but powerful way, sensed but not fully understood by the citizens of the region or by visitors, the Trade Center symbolizes the urban metropolis in its power, its energy, its complexity, and its waste. What Mont-Saint-Michel was to the eleventh century, a stupendous product of the combined energies of Church and State, a symbol of what was valued most highly in society, the Port Authority’s two 110-story towers are to America in the late twentieth...