Accessory Apartments in Single-Family Housing by Martin Gellen

Author:Martin Gellen [Gellen, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Public Policy, Political Science, General, Social Services & Welfare
ISBN: 9781351534123
Google: -x4uDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-12T06:11:37+00:00

The Purposes of Zoning

Comprehensive zoning ordinances divide communities into districts, each with its own set of controls on type of use, intensity of use, and building bulk and height. Use regulations separate residential, commercial, and industrial activities as well as subclasses of each of these. Intensity regulations limit the amount of an activity that can occur in any given unit of land area; they are aimed at limiting population density and controlling the load on available facilities including streets, water, sewerage, police, and other basic city services. Finally, bulk controls regulate light, air, and open space in the interest of enhancing human comfort, health, and enjoyment. Typical bulk controls include setback requirements, yard and court regulations, and height and lot coverage controls.

Historically, districting served as a device for mediating the cultural and economic conflicts produced by urban growth and decentralization during the early twentieth century. Urban decentralization was not a smooth process. From the 1890s up to the 1920s, many suburbs underwent what Herbert Gans has called “definitional struggles” to determine whether middle-class or working-class culture would prevail along the transit corridors. Zoning was one response to these conflicts. To the residents of old established suburbs, the electric trolley and the five-cent fare introduced in the 1890s served as a magnet that attracted the multiple dwellings and the saloons of the working class. Fears of newcomers and property deterioration led to a series of attempts to halt these incursions with laws prohibiting saloons and wood-frame tenement buildings.2

During the 1920s the struggles intensified. Encouraged by outlying railroad beltlines and the availability of electric power, telephone exchanges, and cheap land, thousands of manufacturers sought to build factories at the metropolitan periphery. Up until this time, suburban growth had been primarily a process of residential decentralization. In the 1920s retail stores began moving out of the central business district, locating at new commercial subcenters around suburban transit intersections.3 Along with the businesses and factories came duplexes and townhouses and modern apartment buildings, which made suburban residence possible not only for working-class families but for many others who because of their life-styles did not prefer or need a single-family dwelling. This spectacular growth at the metropolitan fringe, when combined with the practice of unregulated land use, led to enormous land speculation, piece-meal development, incomplete provision of services and facilities, and the depreciation of many old, established residential areas that had consisted exclusively of single-family homes.

Zoning was seldom seen or used as a tool for changing the essential character and structure of American cities. It was rather a means of stabilizing the single-family neighborhoods of burgeoning suburbs from “harmful intrusions.”4 Its popular appeal and mass political support were based largely on the conviction that it would protect home owners of all classes from the most unscrupulous and speculative use of individual parcels of land.5 Thus zoning did not alter the basic pattern of expansion in the American metropolitan system. On the contrary, zoning turned this pattern into a set of norms for the spatial ordering of urban communities.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.