Last Harvest: From Cornfield to New Town Page 4
By the nineteen eighties, it no longer paid to ship cattle from Texas to Chester County, and the King Ranch put its grazing land up for sale. The rumored buyers included the Disney Company, which was said to be looking for a theme park site, and James W. Rouse, the developer of Columbia, Maryland.6 To preserve their countrified way of life, the surrounding landowners turned to the local Brandywine Conservancy, which, aided by unnamed investors, bought the ranch. The conservancy added conservation easements, which forbade further subdivision, and sold the land in parcels of hundreds of acres. Thus began a scheme that eventually put 37,000 acres of land, more than two hundred square miles, under permanent protection — protection from development, that is.
Cassidy offers to show me this acreage. We drive through a spectacularly beautiful landscape of slightly rolling hills and sloping meadows interspersed with small stands of trees. I haven’t seen countryside like this since I visited England; the swelling pastures and tree clumps could have been laid out by Capability Brown. Some of the estates go on for miles. As in Nantucket, wealth and preservation go hand in hand. Cassidy sardonically refers to the large landowners as the equestrian elite and characterizes them as born-again environmentalists. “They are essentially antidevelopment, or will accept as little as possible,” he says. He appears torn on the subject. On the one hand, it is thanks to the equestrian set that so much of the landscape of his childhood is intact. On the other hand, he can’t help being cynical about the preservation of so-called agricultural land as a playground for the rich. “But I’m really just jealous,” he jokes. “I wish that I had a trust fund and could spend my time riding horses.”
Eighty percent of the population of Londonderry are neither farmers nor foxhunters. Some are what Cassidy calls “old suburbanites,” working people who settled here in the nineteen sixties and seventies, when land was inexpensive. Many are now retired. Their modest ranch houses and split-levels are in stark contrast to the larger and more expensive houses of the “new suburbanites,” who have been moving here during the last decade. Cassidy says that there is not much mixing between the two groups. The old suburbanites attend public meetings, get involved in community activities, and volunteer for committees; the new suburbanites keep pretty much to themselves. But if the old and new suburbanites don’t have much in common, they do agree about one thing: they don’t want any more development.
A township’s most powerful legal tool in regulating land use is zoning.7 Zoning ordinances consist of two parts: first, regulations describing different land uses, the minimum size of lots, how much of the lot can be covered by buildings, and so on; second, a map showing how these uses are distributed in the township. Londonderry, for example, is cut up into roughly a dozen so-called zoning districts, defined according to agricultural, residential, and commercial uses, and various combinations of the three.
The first American city to adopt zoning was Los Angeles.8 In 1908, after experiencing runaway growth thanks to several real estate booms, and citing the fire hazards of unregulated use of land, the city created zoning ordinances that distinguished between residential and industrial uses. Such legislation seemed to fly in the face of individual freedoms, but the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of these regulations.9 In 1916 New York City introduced a comprehensive zoning ordinance. After that, with federal encouragement, the concept spread quickly. Within a decade, almost all states adopted laws that enabled local governments — cities, counties, boroughs, and townships — to enact zoning ordinances.
According to a textbook on zoning, states empower local governments to zone “for the purpose of promoting health, safety, morals, or the general welfare of the community.”10 That sounds sensible — having a glue factory in the middle of a residential neighborhood is not a good idea. However, the popularity of zoning is also explained by its secondary effects. Since zoning governs the minimum size of lots, it represents an effective way to control the size of the population — larger lots mean fewer residents. Since large lots generally cost more than small lots, mandating lot size is also an indirect but effective way of defining the type of person who can — and cannot — afford to live in a particular community. This is referred to as exclusionary zoning.* Zoning also has a physical dimension. Requiring very large lots, for example, means that houses will be far apart, reducing their visual impact on the landscape.
If most people in Londonderry don’t want development, why doesn’t the township adopt stricter zoning? I ask Tom Comitta. “I’m often hired to draft zoning ordinances that will prevent development,” he says. “This can be done to some extent by enacting environmental restrictions on wetlands and slopes. It used to be common to limit development to as few people as possible by mandating large lots. But it’s no longer that simple.” Pennsylvania is one of the many states whose judiciary has imposed limits on home rule. In the early nineteen sixties, a developer brought a suit against a Chester County township that had raised the minimum allowable lot size on his land from one acre to four acres. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled in his favor, on the grounds that a township could not insulate itself from urbanization by mandating larger lots. “A zoning ordinance whose primary purpose is to prevent the entrance of newcomers in order to avoid future burdens, economic or otherwise, upon the administration of public services and facilities can not be held valid,” observed one of the Justices.11
Comitta refers me to other important zoning cases. In a 1970 ruling concerning an urbanizing township, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court called residential lots of two and three acres “a great deal larger than what should be considered as a necessary size for the building of a house, and therefore not the proper subjects of public regulation. As a matter of fact, a house can fit quite comfortably on a one-acre lot without being the least cramped.”12 The unstated implication is that, if a township wants to avoid legal challenges, it should make sure it permits at least some lots that are one acre or smaller.
Reading the court rulings proves more interesting than I expected. Unlike most writing about town planning and architecture, which is concerned with how things should be, the law baldly confronts the world as it is. In one case, the Pennsylvania court found that a township could not refuse out of hand the request of a developer for a variance to build apartment buildings even though the land was zoned solely for individual houses. “Perhaps in an ideal world, planning and zoning would be done on a regional basis, so that a given community would have apartments, while an adjoining community would not,” stated the majority opinion. “But as long as we allow zoning to be done community by community, it is intolerable to allow one municipality (or many municipalities) to close its doors at the expense of surrounding communities and the central city.”13 In other words, communities cannot insulate themselves from the world around them.
The result of such legislation is that townships in southern Chester County are forbidden from stopping development outright. What they can do is to draw out the permitting process, throw up environmental roadblocks, and grudgingly — and slowly — comply with the letter of the law, as Londonderry has been doing with the Wrigley tract. In any confrontation with a developer, a township has four important advantages. First, since the courts review zoning on a case-by-case basis, the burden of proof is on the developer. Second, lawsuits take time. This is not a problem for the township, but since the developer has money tied up in the project, time is generally his enemy. Third, most small developers are loath to sue, since legal action is expensive and tends to sour relations with the community. Last, since the developer usually doesn’t buy the land until permitting is complete, his commitment to a project is generally tentative, and in the face of protracted opposition, he will usually forfeit the option fee and try his luck elsewhere, which is exactly what the township is hoping for.
Despite Dick Dilsheimer’s problems on the Wrigley tract, Londonderry Township is not known as exceptionally obstructive. The supervisors and the planning commission do not create artificial d
elays or throw up roadblocks in the face of development. They have worked diligently to create a balanced zoning plan. The northern half of the township, which contains most of the large estates, requires residential lots to be at least four acres. The southern half generally allows two-acre lots and contains several districts where lots can be as small as half an acre and where attached houses, like those being proposed for Honeycroft, are permitted.* It looks logical on paper, but the results have not been satisfactory. Subdivisions are scattered across the landscape without rhyme or reason. It has gotten so bad that each new development proposal is greeted with dread by the planning commission. “We discuss environmental issues, runoff, the percentage of impervious cover, and other technical questions, but basically, nobody likes the way these new things look,” Tim Cassidy tells me after we finish our drive. “Our half-baked solution is to insist that developers build landscaped berms around their projects, so we won’t have to look at them.”
The situation in Londonderry is hardly unusual. Many rural communities across the United States are experiencing the same growing pains. The problem is not simply the pressure of development; after all, from the beginning America has been characterized by expansion and population growth. The problem, rather, is the lack of effective ways to manage growth. Single-use zoning has proved to be notably unsuccessful in organizing the environment, since it does not address the three-dimensional nature of our physical surroundings and instead reduces everything to a crude technical measure. No wonder the popular idea of planning is simplistic: high density bad, low density good. Except that scattering houses over the landscape is not good. That is what Londonderry Township has discovered, and that is why they want to try something different.
I ask Cassidy about the Wrigley tract. He explains that the township requires developers to submit fully engineered plans, together with a fee to cover the cost of review. Once an application is filed, the township is obligated to render a decision within thirty days. To get a reading of the commission’s preferences — and save money — developers often ask their planners to prepare preliminary drawings and present these at public meetings. In such cases, the township is under no obligation to respond quickly. “If a developer is willing to submit more alternatives, that’s fine with us,” says Cassidy. “That’s what Dilsheimer has been doing. Because we’ve been focused on Honeycroft during the last few months, we haven’t paid much attention to his project, except that we aren’t keen on what he’s proposing.
“The Wrigley tract project dragged on for several months,” Cassidy explains. “We weren’t getting anywhere. Finally, at our last meeting, Dilsheimer told us he was withdrawing from the project and introduced Joe Duckworth.” Cassidy isn’t fully converted to Tom Comitta’s ideas about neotraditional neighborhoods. He’s still smarting from the subdivision going up behind his house, so he’s wary of new projects, but he says that he is willing to give a different approach a try.
*Hawaii has statewide zoning, and both Oregon and Florida exercise state control over land use. Maine, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Tennessee, Vermont, Georgia, and Washington (and to some extent Wisconsin and Minnesota) also have a degree of statewide zoning control.
*All twenty “hot” areas, which include places such as Fort Bend County, outside Houston, and Douglas County, south of Denver, are rural counties.
*From the outset, zoning had a socially restrictive aspect. Los Angeles ordinances prohibited hand laundries, for example, which just happened to be largely owned by Chinese; elsewhere, zoning was explicitly aimed at excluding African-Americans. Racial zoning was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1917, although it took more than thirty years for the Court to rule that it was unconstitutional.
*Londonderry also has zoning districts for mobile homes, shopping strips, agricultural business, and commercial-industrial uses.
5
Life, Liberty, and
the Pursuit of Real Estate
How America’s first mega-developer hobnobbed with Founding Fathers, amassed six million acres, and landed in debtors’ prison.
Tim Cassidy talks about real estate development in his area as if it were something new. But it was a real estate transaction that was responsible for the British colony of Pennsylvania, of which Chester was one of the three original counties. Charles II granted the 30 million acres to William Penn to settle a £16,000 royal debt to Penn’s father. A devout Quaker convert, and something of a visionary, Penn maintained that the new colony was a “holy experiment,” but his description of Philadelphia is distinctly secular: “The Improvement of the place is best measured by the advance of Value upon every man’s Lot,” he wrote. “I will venture to say that the worst Lot in the Town, without any Improvement upon it, is worth four times more than it was when it was lay’d out, and the best forty.” He fretted that “it seems unequal that the Absent should be thus benefited by the Improvements of those that are upon the place.”1 Penn was being disingenuous for, as Proprietor, he was by far the largest absentee owner in the colony. “A Map of ye Improved Part of Pennsylvania” shows that, in addition to four choice tracts he reserved for himself, there were several others in the names of his wife and four children.2 These properties, covering tens of thousands of acres, were grandly referred to as “manors,” but they were really land banks, to be subdivided and sold as the colony grew.
In 1682, ever on the lookout for promising real estate, Penn deeded fifty thousand acres in southern Chester County to his relative Sir John Fagg, a Sussex baronet, to hold in trust for Penn’s children.3 Here is a contemporary description of one tract slated for his only daughter, Leticia:
Beginning at a white oak at a corner of Wm Penn’s manor; thence East 606 perches, part by vacant land and part by land of David Kennedy, to a post; thence South by vacant land 1400 perches to a marked tree, and West 606 perches to a white oak; thence North by vacant lands, Israel Robinson’s land and Wm. Penn’s Manor, 1400 perches to the beginning.4
A perch, or rod, is equal to five and a half yards, so the property, which came to be known as Fagg’s Manor, measured about four and a half by two miles. The six thousand acres would have encompassed about a quarter of present-day Londonderry Township, including Tim Cassidy’s house as well as the Wrigley tract.
Leticia, a vivacious girl, accompanied her father on his first visit to the colony but spent only two years in Philadelphia before returning to England. Over time she sold much of her American landholdings but never managed to find a buyer for Fagg’s Manor. As happened often in the colony, squatters settled on the land, ignoring the absentee owner. “There is not enough left for one plantation,” Leticia complained to her brother William, “wch I think very strang there is no Law to hinder such things.”5 Fagg’s Manor survives today as the name of a rather forlorn crossroads, the site of a Presbyterian church and the cemetery where Cassidy’s great-grandfather is buried.*
The story of Fagg’s Manor is a reminder that the American wilderness was opened not only by pioneers and settlers but also by real estate developers, or land jobbers, as they were then called. The surveyor was a key member of the jobber’s team, and in many cases a shareholder in the venture. Thomas Jefferson’s father was a surveyor and a participant in many so-called land companies. So was the young George Washington, who early in his career was part of a company that controlled half a million acres west of the Alleghenies. In the seventeen seventies, Washington embarked on a real estate project of his own in the Ohio River country. “It may be easy for you to discover that my plan is to secure a good deal of land,” he wrote to a friend who was also his land agent. “You will consequently come in for a very handsome quantity; and as you will obtain it without cost or expenses, I hope you will be encouraged to begin your search in time.”6 Washington was not successful. “I have found distant property in land more pregnant of perplexities than profit,” he reflected later in life. “I have therefore resolved to sell all I hold on the western waters, if I can obtain the prices which I conceive their
quality, their situation, and other advantages would authorize me to expect.”7 There were few takers, however, and when he died, the first president still owned more than 35,000 acres on the Ohio.
The British crown did not view frontier land development favorably, fearing it would aggravate conflict with Indian tribes. In 1763 a royal edict forbade the colonial governors from issuing land grants in any areas west of the headwaters of the rivers that flowed into the Atlantic and prohibited individuals from buying land directly from the Indians. The edict enraged people such as Washington (whose clandestine land acquisitions flew in the face of the edict), as well as Patrick Henry, George Mason, Samuel Adams, William Byrd, and Silas Deane, who were all involved in frontier land deals. It’s little wonder that, when Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, he included an explicit reference to land development in his list of grievances against George III.
After the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, the United States was poor in everything except land, so real estate development became the chief form of entrepreneurship. Anticipating the arrival of immigrants from Europe, local businessmen amassed vast holdings. The leading land jobber of the period was John Nicholson, now largely forgotten but a figure of consequence in the new republic. Little is known of his youth, except that he was born in Wales and came to America as a boy. When war with England was declared, the eighteen-year-old Nicholson joined the army, where he rose to the rank of sergeant. Then, in 1778, he was seconded to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia and made a clerk in the Treasury. He must have shined, for after only two years he left federal employ to become auditor of accounts for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. In 1782, still only twenty-five, he was appointed comptroller general, the chief financial officer of one of the largest states in the union.8