Building the American Way: Public Subsidy, Private Space

From the early seventeenth century through the 1920s, Americans created regional traditions of town design centered on public space. Residents of New England’s villages grouped their houses around substantial town greens. Builders of Southwestern towns and cities organized plazas with pedestrian arcades. Designers of Midwestern county seats sited their public courthouses inside tree-shaded squares. Traces of these public spaces linger in major urban centers such as Los Angeles and Boston as well as in smaller towns and villages, but in the twentieth century, urban design in the United States largely shifted from public to private control. ¹ Since 1945, complex public subsidies have buttressed many types of private real estate development. Americans have often made the mistake of condemning low-grade built environments—badly sited tracts, enormous parking lots, or gigantic malls—rather than attacking the process which has diverted public dollars to private rather than public space.