ABSTRACT
Urban America was in something of a zoning crisis in the early 1920s. The history of land use controls is as old as history itself. Public health was a major problem, which grew rapidly as unbelievable numbers of immigrants crowded into cities that were totally unprepared to cater for their basic needs. Technological factors also played a major role: electricity increased the spread of the streetcar suburbs – the escape route of the middle class from the horrors of the insanitary and congested city. In the exercise of the police power, the uses in a municipality to which property may be put have been limited and also prohibited. Planners in the first two decades of the twentieth century had few tools with which they could retune the urban system. Zoning was one tool that offered great promise. Zoning was a part of the scientific management movement that was sweeping America in the first quarter of the twentieth century.
