PLANNING 263 



Most important, these laws say that certain services of the 

 county to the inhabitants the maintaining of roads and 

 schools, for example shall be discontinued in closed areas. 

 The principal purpose of these laws is to induce people to 

 move out of poor areas where they cannot earn a living, and 

 to reduce the costs of local government by closing such areas 

 to further settlement. 



In one area a man moved into a section which according to 

 the zoning plan was closed to settlement. The case was tried 

 finally in the Supreme Court of the state, and the court held 

 that the zoning law was constitutional. The man could stay 

 there, but the local government did not have to build and main' 

 tain a road to his house, nor did it have to take his children to 

 school. His children were not excused from school, but he had 

 to find some way himself of getting them there. The man moved 

 back into the non-restricted area. 



This illustrates a limitation of zoning laws. Such laws cannot 

 correct the present abuses of the land. They have little direct 

 effect on the way in which people on the land already use it. 

 What zoning does do is protect unused land from unwise de 

 velopment. 



STATE PLANNING 



The most recent type of organized land-use planning is state 

 planning. So far not much has been done about state planning 

 beyond the making of first reports to discover just what are 

 the problems in the various states. There are 42 states which 

 have made some efforts to draw up a plan for the use of their 

 resources. This movement was started by the National Re> 

 sources Board which recommended this idea. The federal gov 

 ernment through the Public Works Administration granted 

 money to the states to hire workers to make the necessary in 

 vestigations. So far, most of these state planning boards are 

 still in the stage of fact-finding. Those that have worked out 



