RECORD OF TESTIMONY AND STATEMENTS IN RELATION TO 145 



NECESSITY FOR DISTRICTING PLAN 



proved under existing ordinances, the approval will be good and valid and 

 that you could not prevent the carrying out of building plans which have been 

 approved by competent authorities. Consequently, the effect of a delay of 

 many months in applying the zoning plan would be very serious, and would 

 nullify in no small degree the very purposes which your Commission has 

 in mind. I think that the city has suffered seriously from the lack of such 

 a plan in the past, and with the increasingly rapid growth of the city the 

 plan becomes all the more urgent. 



Meaning of garden city movement 



We have heard a good deal about the garden city movement which, 

 I think, is quite generally misunderstood. It is not so much bringing the 

 garden into the city, or taking the city into the country, as it is a protest 

 against further centralization. Its real purpose is decentralization and the 

 avoidance of the aggravated conditions which we find in Manhattan 

 Borough, and in some other parts of the city to-day, and that would be in 

 no small degree avoided by-- such regulation as the Commission proposes. 



Lack of districting increases cost of streets 



I may say that one of the. serious problems confronting my office in 

 passing upon street plans has been the need of providing what may be an 

 excessive width of streets where land is cheap, for fear that the building 

 of a new transportation line, putting this land in close touch with the busi- 

 ness centre, will result in an intensive development by apartment houses, 

 so that we have been obliged to guard against conditions which formerly 

 prevailed on the east side of Manhattan and to insist upon a minimum 

 street width, which is more than the real need of the territory if reasonably 

 restricted. If such development were confined, for instance, to two' or 

 three story houses, or in some cases to detached houses, we would not have 

 been obliged to impose upon the property owners the cost of acquiring and 

 then improving streets of a greater capacity than they would need, if there 

 were some sane, reasonable plan for preventing over intensive development. 



The present extension of the rapid transit system is another reason 

 why the plan should be adopted now. It is the present extension of the 

 rapid transit system that makes me refuse to recommend what, were it not 

 for the danger of intensive development along these lines, would be a 

 sufficient and reasonable street plan for a suburban development with 

 detached houses or houses of limited height. 



I think districting is a necessary concomitant or supplement to the rapid 

 transit plan, unless the city is going to have a distorted, unbalanced growth, 

 with strips of intensive development along the transit lines. 



Development of slum areas 



Within the last two decades there has been a great influx of European 

 immigration of constantly increasing volume. The racial tendency of these 

 people on arriving in New York is to segregate in certain quarters. This 

 is true not only of New York, but every other industrial centre. Even 

 though employees in mills and factories have received compensation which 

 would really permit them to live decently, they have been disposed, in many 

 cases, if quarters were available, to herd in a few rooms, cutting down fheir 

 rental to a minimum, in order that they may within the shortest possible time 

 save enough money to go back home. If it is possible to crowd together in 

 tenements, they will take advantage of the opportunity. 



