RECORD OF TESTIMONY AND STATEMENTS IN RELATION TO 195 



NECESSITY FOR DISTRICTING PLAN 



Statement by George C. Whipple, Professor of Sanitary Engineering, 

 Harvard University, May 29, 1916 



Building restrictions and the public health 



The Commission on Building Districts and Restrictions of New York 

 City, has formulated tentative regulations governing the area and height of 

 buildings which may be erected in different parts of the city and the uses 

 against which the buildings in each district may be restricted. Authority for 

 doing this was granted by the State Legislature. The Legislature has 

 delegated to the Board of Estimate and Apportionment the power to put such 

 regulations into effect. This is clearly an exercise of the police power 

 which resides primarily in the State. The right to so delegate it is un- 

 questionable. It is of vital importance, however, to ascertain whether the 

 proposed regulations do as a matter of fact fall within the proper scope of 

 the police power. This is a matter for the courts to decide, but the de- 

 cision of the courts should be anticipated as well as possible by considering 

 the relation of the facts to established legal precedents. Do the restric- 

 tions of the bulk and the use of buildings in a city like New York mate- 

 rially involve the health, safety or morals of the people? If they do the 

 action comes within the accepted scope of the police power, and is con- 

 stitutionally sound. 



I believe that there is a vital relation between the public health and the 

 buildings in and about which people spend their lives, and I believe that 

 in a city a reasonable restriction of the height, area and use of buildings is a 

 justifiable exercise of the police power. 



The proof of this cannot, in the nature of the case, be direct or sus- 

 ceptible of support based on definite experiment. Public health is a matter 

 which is influenced by so many things that it is almost impossible to select 

 one factor and consider its effect apart from all others. The proof of the 

 relation between housing and health must necessarily be axiomatic in charac- 

 ter and based upon the accumulated experience of mankind generally ex- 

 pressed. Studies of the statistics of disease and death for people who live 

 or work in buildings of different kinds and under different conditions have 

 been collected by sanitarians in various places in the world, but these 

 lead to no definite conclusion, for the very good reason that housing is only 

 one of the factors, and not the principal factor, which influences disease 

 and death in the community and for the further reason that disease and 

 death are not a complete index of health. Nevertheless the fragmentary 

 statistical studies which have been made point to a relation between housing 

 and health which hygienists and sanitarians have not hesitated to accept. 



Health 



At the outset it is important to get a full conception of what is meant 

 by health. At the present time public health activities are coming to be 

 dominated by the bacteriologist and epidemiologist. Attention has been 

 focused especially on communicable disease. All the world knows that 

 the efforts of the new public health movement in reducing the suffering and 

 misery of mankind have been the most remarkable in the world's history 

 and must long be continued. The results have been measured in terms of 

 death rates and sickness rates. Naturally enough health has come to be re- 

 garded by some as the absence of disease. But that is not a complete 

 conception of health. Health is more than the absence of disease. It is 

 something positive, and involves physique and vitality, and it is mental as 



