A Walk Through West Haven Land Use Coordination, Homeownership, and the Origins of Zoning in an American Suburb Charles S. Dameron Supervised Analytic Writing Suburbs Professor Robert C. Ellickson December 18, 2014 ! Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 3 Part I: West Haven’s Built Landscape .............................................................................. 19 A. Use Coordination ...................................................................................................... 21 1. Commercial Structures .......................................................................................... 21 2. Industrial Structures .............................................................................................. 23 3. Residential Structures ............................................................................................ 24 4. Residential Adjacency to Industrial Uses .............................................................. 27 B. Coordination of Building Forms ............................................................................... 31 1. Building Heights ................................................................................................... 31 2. Front Yard Setbacks .............................................................................................. 31 3. Side Yards ............................................................................................................. 33 Part II: West Haven’s Social Landscape ........................................................................... 35 A. West Haven in 1930: A Snapshot ............................................................................. 35 1. Racial Composition ............................................................................................... 37 2. National Origin ...................................................................................................... 40 3. Rates of Homeownership ...................................................................................... 43 4. Home Values and Rents ........................................................................................ 45 B. The Census-Taker’s View of the Washington Avenue Strip ................................... 47 Part III: West Haven’s Transportation Landscape ............................................................ 55 A. The Early Days of Horse Trolleys ............................................................................ 57 B. The Rise and Fall of the Connecticut Company ....................................................... 59 C. Persistent Streetcars .................................................................................................. 62 D. The Too-Early Rise of the Motor Truck .................................................................. 65 Part IV: Beggar Thy Neighbor—The Rise of the Homevoter .......................................... 67 A. Creating Superstar Suburbs through Controls on Supply ........................................ 67 B. Credit to the People: The Changing Contours of Homeownership .......................... 87 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 97 2 Introduction In his social history of Boston’s inner suburbs, Sam Warner reminded his readers that “[t]he world is full of Roxburys and Dorchesters; places statesmen never visited, towns and counties upon whose fate no intellectual movement or nation has as yet depended.”1 These places invited closer scrutiny, Warner contended, not just by “the mere fact of neglect,” but also because a better understanding of ordinary people in ordinary localities would help to “clarify such concepts” as “class, mobility, mechanization, urbanization, and the like,” and because the development of richer local histories is a good in itself.2 This work is an exercise in the kind of study Warner sought to popularize: it is a narrow look at West Haven, Connecticut—a city of 55,000 residents that has long stood in the shadow of its more celebrated neighbor, New Haven. Thanks to its early prominence in colonial New England, its rise as an American center for nineteenth- century industrialization, and its association with Yale University, the history of New Haven as a city is an especially well-documented one.3 Notwithstanding several excellent !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 SAM BASS WARNER, JR., STREETCAR SUBURBS: THE PROCESS OF GROWTH IN BOSTON, 1870-1900, at 169 (1978). 2 Id. 3 E.g., MYRNA KAGAN, VISION IN THE SKY: NEW HAVEN’S EARLY YEARS, 1638-1783 (1989); STEPHEN LASSONDE, LEARNING TO FORGET: SCHOOLING AND FAMILY LIFE IN NEW HAVEN’S WORKING CLASS, 1870-1940 (2005); DOUGLAS RAE, CITY: URBANISM AND ITS END (2003); VINCENT SCULLY & CATHERINE LYNN, YALE IN NEW HAVEN: ARCHITECTURE AND URBANISM (2004). Especially relevant to this work is the rich volume of literature on New Haven’s history within the comparatively narrow field of legal scholarship, particularly in the area of land use and urban development. See Marie Boyd, Zoning for Apartments: A Study of the Role of Law in the Control of Apartment Houses in New Haven, Connecticut 1912-1932, 33 PACE L. REV. 600 (2013); John P. Elwood, Rethinking Government Participation in Urban Renewal: Neighborhood Revitalization in New Haven, 12 YALE L. & POL’Y REV. 138 (1994); Robert A. Solomon, Building a Segregated City: How We All Worked Together, 16 ST. LOUIS U. PUB. L. REV. 265 (1997); Andrew J. Cappel, Note, A Walk Along Willow: Patterns of Land Use Coordination in Pre-Zoning New Haven (1870-1926), 101 YALE L.J. 617 (1991); Stephen Clowney, Note, A Walk Along Willard: A Revised Look at Land Use Coordination in Pre-Zoning New Haven, 115 YALE L.J. 116 (2005); Stephen Mark Fenster, Note, Remedy on Paper: The Role of Law in the Failure of City Planning in New Haven, 1907-1913, 107 YALE L.J. 1093 (1998). 3 treatments of its history,4 West Haven—like New Haven’s other suburbs—has received only a fraction as much attention as the central city, even though the twentieth-century story of the New Haven metropolitan area is largely a story of suburbanization.5 In this writing I hope to tell part of that story, focusing especially on the time period between 1924 and 1930. I focus on these years both because they fall in one of the most significant periods of West Haven’s historical growth and because they straddle the advent of a major shift in the legal regime governing the disposition of real property within cities, from a mostly laissez-faire system of private coordination to one governed by codified community controls and central planning, through zoning and other innovative land controls administered by municipal governments. Because West Haven’s embrace of zoning was fairly typical (it would appoint a zoning commission in 1929, just a few years after the famous Euclid case clarified that the U.S. Constitution posed no barrier to the adoption of zoning laws), a study of the city in this period is a study in microcosm of some of the forces that triggered this abrupt change in the way Americans organized their communities. This study draws its methodological inspiration from Warner’s study of Roxbury and Dorchester,6 but it also aims to fit into a highly localized land use dialogue begun by !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 4 The most complete history of West Haven is a relic of the New Deal era. See WORKERS OF THE WRITERS’ PROGRAM OF THE WORKS PROJECTS ADMINISTRATION IN THE STATE OF CONNECTICUT, HISTORY OF WEST HAVEN, CONNECTICUT (1940) [hereinafter WPA, HISTORY OF WEST HAVEN]. Other secondary resources on West Haven’s history include PETER J. MALIA, VISIBLE SAINTS: WEST HAVEN, CONNECTICUT, 1648- 1798 (2009); and HISTORY OF CHRIST CHURCH, WEST HAVEN, CONNECTICUT, 1723-1945 (1945). West Haven has not escaped the attention of legal scholarship, though the lone piece of scholarship is focused on modern-day land use coordination problems between West Haven and its neighbor, Orange. See Minor Myers III, Obstacles to Bargaining Between Local Governments: The Case of West Haven and Orange, Connecticut, 37 URB. LAW. 853 (2005). 5 See RAE, supra note 3, at 231-34. 6 Although Warner’s study covered Boston’s middle-class streetcar suburbs in an earlier era—the late nineteenth century—1920s West Haven bears a strong resemblance in various socioeconomic respects to the Dorchester and Roxbury of the 1890s. See Part II, infra. 4 Andrew Cappel’s A Walk Along Willow7 and Stephen Clowney’s A Walk Along Willard,8 each of which examined the rationale for the introduction of centralized zoning policy in the city of New Haven. Cappel’s work was “the first attempt to look at an unzoned regime on a microlevel, block-by-block.”9 It made creative use10 of a set of detailed street maps of New Haven drawn by the Sanborn Map Company, whose Connecticut city maps— running from the late nineteenth century through the latter half of the twentieth century— are housed at the Yale University Library.11 These maps, first intended for the use of fire insurance providers, provide a rich database of the built landscape of the city, including precise building dimensions, information on construction materials, and various other architectural features, as well as building uses and property lines.12 By consulting the 1923-24 edition of the New Haven Sanborn maps, Cappel was able to construct