Central City Plan

City planners are usually the last people to arrive at the ideas of their time. After the idea has jelled, after the demand for a living pattern has been clearly expressed by the “consumer market,” the planner uses the idea. And this goes for the banker who finances the plan.

This procedure of the planner bringing up the rear with the help of the banker is in the great scheme of things, proper. The stakes are too great, both in terms of human life and money, to allow the planner more than the role of showing the public the ideas which it has already accepted.

The England of the early 19th century had already enthusiastically undertaken the idea of industrialization when the planners put the houses around the factory. Later in the century, the ideas of [art critic John] Ruskin and [designer William] Morris had already been put on wallpaper when the planners used the same ideas for the “garden city.”

Our plans for the ideal community, the suburban community, separating the City from the Country, have their roots in the scientific planning of more than fifty years ago. And the plan for the high-rise city apartment surrounded by an expanse of unusable, unwalkable, green grass belongs to the concepts of organized urban society dating back forty years.

We acknowledge that we follow precedent as planners – but as bankers who expect the economic life of a project to extend through the next two generations, it is important to know we are following this year’s precedent, and not the one which is already downgrading last year’s project.

There is a new precedent in this year’s planning: in Baltimore, Philadelphia and Boston; in Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Detroit; in Chicago, St. Louis and New Orleans; in Denver, Los Angeles and San Francisco – there is a new plan. The new plan is to make the Central City habitable.

The new plan has economic roots. We wish to save our investments. But the new plan has human roots. People like to live closely, and enjoy the work and the play which is the byproduct of high-density living.

If you could take a giant cookie cutter and take out a section of Chicago’s loop, take all the human activities whereby people express themselves throughout a 24-hour day, and reshape this cookie into a vertical pattern to occupy a square block – if you could do this, you would have the Marina City plan.

Marina City is a mirror of the city:

Marina City is a plan for 24-hour living, which no tenant could afford on less than a 24-hour basis. This means that the facilities for living pleasure offered by Marina City cannot be supported by a commuting population, or a weekend population. And if housing is something more than just shelter and running water, the new housing must provide the background for the leisure time which our work patterns are giving us.

“Urban Renewal” plans have already established a concept of rebuilding an entire cross section of our urban life: we rebuild houses, shops, and work space.

But beyond “Urban Renewal,” there is an established market, a voiced demand and a public consciousness to provide for people once again, the balanced life of a Center City. More than 400 applications for Marina City living already received testify that people want to live together with their work, and what the recreation and the moderate rents which can be offered in high tax, high cost areas, only by tapping a 24-hour source of income.

Marina City income is divided about 1/3 to upkeep costs, and 2/3 to debt service, but neither of these costs could be supported by residential income alone. Over 39,000 families have indicated a desire to live in the Central City area by survey made in April 1959. Few of these families could afford the Marina City tax rate which would be close to $400 per year per apartment [equivalent to $3,113 in 2012]. Few of these families could afford the cost of amortizing recreational facilities provided in Marina City. And without a balanced day time and night time population the cost of operating either garage or swimming pool would rise beyond the ability of the Marina City tenant to pay for these facilities.

Marina City therefore is the new plan for the balanced living which Central City must provide. As the farmer has understood that his house means house and barn; as the suburbanite has understood that his house means house and garage; so does the urbanite understand that his house means house and work in the recreation. This is Central City housing.