GEORGE A. GONZALEZ - fieldi

THE RISE OF THE AUTOMOBILE 59beginning in 1914, a group of community builders from NAREB’s CityPlanning Committee exchanged ideas with the landscape architects, civilengineers, architects and lawyers who predominated in the National Conferenceof City Planning (NCCP), founded in 1909. Together, these communitybuilders and NCCP activists worked to promote planning legislationamong other entrepreneurs, in the real estate industry, to the generalpublic, and within the state and local governments. (Weiss 1987, 56)Large land developers sought to shape public policies on land use issues because:Private developers who scrupulously planned and regulated their own subdivisionsneeded the planning and regulation of the surrounding private andpublic land in order to maintain cost efficiencies and transportation accessibilityand to ensure a stable and high-quality, long-term environment fortheir prospective property owners. (4)A central objective of large developers in championing urban planningduring the early twentieth century was to accommodate the automobile.Weiss points out that one of the key factors in prompting large scale communitybuilding and the subsequent drive for private and public urban planningwas “the increasing availability of private automobiles for upper- andmiddle-income [home] purchasers” (62). Hence, the accommodation of theautomobile in urban and suburban areas, as well as building homes that couldaccommodate automobiles, became central to reorganizing urban areas andorganizing new suburbs (Barrett 1983; Weiss 1987; Hise 1997).Land developers in the Los Angeles region led the way in the urban planningfield. Its sparse population, the fact that developers could purchase largetracts of land relatively inexpensively, and the sprawled out trolley system,meant that Los Angeles was an ideal area to launch large-scale communitydevelopments by individual developers. As a result, many of the urban planningtechniques and public policies discussed by Weiss were initially developedand applied in Los Angeles (Weiss 1987; Hise 1997).With Los Angeles developers at the cutting edge of community developmentmethods, they were quick to see the profit potential in the automobile,and planned and developed accordingly. As a result, the mass production ofthe automobile, and the urban planning methods developed and politicallysponsored by large developers to accommodate the automobile, profoundlyaffected Los Angeles. Foster (1975) points out thatwhile the trolley promoters established a number of subdivisions milesfrom the downtown area, they had developed only a tiny fraction of theland in the Los Angeles area by 1920. Pre–World War [I] residents were sodependent upon the trolley for transportation that developers made fewattempts to promote single-family homesites more than a half-mile fromthe lines. (476)