The NIPC told us how to do it back in ’68: put all of Chicagoland’s new houses, apartment buildings, shopping centers, and factories within walking distance of CTA and commuter-train stations. Don’t scatter them out over the farmland. Leave some open space between the fingerlike suburban corridors. That way people could live near their work, drive less, pay lower taxes. Developers might be able to make money redeveloping the inner city. And “greater use of the commuter rail and rapid transit systems should lead to improved service and facilities, which in turn should encourage even greater use [and in turn] . . . relieve traffic congestion on highways.”
The Illinois General Assembly created NIPC in 1957 because, according to a legislative commission at the time, northeastern Illinois “appears to have been unprepared for the service problems that have come to the area as a result of its growth. Organization for the solution of storm water drainage problems, the solution of transportation problems, the solution of garbage disposal problems in the Area has been inadequate . . . in part at least [because of] the absence of a coordinated planning effort.”
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Measured by this standard, NIPC’s 36-year career has been fruitful. It has aided and abetted local planning, both as a consultant and as a producer of model ordinances. “In the early 1960s, when I first came here,” recalls Christmas, “Du Page County had a new forest preserve district but no staff to plan for it. They hired the commission to decide what they should acquire, and that plan has to a large extent been followed.” Such services remain NIPC’s bread and butter: it helps local governments plan and coordinate their plans, and it helps the feds by reviewing local applications for federal grant money, to head off duplication and waste.
“The 1968 plan said, I think correctly, that land use and transportation must be reconciled,” says Christmas. “If we’re going to have a viable public-transportation system, we must have a land-use pattern that supports it. The pattern then and now evolving is antithetical to wetlands, open space, the economical delivery of public services.
What we should do, planners consistently state, is be more like Europe. “It doesn’t have to be this way,” Christmas insists. “In France and England you have poor neighborhoods, but not this scale of abandonment. You don’t find towns scattered into the countryside in a random pattern. There’s a clear definition between town and country, and less strip development.” But doesn’t Western Europe have to do this because of greater population densities? (Great Britain has 601 people per square mile, the United States 70.) Christmas’s reply: “One of our faults, you might say, is that we have too much land.
Get tough. State land-use regulations–planning with teeth–would do the trick, as in Oregon, Florida, and Vermont. As Gerrit Knaap and Arthur C. Nelson put it in their book The Regulated Landscape, “Every acre of Oregon land is zoned, every zone is planned, and every plan is state-approved.” How else to keep one hungry suburb from outbidding its neighbor for yet another shopping mall?
“I don’t blame Sears. They were like a kid in a candy store [with incentives being offered]. I don’t blame Hoffman Estates. They went for the gold ring and got it. Cook County does no planning on this. NIPC was not asked to comment. Nobody did anything wrong, everybody did the right thing under the existing rules–and it turned out to be the wrong thing.” Hence, he says, let’s not distribute blame, let’s change the rules.
