Implementing the General Interest

G OVERNMENT in the City of New York is to be looked at, perhaps, as a special case: sheer size and spread, remainders of local autonomy in the various boroughs, a tradition of uncontrolled speculation in land, the existence of large adjacent metropolitan areas under other administrations, fantastic overzoning for business and high-density residential uses, a decaying center and a growing peripheryall these are at least unique in scale. But perhaps the uniqueness is more a matter of size, after all, than anything else. For even casual observation is sufficient to show, for instance, that Los Angeles has a wider spread, San Francisco a comparable problem of competing municipalities, Detroit as serious a speculative situation, Buffalo an equally decayed center, and so on. New York may, in fact, not be so special a case as would at first appear, and an account of the building into the governmental structure of a planning agency may therefore have relevancy for other municipalities. The history of that agency's operations is necessarily short; yet it offers some interesting illustrations of the failures and successes to be expected from any such organization.' The present charter for the city went into effect January 1, 1938. It was one result of the whole revulsion from unusually bad government in the period which followed