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The Death and Life of Great American Cities is a remarkable book that makes a fresh appraisal of the causes of many urban problems, and offers some unique solutions. Author Jane Jacobs' solutions do not include any conventional urban planning theory. In fact, she eschews all the entrenched theories as being too little rooted in the day to day human realities of a city. The following essay reviews her major observations and arguments, and extrapolates from them to find that Jane Jacobs' philosophy has a significant bearing on the idea of land value taxation.

I go out my front door, turn right, and waving a morning greeting to the barber next door, I myself become part of the endless pageant that takes place up and down the street. For indeed, every day, twenty four hours a day, a long pageant of American vignettes have been acted out along this thoroughfare.

During the day, the pageant is mainly made up of people coining to the post office across the street. Look now at that man as he ties his poodle to the guardrail and goes heavily up the post office steps alone. Each person leaving the building is whimperingly questioned by the dog until his owner reappears. Then a happy, an ecstatic reunion takes place. The dog vibrates out the kind of welcome that it's clear the man has received from no human in his life.

Now see those two women walking together toward the steps. One puts her packages down on the sidewalk in order to urgently say something to her friend - in sign language! I'd never .thought of that. It's rather nice the way you, have to stop doing everything else and Concentrate toward the other when you communicate in sign language. Not working, not driving a car, not even carrying a parcel can divide the attention then.

As evening comes on my street, the people going to the post office are commingled with the workers from the machine shop just south of us. Those finishing their shifts bunch through the factory doors in escape from the boiler room noise and heat that clutches out after them. Their voices useful once again, they shout a day's accumulation of -news and reminders over their shoulders as they scatter.

There is also a purposive lot of neighborhood residents hurrying by, going to the small stores all around to pick up last minute ingredients for dinner. And as usual, some youths are joylessly munching snacks at the Tastee Freez, and then tossing their half-eaten ice cream cones in our doorway.

Throughout the night, often until three or four o'clock the next morning, the pub on the corner drums the parade to a jauntier step. People coming from the bar are singing snatches of the Irish ballads they've just had recalled to them. And maybe again tonight, the bagpipers will come and start blowing their Highland airs outside our windows so they can swing into the pub in full wind.

It's a good place to live, this corner. The steady beat of activity that characterizes it may fade away rapidly as you move into the adjoining, strictly residential streets. But on this particular street, at this particular intersection, you can almost always feel a vital urban rhythm resonating you into some sense of harmony with the life around.

The place in fact bears a striking resemblance to the street Jane Jacobs lived on and described as a kind of urban ideal in her 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. In their balanced complexity of activity, both streets have had what every large city as a whole should strive toward. Both have been the settings for that outgoing kind of vitality that every large city should seek to extend across its entire face. Then all the people within the city could have a free and open access to life. They all could know the exhilaration that comes with the possibility of new beginnings at any moment. They could know the security that comes with a sure flow of activity always waiting to be tapped just out there. All the people could realize the unique abundance a city has to offer.

But these are only the fanciful, poetic reasons for so enlivening a City with street life. For those who demand them, there are other, very practical reasons as well. These latter make it imperative that a city be able to boast some cycle of pageantry throughout all its districts, down all its streets.

Jane Jacobs has imaginatively perceived the critical role that street life plays in maintaining the basic health of a city. In her terms, a city is sustained and nourished by a circulatory system of different people, doing different things, seeking different fortunes, at different times along its streets. If there are too many impossible obstructions to such activity, the city cannot flourish or grow strong in any of its parts.

Starting with the most practical consideration first, a city area lacking a steady, continuous street life can not flourish economically. Too many kinds of enterprises need to have their business staggered throughout the day. They can't deal with spurts of customers who swamp them at certain times and leave them empty at others. They can't survive on rush hours alone. When these enterprises fold from lack of a constant patronage, they drag many other businesses with them. The economy of the area spirals downhill with failure feeding on failure. The street ends with only a single note to sing, and shaded in the monochrome of a single purpose.

A city that has lapsed into this state of affairs over most of its territory can then no longer provide the immediate diversity of opportunity and contact that drew people there in the first place. Individuals are left in frustrated backwashes. They're put away in pockets that are just out of reach. While there may be people drifting, even churning back and forth outside some of the buildings some of the time, unless these people form a continuous chain of activity, nothing can easily come of it all. What is perceived as 'the good things of life' never seem to filter down in the direction of those who live on this dead end street. While conversely, what they have to contribute has no way of getting circulated out to the larger body. Unless they are able and willing to be infinitely mobile, their horizons remain as limited as in the small towns and mud roads they may have left behind. The dead feeling of a promise broken settles into so many of them then.

When the barriers to public concourse exist frequently enough within a district itself, then the problem increases to one of an isolating lack of communication between individuals. Without a neighborly street corner, people have no cannon ground on which they can tentatively get to know each other. They have no place to exchange small talk sociably in passing, where involved commitments aren't necessary. In order to bulletin out a piece of information, to rally support for a cause, to just extend a welcome greeting to a newcomer in such a place, the individual has to invite his audience into his home. Where there is no public life, it's either that, or keep to oneself. And caution usually dictates the latter.

Then too, in a city that is stagnant in certain areas, during certain hours, crime becomes an insoluble problem. Those areas or little activity are dangerous no matter how heavy the police patrol assigned to them. The only practical means of gaining safety in a big city is to encourage and maintain continuous use of the sidewalks by a varied group of pedestrians who in the normal course of their business can serve as protectors and potential witnesses. If a well anchored network of such people is present throughout most of every twenty-four hour period, then individuals can be fairly safe in the district. On the other hand, if the district is deserted and estranged for most of the day, the few who have to make their way across its expanse can be picked off in every kind of criminal assault, all unnoticed.

What's more, each dead and empty space in city life produces bad effects beyond these obvious first ones. Each such depression acts like a pebble thrown into a pool. Its impact sends ripples out in ever widening circles until almost every aspect of urban activity is being washed against. For example, the crime generated by the desolation in one area, spreads out into surrounding areas. Or if it doesn't, the fear it sets up does spread in waves, until businesses and enjoyments are affected for a long way around. Or for example, the inability of a neighborhood's residents to form limited acquaintanceships with each other on neutral territory has important repercussions when different ethnic and racial groups try to move into the area. These new groups run into doubled resistance from the area's established population. In the all or nothing kind of contact that the people of shuttered, introverted areas are forced to choose between, those coming from alien cultures almost certainly are granted nothing.

Having to remain unknown quantities, they are treated as interlopers, as objects of suspicion and hostility. The racial tensions that develop send dangerous undercurrents throughout the entire city.

In fact, most chronic problems that deteriorate a city are exacerbated by dull, unpeopled streets and sidewalks. An around-the-clock street fair kind of atmosphere is not therefore just a decoration for a city. It's not just a good thing to have here and there like a token Old Town or a Lincoln Park West to attract tourists and provide an evening's entertainment. Such occasional spots of energetic street life can't usually exist for long in a general vacuum anyway. They too soon become outposts that are under constant siege from their surroundings. Jane Jacobs makes the point clear from a hundred subtle details of urban success and urban failure recounted, then brilliantly interpreted in her book.

It follows that city policy should always have as one of-its goals the fostering of a lively street life. At least the effects of a policy on street life should be considered when judging the merits of that policy. It's not enough to decide that by executing a given plan, more money will be drawn into the city coffers, or more needed housing will be provided, or people will be moved faster and more cheaply to their various destinations. It must also be asked whether the plan, when realized, will help create that essential network of different people at different times along the city sidewalks, or whether it will in fact hinder that kind of pedestrian traffic. If the plan would apparently hinder street activity, then it must have other, overwhelming advantages before it can even begin to justify itself. This is true of building policy, of zoning policy, of transportation policy - and it is certainty true of all policy concerning taxation.

THE LAND VALUE TAX PROPOSAL

The specific tax known as the 'real estate' or 'property' tax is only briefly dealt with in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. But Jane Jacob's insights into what makes a city work carry obvious implications for advocates of tax reform in this area. Her observations have a particularly important bearing on any reform proposals made in the direction of turning the property tax more exclusively into a tax on land.

Today's advocates of 'land value taxation' base much of their proposal on the single tax theory of the American economist Henry George, and much on the exigencies and temper of modern times. As they often state their case now, they would start by having the current property tax publicly recognized as actually consisting of two separate taxes. One is a tax on the value of the improvements on a plot of land; the other is a tax on the value of the land itself. Then they would have the latter raised as high as state constitutions and other local authority allow, while having the tax on improvements lowered to the greatest extent possible. This arrangement would, in their view, best conform to the dictates of justice by taxing away from landholders a value that not they personally, but the community as a whole had created.

Taking some of the tax burden off of improvements and transferring it onto the land would yield many tangible benefits as well. If the tax liabilities attached to improving one's property were to be lifted, then renovation and new building could proceed without that major discouragement at least. The tables would in fact be turned, and the person who kept his property underimproved would then be the one to fall most liable. With the taxes increasing on his choice but underused land, he would feel pressured to do something more constructive with that land. He would be pressured to make his land more remunerative, or else to sell it to someone willing and able to make it realize its full productive potential. In this way, land value taxation, or LVT, would help force every piece of land into what some tax reformers call its 'best and highest use.'

If indeed a city is made by its material productivity and its sheer physical achieve, then LVT can carry it a long way toward success. LVT would certainly create powerful incentives to material development. But if a city is also made by the quality of its human interactions, as Jane Jacobs suggests, then the value of LVT becomes more equivocal. The simple yardsticks of growth, enlargement, physical enhancement, and maximum efficiency do not suffice in that case. If a city is process as well as substance, expectation as well as actuality, then other, subtler criteria of success must be applied.

Such criteria as you would apply to a rich tapestry must be applied to the city. How finely interwoven are the different threads of activity, how well is the design carried out to the very edges -- these are the criteria to apply to a city of people. And one of the best tangible indices of this intangible mood of vital, creative pattern is the existence of a lively street life filling in between the city borders. So we come down to the specific question, 'How will land value taxation affect a city's sidewalk pageant?'

THE POSITIVE EFFECTS OF LVT

To answer that question, it is first necessary to know what kind of an urban setting is most conducive to the more complicated rhythms of street activity. What kind of physical layout best enables people to mix and mingle along their way?

In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a number of factors are shown relevant to this issue. But Jane Jacobs keeps emphasizing two factors in particular as being basic preconditions for a lively street life. These two preconditions are: 1.) a continuously high population density within the city; 2.) a continuous diversity of buildings according to architectural style, age, function, and size.

The necessity of maintaining high population densities throughout a city is fairly obvious. If people are to meet in catalytic profusion along the streets, they have to be numerous there. This means that doorways must be numerous, spilling people out onto the streets at frequent intervals. It means that buildings must be nestled closely together, filling in all the unnecessary gaps in the city's smile.

It means that the whole problem of urban sprawl must be attacked. In order to achieve high population densities, the city has to be gathered back into one concentrated form. Currently, too much valuable space is being given over to wasteful uses like parking lots, used car lots, gas stations, highways, junk yards, abandoned buildings, and lots that are completely empty. These properties keep the city from being tightly knit. They stretch out like patches of Desert waste, so uninviting that no one goes by way of them if he has any choice. Normally, people give these lifeless sections a wide berth and seek more convivial paths to take. But with so much negative space, with so much undeveloped space yawning in the wake of urban sprawl, there are often few adventurous routes left to people. They then stop walking altogether. The circulation of pedestrian traffic is checked, and wider and wider breaks appear in the pattern or urban activity.

The planned bare spots in the city have the same effect. All those expanses of lawn that were intended to bestow some healthy rural spaciousness on the city only succeed in setting up barriers to human interaction. Those vast expanses around housing projects, those front yards, those malls, those centers, those plazas all operate in the direction of keeping)people at arm's length from each other. To be successful, big cities have to be unabashedly and totally urban. By trying to assume the characteristics of the countryside, they only undermine their ability to function properly, and they compromise themselves into a dull gray version of what they might be.

Urban sprawl is so pervasive a tendency though, that it can't be fought with mere argument and exhortation. Rather, the battle against urban sprawl must be fought by applying legal and economic pressures. And certainly, LVT is one kind of economic pressure that could be applied very effectively against those owners reclining carelessly across broad tracts of land and natural resource.

As has been pointed out, such a tax would make individuals pay too dear an annuity for valuable urban land to put that land to petty uses. They would find it difficult to let their property remain just an unimaginative flat of concrete. They would find it almost impossible to hold their land completely idle while they sat back as speculators, waiting for further accretions in value, until the land reached an enormously profitable selling price.

In this way, LVT would help to eliminate the 'green belt' currently encircling most large cities. That land on the periphery of the city is now generally being held out of use by speculators waiting for the inevitable growth of the city's core to catch it up and make it skyrocket in price. Developers and industrialists needing space have to jump over this land and buy tracts in far outlying districts. From this circumstance there derives much of the polluted air and many of the wasted hours involved in haying to commute. One of LVT's biggest contributions would be to pull the city back across the terrain it has encroached upon, until it is once more a concentrated, easily traversable whole.

Then there's an occasionally advocated corollary to the proposition of land value taxation which would attack that other, institutionally planned source of urban sprawl. The corollary proposal states the need to eliminate most of the category of tax-exempt land. Under the protective umbrella of exemption, many kinds of enterprise are not only evading the spirit of the law that dictates their civic responsibility, but they are also indulging their most grandiose dreams of territory at the community's expense. This latter indulgence is what really hurts the city. The vast, sprawling projects that result may be notable for their architectural wizardry, but they are completely out of human scale. And again, they end by holding people at arm's length from each other.

Hospitals, government housing projects, and educational institutions are currently the most guilty of splaying the city apart by these means. Banking extensive innovation and openness above human interaction, they go ahead and create gigantic 'complexes' that block people off into groups, then space each group into a separate world of its own.

Take the University of Illinois-Circle Campus as an example. Going there becomes more an experience of surrealistic distance than a learning experience. In fact, when parents and freshmen attend the School's orientation meeting, they are told that above all else, a new student there will need 'a really good pair of walking shoes.' So an ethnic community, perhaps run-down, perhaps chaotic, but continuously alive with the possibility of fresh encounter, was replaced by this concrete absence of possibility. A neighborhood where the close juxtaposition of events could spark endless new combinations and new ideas has been replaced by this monolithic world where any new idea has to be hard sought across barren terrain. This is one instance of institutionally wrought sprawl, but it typifies .the kind of blasting changes made by most institutional projects.

The tragedy of such replacements could be largely prevented if a strong LVT bill and a substantial end to tax exemption were enacted. "At least with these measures in effect, some practical limits would be placed on what comes off the drawing boards. The various institutions and the architects they employ could not continue to command the landscape with a Pharaoh's disregard of cost. They couldn't leave in their wake the vast and vain projects of an Ozymandius. To the contrary, every structure would have to justify itself by playing a continuously active role rather than just an elaborately postured one. Every structure would have to enclose a bustle of creative,- productive activity. And it would have to be set in a close context of other such structures. The city's buildings would be drawn tightly back around that central fire where all wild and free new ideas are sparked.

So if the theory of LVT were to become thoroughgoing practice, the densities needed to make cities lively places would follow in due course. Land value taxation offers a means of physically linking the city back together. It's a way of pulling the pieces together, of filling in the gaps until the city is compact enough to allow the possibility of interaction. Then the first step will have been taken. The city will have realized the first precondition of health and vigor.

THE NEGATIVE EFFECTS OF LVT

But remember -- high population density is only the first precondition. If all considerations were to stop with numbers alone, the city would be in even greater danger of becoming a jungle than it is now. Mere numbers of people too easily congeal into meaningless crowds. They form the 'mass,' the 'herd,' the 'rat race' through which the individual has to fight his way everyday. In order to make of several million contiguous people something other than a crowd, it is necessary that the second precondition be met as well. That second precondition is diversity -- the kind of complementary difference among parts that brings an internal order to things. A crowd, a mere aggregate of people, could be turned into a human network only by such diversity.

Something that a stage actor once said bears on this point. He mentioned that when all the seats in a theater had been bought up as a block by some one group like the Veterans of Foreign Wars or the League of Women Voters,, the performance was sure to fall flat. It didn't matter that there might' be a full house or that he might have acted brilliantly for the occasion. His words failed to catch fire nonetheless. All the guffaws came predictably in the same place, all the handkerchiefs were raised at the same moment. It was like playing to just one person who had been oddly magnified several hundred times. And when the audience was made up of several such blocked theater parties, the result was very little better. In that case, the actor got several reactions instead of just one, but the reactions remained discrete islands of response. No fire there either.

However, on those nights when the audience was a wide cross section of people randomly admixed, then things were different. One listener might catch a touch of humor that his neighbors had missed. His laughter would awaken the others to new possibilities in the play. Someone's mere posture might communicate itself and send new elements of tension or interest rippling through the audience. In other words, the people seated there no longer constituted an inert body. There was a subtle interaction and interplay among them that could ignite the whole evening into life. That's the kind of chemistry a city has to capture for itself too.

A city can't be arranged so that its inhabitants are blocked off like theater groups. There can't be strictly residential districts whose single outlook is that of the preoccupied businessman leaving his home at 7:00 and returning at 6:00 in the evening. With an area's inhabitants all pulsing to the same rhythm like that, there are bound to be long silences into which hostility, crime, urban alienation, and loneliness are sure to creep. During most of the day, there will be no essential activity on the streets; no one will be surely around to stand as a public presence against robbery and mugging, or to serve as a link in a neighborhood chain of communication.

By the same token, the high-rise office district which receives most of these evacuees each weekday is no better paced. Its music is just as much without the necessary counterpoint. If the area becomes preponderantly offices and businesses, as most downtown areas are becoming, then it will literally close up after the evening rush hour. A dangerous vacuum will have been created. But even^ during busy times, the area suffers because it is too single track, too monotone. It is a uniformity of strangers, all intent on producing or consuming, none involved with each other, none rooted enough into that part of the city to form any kind of vital network there.

It's the same story wherever an area's people are of too similar an outlook and therefore pound too much the same beat. It's true of strictly 'poverty areas.' It becomes true when the excessive duplication of shopping centers occurs, or along extended relays of athletic facilities in giant parks, or artist's colonies, or night-life strips. No matter how well these sections might- be physically compacted, they make the common error of collecting people of one type and one motive all into a clump. They box people off into separate sections of the theater with no chance of any one group's correcting its myopic stare at life with another's different vision. In so doing, the city plan generates tangible failure in the form of crime, inconvenience, fragmentation, and a stagnating economy. And it generates that more intangible kind of failure that comes .when there is no more hope of a transforming alchemy. The average city block fails because it doesn't conjure the right ingredients to make the magic work.

Not that the answer is to homogenize every neighborhood by stripping away all of its unique character. Rather the answer revolves around introducing everywhere enough diversity to give the street a continuous complex of life. To get the right catalysts, to achieve that reactive mixture of human elements, the place must have the proper mixture of physical elements. Variety is the second precondition that must be met.

Obviously, an area's buildings must vary according to function. Offices generate a daytime pattern of activity that is best complemented by the more nighttime attractions of restaurants, amusements, and residences. Enough of the latter are therefore necessary in every business district. And vice versa -- enough offices and shops are necessary in every residential district. This juxtaposing of buildings with widely different concerns is perhaps the best way to attract a diverse group of people onto the streets at all hours. It's the most fundamental way of gaining for an area all the social and economic advantages that come with a real urban thoroughfare.

But buildings must also differ in size and style. A variety of architectural motifs woven together makes a street a compelling place to walk down. People of different moods are drawn there and encouraged up and down the length of the street by a tantalizing atmosphere of discovery. Whereas a uniformity of building style would deaden whatever traffic a street might otherwise have, structural diversity enlivens the pace immeasurably. As long as no outrageous departures are made from the area's general scale and character, this kind of variety is as necessary as functional variety. It adds interest to the contour of the place with almost as dramatic a result as the hills of San Francisco achieve for that city as a whole.

Under the broad need for interspersing buildings of different styles there falls the specific need for interspersing buildings of different ages. Old and new should go together for reasons over and above the good esthetic blend they make. New buildings can usually house only conventional, prosperous activities and people because of the high overhead to be paid -on them. The types of enterprise going into modern facilities 'are automatically limited to those that can support the high costs of new construction.' Old buildings, even dilapidated old buildings on the other hand, can afford to be experimental in their array of tenants. They can be a haven to struggling young projects and new ideas. That these two kinds of activity be able to meet on common ground is again vital to the health of the city. The staid and the visionary, the morning reality and the nighttime dream need some interface. Each is enlarged by the presence of the other, and the city describes the best, the richest human tapestry when these two are woven together.

Diversity in buildings though is very hard to achieve. There are many pressures working against a street's having any intrinsic variety at all. Current urban planners try to sort everything out for the sake of 'rationality* and 'order.' Almost all zoning law also works in the direction of banning 'non-conforming' uses in an area.

Then if a street does achieve some modicum of diversity, it finds that diversity difficult to maintain. In such districts there's the danger of the 'excessive duplication' that will be precipitated by success itself. When an area hits upon the right combination of ingredients, that area grows in popularity. It becomes an 'in' place, a sought after location. The demand for space exceeds the supply and soon only the most financially successful ventures can afford to remain in the game. They and institutions of their same stamp are the inevitable winners of the brisk competition for space that is set up wherever an area becomes successful. So the area gradually makes the return trip back down again from diversity to a blank uniformity. It's the kind of trip so many downtown areas have made in the last decade. They've changed from glittering, shop-lined streets, to somewhat less exhilarating stretches dominated by a few big insurance buildings, to solid walls of modern office buildings all occupied by people filling things out in triplicate.

All the processes that lead toward dead routinization of an area, and especially this last process, are accelerated by the ubiquitous applications of the property tax. To the extent that assessments are made against the value of the site a building occupies, the tax exerts a significant pressure toward conformity. Currently, only a portion of the real estate tax is levied on the land. The rest is collected on the value of the improvements made on that land. If the tax were to be weighted more heavily toward the land value though, as Georgists urge, then an overriding pressure toward neighborhood monotony would be created. And if the category of tax-exempt land were to be eliminated, then the last loophole for diversity would be closed up tight.

Of course, land value taxation would not dictate that one building exactly replicate the building next to it. But such a property tax would demand that a certain level be maintained in an area. A certain level of earning power, and therefore a certain uniformity of style would be enforced, not de jure but de facto. If any properties were to fall consistently below that general level, they could not long afford to pay their taxes, and would have to get out. If any greatly exceeded the general earning power of the area, their burgeoning profits would inevitably impel them either to spread their influence and dominate the block, or else to move to an area of their peers.

So while one might not find exact duplications under LVT, one would find a general sorting of buildings according to style and function. Certainly no haphazard boarding house could coexist alongside an efficient office building; no coffee shop quartered in some scrap of old church property could stay beside large industrial complexes; no family business could last where high rise apartment buildings had come. And far from being regarded as just so much misguided sentimentality, concern over these little 'non-conforming' uses finding a permanent place among the more commercial and profitable uses should be the central concern of good urban policy. It is only by constantly stirring such diverse elements together, never allowing any one to settle to the bottom, that the city can be made a good place to live.

TOO SMALL AN EQUATION

This then is precisely where the unqualified advocacy of land value taxation fails the purpose. It starts with that very laudable objective of putting every piece of land to its 'best and highest use.' But it automatically assumes that the 'best and highest' is the maximally productive in material terms; and in positing this as true for land use, it breaks an otherwise strong chain of logic at the outset.

The implicit assumption that the best use for a given piece of land is the use that will generate the greatest possible material increment is a heady leap in the wrong direction. Such redoubtable materialism was the glory of the 19th century. It took the world a long way. But as has been shown, there is a whole complex of other values that must now be used as measure of an urban project's worth. There is no one lever that can be applied to achieve success for an immensity like a big city; there is no single ideological handle one can catch onto expecting to be towed into a better state of affairs. Merely trying to insure that each piece of urban land is given over to activities yielding the highest return possible from that land is a very short-sighted approach. In the long run, such policies would only tend to deteriorate the city.

As freethinking, ideologically uncommitted writers like Jane Jacobs, and William Whyte, and perhaps above all the likes of 0'Henry have demonstrated, a city needs to be free to crop out in improbability, to manifest some archaisms, many disparities, and continuous variety. Any insistence on material criteria, on maximum returns, could only stifle a city by making it run too narrow a course. Success must be defined in a broader sense and recognized as the result of a subtle and complex chemistry of events. And this last cannot be brought about by a high tax on land values.

So for one last summary example, let us say that there is a piece of land available among numerous tall office buildings in the downtown area of a big city. Tax laws, if enforced in the direction of LVT principles, would dictate that the space be taken by some venture whose profit and scale were commensurate with its neighbors. This would probably mean another similar office building, or some office building cousin like a bank or a high rise apartment building. Any of these uses would be completely wrong for the area though. Another commercial enterprise would only create an excessive duplication of pedestrian traffic patterns and rhythms. It might also tip the block over into an incontrovertible visual monotony.

No, what's required in that spot is something that would offer a definite change of pace and mood. A classically designed theater would be an ideal alternative. Such an attraction would draw people into the downtown area and onto the sidewalks at night at a time that would otherwise see the streets abandoned and wasted. It would add a new theme to the street's own dramatic repertoire. And a theater would inject that necessary complement of style, that texturizing new dimension to the street's facade.

But under land value taxation, there would be almost no chance of a theater building's ensconcing itself on the available site. However well managed, however dedicated to sound business principle, live theater is hardly a large-scale moneymaker. Certainly it can't equal the high returns generated by well-situated commercial enterprises whose product, after all, is standardized in nature. So a theater couldn't hope to pay any real estate tax bill calculated on the basis of the generally high earning potential of a downtown area. In short, it just couldn't pay a tax based on the value of the land it occupied.

Here the insufficiency of land value taxation is clearly demonstrated. It claims to foster the 'best and highest use' of each piece of land. Yet in practice, it would bring about almost the exact reverse of that objective. A theater building would surely constitute one of the best and highest uses of that hypothetical downtown land, when 'best and highest' was properly defined in terms of what would lead to the overall, long-range health of the city. But a theater building is precisely what would be made impossible by LVT.

Land value taxation would present this same obstacle to good land use in a thousand, a hundred thousand places throughout the city. It would block the continuous kind of variety necessary to keep, the city alive. And by preventing that diversity, it would also end by stifling the very material progress, the increased productivity it assumes as its inevitable result. Because if any city street becomes dangerous or uniform, it certainly can not long support much vigorous economic activity. That kind of activity will recede into the distance with the receding parade of life.

Almost ironically, the solution seems to lie closer to an intuitive randomness than to any strict application of economic law. In their own way, the graft, the sweetheart contracts, the exemptions, the neglect, the underassessments, have given the city some of the randomness it needed to be a healthy amalgam. These lapses in the pattern of honest, just tax enforcement have given the city some of the loopholes it needed to break out in nonconformity. But corruption is surely not the best way of mitigating the effects of too equal and too equalizing an application of a principle.

It is much better to broaden or revise the principle. In the area of real estate taxes, Jane Jacobs recommends that property tax ceilings be spot-imposed in order to foster the diversity a city requires. She discusses this issue explicitly only once and only briefly as part of her treatment of zoning regulations.

According to her concept of good urban planning, zoning laws should be turned 180° from their current goal. Instead of zoning for conformity, she would have zoning laws that enforced a diversity of buildings throughout each district. But to make this possible, equivalent turnabouts would have to be effected in the tax system. Jane Jacobs says:

ALL SUCH ZONING FOR DIVERSITY - SINCE THE DELIBERATE INTENT IS TO PREVENT EXCESSIVE DUPLICATION OF THE MOST PROFITABLE USES - NEEDS TO BE ACCOMPANIED BY TAX ADJUSTMENTS. LAUD HAMPERED FROM CONVERSION TO ITS MOST IMMEDIATELY PROFITABLE USE NEEDS TO HAVE THIS FACT REFLECTED IN ITS TAXES. IT IS UNREALISTIC TO PUT A CEILING ON A PROPERTY'S DEVELOPMENT (WHETHER THE TOOL IS CONTROL OF HEIGHT, BULK, HISTORICAL OR ESTHETIC VALUE, OR SOME OTHER DEVICE) AND THEN LET THE ASSESSMENT ON SUCH PROPERTY REFLECT THE IRRELEVANT VALUES OF MORE PROFITABLY DEVELOPED PROPERTIES,NEARBY. INDEED, RAISING THE ASSESSMENTS ON CITY PROPERTY BECAUSE OF INCREASED PROFITABILITY OF THE NEIGHBORS, IS A POWERFUL MEANS TODAY OF FORCING EXCESS DUPLICATION. THIS PRESSURE WOULD CONTINUE TO FORCE THEM, EVEN IN THE FACE OF CONTROLS OVERTLY INTENDED TO HAMPER DUPLICATIONS. THE WAY TO RAISE THE TAX BASE OF A CITY IS NOT AT ALL TO EXPLOVT TO THE LIMIT THE SHORT-TERM TAX POTENTIAL OF EVERY SITE. THIS UNDERMINES THE LONG-TERM TAX POTENTIAL OF WHOLE NEIGHBORHOODS. THE WAY TO RAISE A CITY'S TAX BASE IS TO EXPAND THE CITY'S TERRITORIAL QUANTITY OF SUCCESSFUL AREAS. A STRONG CITY TAX BASE IS A BY-PRODUCT OF STRONG CITY MAGNETISM, AND ONE OF ITS NECESSARY INGREDIENTS -- ONCE THE OBJECT IS TO SUSTAIN SUCCESS - IS A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF CLOSE-GRAINED. DELIBERATE, CALCULATED VARIATION IN LOCALIZED TAX YIELDS TO ANCHOR DIVERSITY AND FORESTALL ITS SELF-DESTRUCTION. (The Death and Life of Great American Cities, PP. 253-254.)

Clearly, this is not land value taxation. What is called for in fact proves to be the exact opposite of any land value tax formula. It proves to be the opposite of any formula at all. In many ways, Jane Jacobs' entire book is a plea for insight into individual cases rather than the application of formula.

A city will always need a great deal of concerned participation on the part of individuals who sense the imbalances and excesses occurring in a particular neighborhood. It will always need constant personal insights into each of the many problems that touch its development. But underneath everything, the only laws that must be at work are the ones implicit in the process, the ones intrinsic to the nature of the city itself. No final solutions can be imposed on this process of infinite inner dynamic. Not conventional urban planning theory, not a whole library of ordinance, not land value taxation are big enough equations to hold all the variables of a big city.

Perhaps land value taxation is a fine and sufficient remedy to apply in simpler settings or across broader generalities. It would be an appropriate reform for rural and semi-rural environments. It would accomplish the measure of justice and progress it intends in 'underdeveloped' countries as a whole, where most of the land is held idly out of use by an entrenched aristocracy. But to the great cities of the world, to London, New York, Chicago, to San Francisco, land value taxation can not be applied with any hope of a net positive result. What it would give in the way of consolidating and concentrating the city, it would more than take away again by making the juxtapositions of this new density too sterile, too predictable.

In a great city whose final triumph depends on the barber, the factory worker, the industrial president, the shopper, the recluse, the letter-mailer, the drunkard, the bagpiper, and me, all being contiguous and somehow available to each other, there can be no principle at work that sorts and files away neatly by subject. Any such system would only end by turning the grand bazaar into a supermarket, and the whole eager pageant of life into a rigid procession marked out in strict two/four time.