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essarily demeans the environment.27

McFarland went on to deplore the speculative purchase

of land for potential development, which he thought

stretched the central city farther and farther from its core

and forced otherwise unnecessary public investments in

extending water and sewer lines and highways.  McFarland

placed the need to control growth in the context of a long-

unrealized agenda that he dated to the quintessential Pro-

gressive Era indictment of slum conditions, the 1894 publi-

cation of How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis.  About a

presidential study commission that was convened by Theodore

Roosevelt not long after, McFarland wrote, "Like the reports

of many presidential study commissions before and after, it

produced no action."  The clear implication: cities have

long been growing helter-skelter, with ominous consequences.

The concern about sprawl was linked to the concern

about the inner city.  In his introduction to McFarland's

book, Paul Ylvisaker, dean of the Harvard Graduate School of

Education and an architect of the Ford Foundation's efforts

in the early 1960s to intervene in the "gray areas" of cit-

ies, promoted the idea that HUD was needed to fight sprawl

and make cities aesthetically pleasing.  Ylvisaker contended

that HUD, by directing capital where it would not otherwise

go, could constrain the majority's settlement patterns.

McFarland and Ylvisaker saw metropolitan government and

central planning as the solution for the cities' problems,

which is arguable at best.  There is, first, an obvious and

powerful dose of aesthetic elitism, a presumption that

"glaring lights, gaudy signs" and other trappings of com-

merce should offend everyone.  Such views are part of a

tradition of reformist disdain for newly developing middle-

class and blue-collar neighborhoods; in their day, the row

houses and two- and three-family homes in immigrant zones of

emergence were denigrated by reformers who conceived public

housing projects in their stead.  Beyond such aesthetic

views, however, is the implicit assumption that racial

minorities will not want to partake in the "majoritarian

settlement pattern" and, further, that it is proper for

government to attempt to suppress what most Americans want.

It is fascinating, however, to note that "majoritarian

settlement patterns" are not set in stone.  As commuting has

become more difficult and as some people have begun to

express a preference for 19th-century housing patterns of