¶ Building Business (1)
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Index Entry
Building Business:
"I don’t want to dwell on the negatives. I feel that the answer to the question of how urban sprawl happened is that there is no social organization. Though there are a great many studies and planners, planners have no authority and they find the plans for communities continually overridden by people with ingenious ways for making money. And we’ve seen orchard after orchard belonging to a farmer go out of farming because the real estate man came along and showed that he could make some money out of it. And so he gets an option on it and all kinds of federal help with which he can manipulate to get in the sewers, and so forth… not making a very large amount of money. It’s entirely a matter of individual ingenuity and how to make money: that’s why we have urban sprawl.
“I would like to talk a little on the positive side here. I’ve been thinking about and concerned with this problem since back in the early 20s–fully half a century–and I’ve been… In the building arts we have very great lags in the rate of realization of inventions. In the electronic arts there is only a two-year lag between invention and industrial use. There’s a five-year lag in aeronautics. A ten-year lag in automobile building. A 15-year lag in railroading. A 25-year lag in large buildings And a 50-year lag in individual homes.”
