Frank J. Popper

Understanding American Land Use Regulation Since 1970: A Revisionist Interpretation

Abstract This article challenges the conventional accounts of the history of American land use regulation over most of the last two decades. It traces the emergence of centralized regulation in the early 1970s and presents the standard (but contradictory) explanations of what has happened to it since: the liberals interpretation that the regulation faded and the conservatives interpretation that it bloomed excessively. The article offers a third, more pragmatic interpretation, which reconciles the other two–that centralized regulation quietly succeeded, even into the late 1980s as it increasingly overcame its initial practical disadvantage of unfamiliarity. The article ends by examining this revisionist interpretations surprisingly optimistic political and professional implications for planners.

Rural Land Use Policies and Rural Poverty

Abstract Drawing its illustrations mainly from the Northeast, this article contends that most contemporary American rural land use policies have their conceptual roots in urban areas and their social roots among the wealthy. In rural areas (as in urban ones) the policies—in particular, those based on zoning and the national park—do little for the poor. The article presents two practical approaches that will permit rural land use policies to help the poor more, along with suggestions for land use research to buttress the new initiatives.

The Great Plains and the Buffalo Commons

The Great Plains region, North America’s grassland and breadbasket, is a vast, beautiful, charismatic place with a volatile settlement history. Since the end of the Civil War, the Plains has suffered three large cycles of population, economic, and environmental boom and especially bust. Seventeen years ago the authors (Popper and Popper 1987) proposed a solution for the region’s difficulties, a vision of the Plains’ land-use future that we called the Buffalo Commons. Our idea took hold in the Plains, has lasted, and promises to affect the region’s development.

Is there still a frontier? The 1890 US census and the modern American West

Abstract An omnibus section in the 1890 Census, ‘Progress of the Nation’, analyzed the course of US settlement since the first Census in 1790. The essay concluded that the American frontier was fast diminishing as the post-Civil War settlement of the West expanded; and that the frontier was thus no longer worth measuring. Frederick Jackson Turner made the document the starting point for his famous 1893 essay on the significance of the frontier. Turner invoked ‘Progress of the Nation’ to declare that the frontier was gone. Researchers have neglected ‘Progress of the Nation’ as a primary source, exploring it mostly as it influenced Turner. Yet its main approach — tracking the distribution of population densities at decade intervals — yields a precise method for understanding low-density frontier settlement. We use the 1890 Censuss density-based method to chart the frontiers historical and contemporary evolution. We show that a vast frontier endures. The frontier never closed; instead it changed. After spending nearly the entire 19th century shifting quickly west, the frontier gradually moved east, to the point where large stretches of the Great Plains have now reverted to frontier. We also demonstrate that the modern-day West owes its distinctive form to land-use and urbanization patterns that appeared as early as the 1840s and were evident in ‘Progress of the Nation’. The region, with its big cities enveloped by a huge frontier, embodies its own 150-year-old settlement tradition.