Jesse Clyde Nichols and the Rise of City Planning: Private Motives and Public Interest—Part I: Nichols in Kansas City
Sketch of the Country Club Plaza, photo taken in the Western Historical Manuscripts Collection at the University of Missouri, Kansas City in 2017 (State Historical Society of Missouri)
In this series, I will be breaking down my past graduate research into five short articles. This research followed the work of Jesse Clyde Nichols alongside the rise of city planning and the housing segregation that resulted. I used J.C. Nichols (and his connection to city planning and early housing legislation) as a case study for cloak-and-dagger practices that discriminate against and disadvantage communities of color. These practices pervade the social, political, and legal domains and appeal to public interest in a number of ways, but their ends are ultimately harmful. Such practices gain momentum and support when their champions advocate for a common cause (like boosting the local economy) or against a common fear (like voter fraud), but influential figures and these practices themselves either fail to achieve that cause in an equitable manner, or they address a fear (that may be baseless) through inequitable means. In Part IV of this series, I will discuss some of the ways that these practices affect other policy areas and realms of civic life, but for now, I will focus on housing and the work of J.C. Nichols.
As many of my KC readers will know, Nichols was a prominent housing developer in Kansas City, Missouri who created the Country Club District and the Country Club Plaza (a luxury outdoor shopping center), among other works. Prior to these well-known accomplishments, Nichols, who was born in Olathe, Kansas, received his bachelor’s from the University of Kansas and attended graduate school at Harvard. Returning to the Kansas City area after graduate school, Nichols started his company, Reed, Nichols & Co. (later known as the J.C. Nichols Company), and created his first development in 1905 in Kansas. In 1908, Nichols broke ground on the Country Club District, and the Country Club Plaza was later designed in 1922.
Nichols gave a number of speeches on city planning and housing developments (and the Country Club District in particular), in addition to writing articles and conference papers that were read nationally. In these speeches and writings, he discussed his developments in an idealistic sense, setting them as the pinnacle of high-class living and forever juxtaposing them against poor city planning, urban crowding, and unstable property values. He continually spoke about the public good and economic benefit that these developments and city planning would bring (the cloak), despite the reality that these benefits were only ever intended for White, upper-class Kansas Citians.
In creating his developments, Nichols advanced existing housing methods and created those of his own that better reflect the “dagger” portion of his practices. The first of these was to set clear racial boundaries that divided—or, in his tainted view, “protected”—his properties primarily from communities of color to the north and east. Historically, Black Kansas Citians lived on the east and northeast sides of the city and were pushed further east and denied the freedom to move outside of these bounds in large numbers (more on this later). Nichols constructed Ward Parkway (the northern and western boundary) and Brookside Boulevard (the eastern boundary) to effectively quarantine his developments from the surrounding areas. The green spaces along these roads also acted as buffers to separate his single-family residences from the surrounding retail spaces and multi-family dwellings. The three country clubs within his district acted as land barriers as well and further isolated the community he created, which was also divided from the city to the north by the Country Club Plaza.
In concert with these forced boundaries, and like many other developers at that time, Nichols used restrictive covenants (a.k.a. deed restrictions) for all of his properties. These were meant to protect homeowners from anything that could affect their quality of life (termed “nuisance” covenants) or anything that could drive down property values, e.g., covenants that set minimum square footage and costs for new homes. Notably, restrictions for “high-class” developments included designating properties for single-family use. Such restrictive covenants appealed to wealthy homebuyers and became extremely marketable at this time. In fact, restrictions became a requirement for builders who wanted to be able to offer Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgage insurance to buyers. These examples alone kept out low-income individuals, and racially restrictive covenants kept out people of color (and often Jewish homebuyers).[1]
Now, as I mentioned, Nichols was not the first to use restrictive covenants in general and racially restrictive covenants in particular. He did, however, pioneer the practice of making them self-perpetuating through the implementation of homes associations. An early hurdle to effective deed restrictions was that once the last plot in a development was sold, there was no incentive for the developer to enforce the restrictions. Developers could essentially say, “I’ve made my money,” and move on. To address this, Nichols implemented homes associations, which were private companies for individual subdivisions that provided various services (like trash pickup and street sweeping) but ultimately functioned as enforcers of restrictive covenants.
Within his use of homes associations, Nichols also implemented—and suggested to developers across the country—the practice of automatically renewing restrictions at the end of a given term (often 20 or 30 years) unless there was a majority vote among the property owners to amend or remove a restriction. Unsurprisingly, such changes were rare, and that was the point. In an article he published in the National Real Estate Journal, Nichols wrote,
For the past fifteen years or more, each new plat filed by us had been immediately followed by the filing of these self-perpetuating restrictions. Several of the old plats have reached the end of the period for which a majority could cancel all or a part of the restrictions, and in no instance has such action been taken. We believe that except in very unusual cases, there will not be a majority who wish to cancel the restrictions or at least take positive action to do so. This puts the burden on the owners who wish to break the chain of restrictions and those owners are confronted with a great difficulty of location and finally persuading certain majorities to join in such action.[2]
These practices, in conjunction with violence, worked to further segregate Kansas City, and the effects of this have yet to be remedied.
This is true across the country, and it is not coincidental but rather directly tied to Nichols. I mentioned the article Nichols wrote for the National Real Estate Journal, which was a prominent publication in the field at the time, but he had other ways of accessing a national platform. In addition to being an executive member of the National Association of Real Estate Boards and the Community Builders’ Council (not to mention assisting in the creation of the FHA), Nichols worked directly with major influential figures in housing, city planning, and landscape architecture. He was greatly inspired by Frederick Law Olmsted and the City Beautiful movement and worked with Olmsted’s sons on the Liberty Memorial in Kansas City. The Olmsted brothers also worked on nationally renowned developments of the time, including Palos Verdes in California and Roland Park in Maryland. George Kessler also appeared in Kansas City, having previously worked on developing Central Park in New York City with Frederick Law Olmsted. Nichols worked with Kessler on the Parks and Boulevards project that produced Ward Parkway, Brookside Boulevard, Paseo Boulevard, and others.
Nichols’ ties to these and other prominent figures show his connection to the City Beautiful movement; however, as with the city planning movement in general, it is important to note that these beautification and greenspace projects (much like gentrification and “urban renewal” projects today) primarily benefitted White, middle-to-upper class Kansas Citians. Nichols and his contemporaries fabricated a sharp contrast between these “ideal” spaces and crowded urban life, wrongfully deeming urban areas as “slums” and people of color and Jewish individuals as “undesirables.” In the early 1900s, Nichols and others were already categorizing urban crowding and poverty as inherently Black, even as the practices of developers, city planners, and municipal law itself created and perpetuated these conditions.[3] Across the country and in Kansas City today, these racialized geographic boundaries and false conceptions persist, and I will elaborate on the contemporary manifestations of these issues in Part V.
Notes
[1] For more information about racially restrictive covenants, view Jim Crow of the North, a documentary examining their use in Minneapolis.
[2] J.C. Nichols, “Restrictions and Homes Associations,” J.C. Nichols Company Records Selected Inventory, Folder 39 (1939), The State Historical Society of Missouri.
[3] For an in-depth examination of these practices outside of Kansas City, check out Black Chicago by Allan H. Spear.
Photo source: 1000 Acres Restricted sign; K0054; J.C. Nichols Company Records (K0106); The State Historical Society of Missouri Research Center-Kansas City.
Additional Resources
The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein
Race and Real Estate edited by Adrienne Brown and Valerie Smith
