restricting the density of people in a place where the density of
buildings and pavements is what really matters.

[Illustration: THE HYDROLOGIC CYCLE]

Tax systems can be troublesome in various ways--discouraging public
purchase of needed parks or conservation areas because officials don't
want the land to go off the tax rolls, preventing renewal of blighted
areas by penalizing improvements, running farms out of business by
taxing their fields as subdivision land, promoting leapfrogging and
sprawl (in the case of Federal capital gains taxation) by rewarding
speculative retention of tracts. And other government programs and
policies at various levels work against good planning or have done so in
the past, either by failing to encourage good types of land use or by
actively promoting bad types. Traditional Federal mortgage insurance and
home loan practices oriented toward standard suburban development are an
example, and so are many highways and roads subsidized and routed by
experts in higher realms of government.

With so much economic and legal muscle arrayed on the side of chaos and
a whole army of enterprising folk dedicated to its perpetuation--some
holding seats on planning and zoning bodies--the wonder is that the
metropolitan counties have been making any headway at all with improving
their planning process. And they have been, especially since they have
begun to work together in such organizations as the Metropolitan
Washington Council of Government. But, as elsewhere throughout America,
the progress is somewhat dwarfed by the population pressures and
untrammeled expansionism planning must deal with. Radical measures may
be needed; there has been sober talk of counties' issuing bonds,
condemning all vacant land within a wide radius of the city, and buying
it up for gradual resale and development in an orderly and sensible way,
thus eliminating at one stroke the speculative pressures and torsions
that are the root cause of much of the trouble.

For under metropolitan conditions fee ownership, either of land or of
its development rights, seems to give the only certainty of control over
land's use. Obviously its potential employment by government is limited
in a free economy, and such things as zoning and subdivision
controls--strengthened and made rational--are going to have to continue
as main tools, together with devices like scenic easements, which
usually, however, again involve a form of purchase.

Fe