Town Plan Analysis System

Abstract

The Housing Act of 1954 authorized the federal government to subsidize municipal planning programs. As a result, planning firms produced “comprehensive plans” for rural towns at an increasing rate. After a decade of experience with these HHFA “701” “comprehensive” town plans, it became evident that there was a wide variation in quality and content of the plans. Plans varied from useful tools for guiding growth to useless documents containing no meaningful recommendations. The latter situation resulted when urban planners drafted plans for rural areas based on urban concepts with no significant input by local people. Also, administrators of the “701” program and students of regional planning had no accepted criteria to distinguish an acceptable rural town plan from a useless compilation of data. This situation allowed planners who lacked rural planning know-how to use urban planning concepts to develop nonrelevant “shelf” plans in performance of their “701” contracts. By 1968 this problem was generally recognized. As a result, a research project was developed at the University of Vermont (Hatch 212), to study town plans and planning. The project had two objectives: (1) to evaluate adopted rural town plans by measuring the quality and content of plans, thus separating implementable plans from nonimplementable plans, and plans with considerable content from plans with little content, and (2) to develop planning concepts and procedures relevant to rural areas. This paper is a progress report on the first objective—a proposal of a town plan analysis and evaluation system.