wikipedia | Jesse Clyde Nichols (August 23, 1880 - February 16, 1950), better known as J. C. Nichols, was a prominent developer of commercial and residential real estate in Kansas City. He was born in Olathe, Kansas, attended the University of Kansas and Harvard University. His developments include the Country Club Plaza, the first suburban shopping center in the United States and the Country Club District, the largest contiguous master-planned community in the United States.
He called his method "planning for permanence," for his objective was to
"develop whole residential neighborhoods that would attract an element
of people who desired a better way of life, a nicer place to live and
would be willing to work in order to keep it better." Nichols invented
the percentage lease, where rents are based on tenants' gross receipts.
The percentage lease is now a standard practice in commercial leasing
across the United States. Nichols was prominent in Kansas City civic
life, being involved in the creation of the Liberty Memorial, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Midwest Research Institute, as well as the development of Kansas City University, now the University of Missouri-Kansas City. His philosophies about city planning greatly influenced other developments in the United States, including Beverly Hills and the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, as well as Shaker Heights, Ohio.
Modern outdoor shopping centers, now common in the United States, share
a common ancestor in the Country Club Plaza, which opened in Kansas
City in 1923. The Urban Land Institute's J. C. Nichols Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development[1] is named for him. Moreover, the New Urbanists, developers who design to combat suburban sprawl, look to the Country Club District as a model for modern developments.
J.C. Nichols relied on restrictive covenants
to control the uses of the lands in the neighborhoods he developed.
Most of the covenants restricted the lands to residential uses, and
contained other features such as setback and free space requirements.
However, homes in the Country Club District were restricted with
covenants that prohibited African Americans and Jews from owning or
occupying the homes, unless they were servants. Nichols did not invent
the practice, but he used it to effectively bar ethnic minorities from
living in his properties during the first half of the century. His
restrictive covenant model was later adopted by the federal government
to help implement similar policies in other regions of the United
States. Ultimately, the 1948 Supreme Court decision Shelley v. Kraemer
made such covenants unenforceable. Nevertheless, covenants remained on
the deeds to properties developed by J.C. Nichols for decades after the
Supreme Court decision because of the practical difficulty of changing
them. (The deed restrictions in most neighborhoods renew automatically
every twenty to twenty-five years unless a majority of the homeowners
agree to change them with notarized votes.) In 2005, Missouri passed a
law allowing the governing bodies of homeowner's associations to delete
restrictive covenants from deed restrictions without a vote of the
members. To this day, the Country Club District is predominantly white,
and it is among the wealthiest, most sought-after neighborhoods in the
United States, and has still been plagued with numerous accusations of
racial profiling against minorities by police and security officers in
the area.
