Planners worry about population. They worry about people also—people as human beings. But their working material is people as statistics-population. Planners spend days and weeks extending curves, extrapolating figures, calculating fertility rates, and building age-sex pyramids.

Then in the end they come up with just those things: curves, figures, rates, and a queer drawing that looks like a stylized Christmas tree.

Valuable as these population statistics must be (or planners wouldn't spend all that time on them) they don't make for lively reading. They are particularly dull when you try to work them into a speech. So I suggest we crib an idea from the boys who whoop it up for new industry. I suggest we adapt one of their reports in which they have tried to figure out "What 100 New Factory Employees Meant to Their Community." Only we talk about families.

What do 100 new families mean to the community? What do we have to do here in 1955 to supply all the public services that urban residents need and demand? How much will some of those things cost?

It seems to me that these figures would come in handy many times. It seems to me, too, that they would be quite easily pictured by laymen who don't know and don't care about things like age-sex pyramids.

Here's how they will look.

One hundred new families mean about 450 new people.

One hundred new families will put about 100 new children in our schools. About 67 will be in grammar school and 33 in high school. If you operate on the 6-3-3 system, it will be 50 in grammar school, 25 in junior high, and 25 in senior high school.

We can follow this school business, which is mighty important, a little further. You will need 2.2 new grade school rooms and 1.65 new high school rooms, which will cost about $120,000.

You will need four new school teachers and they are hard to find.

The 100 families will add about $30,000 a year to the school operating budget. The city will have to buy about 4 acres of land: 1 acre for grammar school, 1 acre for high school, 1 acre for parks, and 1 acre for playgrounds and playfields.

Besides school teachers, the 100 new families will require you to hire other municipal employees. The city will need 0.84 new employees in the police department and 2/3 of a new fireman. The police budget will have to be boosted $4,510 each year and the fire department budget increased $2,820.

You will need all sorts of additional jobs done, like cleaning streets and cleaning more windows on the city hall, like collecting garbage and collecting taxes, like looking after the city parks and the city health. You will probably need four new persons on the municipal payroll besides the policemen, firemen, and school teachers, at $12,000 to $15,000 added to the annual payroll.

The water department will have to figure on pumping about 10,000 additional gallons of water each day. The 100 families will own 140 automobiles and trucks that will be added to your present traffic. The way it looks now, however, you can't count on the 100 families increasing the number of public transit riders in your city at all.

There are all sorts of odds and ends of things the 100 new families require. Like a new hospital bed (price 10,000; 500 new volumes in the library (add $675 to the library's annual budget); a fraction of a visiting nurse; and a fraction of a cell in the jail.

Now before anyone starts questioning these figures too closely I will say they are based on a sort of composite of the family that lives in the modern merchant-builder, mass-produced suburb and the operating figures are for the three best administered medium large cities (I will plead the Fifth Amendment to anyone who asks me to name the cities) plus miscellaneous unidentifiable sources too numerous and obscure to mention.

Oh yes, the 100 new families will increase the planning budget $98.83 and will have to be provided with 0.02017925 persons added to the planning staff. But even that little of a planner is scarce these days.

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*Reprinted from April 1955 American Society of Planning Officials Newsletter.