Saturday, October 28, 1933

Got Mrs. Raifert some meat. Cut my hand. Went over to Helen's. Had a swell time. Traded dresses with Helen. They brought us home.

Jesse Clyde Nichols, better known as J.C. Nichols (August 23, 1880 - February 16, 1950),

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 on based tenants' gross receipts. The
percentage lease is now a standard practice in commercial leasing across the United States.

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.