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doctrine. This was of particular concern to the traditional landed classes since, in the period near the turn of the nineteenth century, many social codes that often kept the urban poor and working classes well away from the rich were broken. This meant that some wealthy landowners were confronted with behaviors by nearby landowners that, while possibly annoying or even offensive to certain personal or community norms, were not actionable. Next, in the large cities with industrial or commercial concerns in close proximity to carriage trade areas or exclusive residential areas, the annoyances sometimes arose not from nearby landowners but from those whose proximity allowed them to simply pass by. For example, merchants on New York's Fifth Avenue decried the possibility that the immigrant masses employed in nearby businesses could walk on the streets at lunchtime, destroying the exclusive character of their businesses, and in the view of the merchants, reducing property values accordingly.29 Nuisance law could offer no remedy for such problems. In addition, because nuisance is a post hoc remedy and can only be invoked after a problem arises, and because it is highly fact specific, it was difficult for landowners to predict when or if their own actions would be the subject of nuisance claims.30 This uncertainty left landowners who sought to put their land to new or different uses facing the possibility that the proj ects in which they invested could be halted by the application of nuisance law. Finally, besides these limits of private land use arrangements, by the early twentieth century, notions of the permanence of social class, the concentration and retention of wealth in a 29 peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow 61 (2002). 3o Dukeminier supra note 27, at 952. 11