Architecture and Real Estate in the United States
A working bibliography compiled by Erik Carver, Leslie Klein, Jacob Moore, Cezar Nicolescu, Pollyanna Rhee, Susanne Schindler, Jack Schonewolf, and Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió, at The Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, Columbia University, in conjunction with the Buell Center research project House Housing: An Untimely History of Architecture and Real Estate.
A version of this list accompanied the article “Fundamental #13: Real Estate as Infrastructure as Architecture,” by Buell Center Director Reinhold Martin, published on Places in May 2014. The Buell Center continues to update this bibliography at house-housing.com.
Guaranteed to Fail: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Debacle of Mortgage Finance
Princeton University Press
Policy-oriented bibliography by four professors at the NYU Stern School.
American Property: A History of How, Why, and What We Own
Harvard University Press
A readable, theoretical study of legal changes over several centuries of history, with attention to unusual cases.
Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk
Wiley and Sons
An entertaining, non-academic history of risk management from ancient Greece to the present.
Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California
University of Chicago Press
A social, political, and urban history of Asian Americans in 20th-century California. In explaining the dramatic transformation in Asian American rights in the 40s and 50s, the book emphasizes cold war geopolitics.
A Global Perspective on Real Estate Cycles
NYU Salomon Center/Kluwer
Economic analysis finding in part that global real estate markets are separate but converging.
Financing the American Dream: A Cultural History of Consumer Credit
Princeton University Press
A social and cultural history of credit in US from 1890-1940. From pawnbrokers to consumer credit, Americans have long been trapped in debt.
A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America
Knopf
A socio-cultural and political history from 1930 to 2000. Good citizenship and consumerism became conjoined in the postwar US consumer culture, while fragmenting along lines of race, class, and gender. Focusing on New Jersey, it includes sections on the suburban spaces of housing and shopping malls.
Real Estate in American History
Public Affairs Press
Barrio Urbanism: Chicanos, Planning, and American Cities
Routledge
An urban-planning and policy history of Chicanos in the 20th century, tracing migrations, and looking at the blind spots of planning with respect to poverty, racism, environmental justice, and land use.
Shaky Palaces: Home Ownership and Social Mobility in Boston
Columbia University Press
Neo-marxist history of the political economy of urban development and real estate in metropolitan Boston from 1890 to the 1970s, providing both quantitative and qualitative analysis. A class struggle has fueled suburbanization, fiscal policies, the ideology of social mobility, and the mirage of homeownership, thus constraining American life.
The Merchant Builders
MIT Press
Business history written by an insider, charting the rise and operation of American homebuilders in the postwar era.
Modernizing Main Street: Architecture and Consumer Culture in the New Deal
University of Chicago Press
An architectural and political history of FHA-funded retail modernization which touches on social and economic questions.
The City Builders: Property Development in New York and London, 1980-2000
University Press of Kansas
Urban planning analysis of three pairs of case studies, eg. Times Square and King’s Cross, with nuanced assessments of public-private partnerships. It begins with recent political economic history with respect to business cycles and urban policy, and concludes with an attack on post-structuralist critique and a call for an enlightened version of public-private development.
Real Estate Principles
Dearborn Real Estate Education
Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America
University of Chicago Press
This book is half history of 20th century segregation in the U.S., half case studies rooted in Detroit. Freund argues for a more continuous history of suburbanization, in that early suburbs were adjacent to and indistinguishable from cities.
Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development: The Kansas City Experience, 1900-2000
State University of New York Press
A political history of segregation arguing that segregation was an intentional goal of government and real-estate institutions.
The Informal as Project: Self-Help Housing in Peru
Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University
The Fateful History of Fannie Mae: New Deal Birth to Mortgage Crisis Fall
The History Press
Building a Market: The Rise of the Home Improvement Industry, 1914–1960
University of Chicago Press
A scholarly history of the home improvement store (and the do-it-yourselfer), bringing in economic, demographic, planning information, as well as business archives and consumer retail history.
Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960
University of Chicago Press
Urban history documenting the production of the postwar ghetto via public and private discrimination and urban renewal.
A Nation of Realtors: A Cultural History of the Twentieth-Century American Middle Class
Duke University Press
Cultural history of the professionalization of the curbstone broker into the realtor, crucially in the 1920s. The book also traces the turn to homeownership as the American Dream by the postwar, and the entry of women into the field in the 1950s.
Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink
Princeton University Press
An economic and cultural history of American personal debt over the course of the 20th century. Hyman tells a nuanced story of the interactions between marketing and credit, and the complications arising from reforms as well as business innovations.
Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It
University of Chicago Press
A history of American cities from 1890 to the 1970s—City Beautiful to festival markets—which challenges narratives of the decline of main street. The book uses business and government records, brings in race and gender, and focuses mostly on downtowns and retail.
Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States
Oxford University Press
Race, Ethnicity, and Real Estate Appraisal: The Home Owners Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing Administration
Journal of Urban History
Fundamentals of Land Development: A Real-World Guide to Profitable Large-Scale Development
Wiley and Sons
The Evolution of the Residential Land Subdivision Process in Louisville, 1772–2008
The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society
Entrepreneurial Vernacular: Developers' Subdivisions in the 1920s
Johns Hopkins University Press
A business, social, and architectural history, using three case studies looking at different classes of housing in San Francisco and Detroit. Building on Marc Weiss, Loeb connects the history of large developers with builders and tradespeople. The book considers standardization, the constrained role of architects in design, and the neighborhood unit.
American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass
Harvard University Press
A sociological history of American segregation in the 20th century. Using a significant amount of data, it argues that segregation is a product of 20th century industrialization. After the civil rights era, segregation persisted in the form not of explicit codes, but private forms of discrimination and steering practices. Redlining and deindustrialization left ghettos isolated from jobs and resources, and made race outweigh class in determining mobility. The authors conclude with a call for a comprehensive reform of the American real estate system focused on better integration rather than on increased spending in ghetto areas.
Risk and Regulation in the Financial Architecture of the American House
Governing by Design: Architecture, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century
University of Pittsburgh Press
Real Estate Development: Principles and Process
Urban Land Institute
My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965
University of Chicago Press
A scholarly, thick, data-rich portrait which argues for bottom-up origins to segregation and working-class conservatism. In considering industry, consumption, religion, and the importance of the family home, it contrasts with approaches emphasizing policy and the elite suburbs.
The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York
Oxford University Press
An urban renewal history documenting the gentrification of Brooklyn in the 1950s and 60s by white-collar liberals pitted against technocratic urban renewal on one hand, and the Democratic machine on the other. Restored brownstones anchored idealized histories of the neighborhoods mobilized by this emerging social group.
Everything in Its Place: Social Order and Land Use in America
Princeton University Press
Making Houses, Crafting Capitalism
University of Pennsylvania Press
A clear description of the complex histories of microeconomics, contracting, and construction in antebellum Philadelphia, the book abandons the decline of the artisan narrative in favor of continuity in the face of changing material and economic conditions. It explains the ground-rent system (which lowered barriers to entry for builders) and focuses on the role of the mechanic-builder.
Building On the Land: Toward an Environmental History of Residential Development in American Cities and Suburbs, 1870–1990
Journal of Urban History
The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism
Cambridge University Press
An environmental history of the suburbs in the 1950s and 60s, looking at the ironies and conundrums inherent to sprawl. Sections cover the growth of energy consumption and under-insulated homes; federal actions, like the sponsorship of sewers in the 60s; the growth of environmentalism by residents of suburbs; and the failure of the 1970 Land Use act in the face of development interests and property rights.
Conflicts of Interest in the Structure of REITs
Real Estate Finance
The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo
Princeton University Press
The New Suburban History
University of Chicago Press
The book challenges the earlier generation of suburban histories by presenting a heterogeneous, nonconformist suburbia. Essays tackle racial diversity, integration, coalitions, and busing; tax revolts; elite, university suburbs; etc.
The Anatomy of a Residential Mortgage Crisis: A Look Back to the 1930s
National Bureau of Economic Research
Mortgage Banking in the United States, 1870–1940
Research Institute for Housing America/Mortgage Bankers Association
Not a critical history, given its sponsor, but finding others has proven challenging and this includes a long bibliography.
The New Deal and the Origins of the Modern American Real Estate Loan Contract
National Bureau of Economic Research
Developing Expertise: The Architecture of Real Estate, 1908–1965
Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University
A business and institutional history following developers in the early 20th century as they gain expertise in greenfield development, then apply this in the postwar via urban redevelopment. There are several case studies: J.C. Nichols in Kansas City, Herbert Greenwald in Chicago, and William Zeckendorf in New York. It looks also at professionalization, the ULI, finance and life-insurance investment.
From Puritans to Public Housing: Public Housing and Public Neighborhoods
Harvard University Press
An intellectual and policy history focusing on Boston over three centuries. Vale shows how charity and concepts like the “public neighbor" evolve, and how poverty becomes displaced and federalized over time.
Calling Upon the Genius of Private Enterprise: The Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968 and the Liberal Turn to Public-Private Partnerships
Studies in American Political Development
Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the 20th Century
University of Chicago Pres
With demographic and policy evidence, as well as first-person accounts, this book argues for the importance of black suburbanization and middle-class emergence. This history stretches from 1900 to beyond the civil rights era, but peaks in the mid-20th century. It looks at a handful of suburbs in the South, Northeast, and Midwest.
Researching the History of Real Estate Development
Journal of Architectural Education
The Rise of The Community Builders: The American Real Estate Industry and Urban Land Planning
Columbia University Press
Business and institutional history of developers, with L.A. in the 1910s and 20s as a case study. A clinical account shows how large developers and trade associations effectively captured government to legislate small operators out of business. The single-family house on its own lot emerged as optimal real-estate product. Race is briefly touched on but simmers below the surface.
Real Estate Investment
South-Western Cengage Learning
Land in America: Its Value, Use and Control
Pantheon Books
New Racial Meanings of Housing in America
American Quarterly
Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York
Oxford University Press
A history of urban renewal between the 1940s and 1970s, the book draws on NYCHA archives to document the redevelopment processes for four large projects, and reconstructs the neighborhoods which existed before, in order to question the designation of “blight." A vertical global, metropolis is pitted against intimate neighborhoods defended by Jacobs and others. Battle lines are complex, with geopolitical influences, and tensions between progressives and working class residents.