Discriminating Appraisals: Cartography, computation, and access to federal mortgage insurance in the 1930s

Technology and Culture

Volumn 52, Issue 3, 2011, Pages 485-522

  Light, Jennifer ^a  

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EID: 80051523961     PISSN: 0040165X     EISSN: 10973729     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/tech.2011.0111     Document Type: Article

References (218)

1. On the history of mortgage underwriting
2. see John Metzger, ''Planned Abandonment: The Neighborhood Life Cycle and National Urban Policy,'' Housing Policy Debate 11 (2000): 7-40
3. Guy Stuart, Discriminating Risk: The U.S. Mortgage Lending Industry in the Twentieth Century (Ithaca, N.Y., 2003)
4. Kenneth T. Jackson,''Race, Ethnicity, and Real Estate Appraisal: The Home Owners Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing Administration,'' Journal of Urban History 6 (1980): 419-52
5. Jennifer Light, ''Nationality and Neighborhood Risk at the Origins of FHA Underwriting,'' Journal of Urban History 36 (2010): 1-38
6. David Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (Chicago, 2007). Although several of these accounts use the term ''redlining,'' it is not entirely accurate to connect the practice of outlining districts in red on a map with the denial of FHA mortgage insurance. This cartographic approach to designating hazardous areas, in fact, originated in the work of the FHA's contemporary, the U.S. Home Owners' Loan Corporation, which actually made numerous loans to the neighborhoods it considered hazardous.
7. See Amy Hillier, ''Redlining and the Home Owners' Loan Corporation,'' Journal of Urban History 29 (2003): 394-420. In constructing maps of mortgage-risk districts the FHA did not outline areas in red, although it did designate neighborhoods to be excluded from the benefits of its programs.
8. Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (New York, 1922)
9. A. G. Hinman, ''Scientific Real Estate Merchandising: The Professional Ideal,'' Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics 1 (1925): 487. Like many others in the period,Hinman hoped that realtors might someday garner the same respect as doctors and lawyers.
10. Letter, Herbert Nelson to William Keandin, 23 December 1926, in folder ''Multiple Listing History 1907-1927,'' Archives of the National Association of Realtors
11. L. B. Magoon, untitled, undated clipping from The Oakland Realtor, attached to ''Address by member of the Beloit Board, 1919,'' folder ''Multiple Listing History 1907-1927,'' Archives of the National Association of Realtors. On the textbook series, as well as the real estate community's effort to raise its work to the status of a predictive science,
12. Jeffrey Hornstein, A Nation of Realtors (Durham, N.C., 2005).
13. Leonard Hammel and Charles Lee, Los Angeles Blue Book of Land Values (Los Angeles, multiple dates)
14. George Olcott, Olcott's Land Values Blue Book of Chicago and Suburbs (Chicago, multiple dates)
15. Cuthbert Reeves, The Valuation of Business Lots in Downtown Los Angeles (Los Angeles, 1932)
16. Chicago Real Estate Index Company, Valuations for the Heart of Chicago 1911-1914 (Chicago, 1914). For an account of nine popular approaches to valuation and the varying weights they assigned to factors, including capitalized income, suitability to improvement, and neighborhood desirability
17. Stuart, table 1.1, 40.
18. The ongoing controversy would prompt some appraisers to put forward their ideas anonymously
19. see, for example, Val U. Ator, ''Just What Do We Mean by Value?'' Real Estate: TheWeekly for Owners, Realtors, Architects, Builders, 15 June 1935, 7, 19.
20. This phrase is drawn from Maurice Reidy, ''Better Appraisals Mean Better Loans,'' InsuredMortgage Portfolio, May 1937, 6.
21. Reidy was president of the American Institute of Real Estate Appraisers.
22. Ernest Fisher, ''Some Problems of Mortgage Lending,'' Insured Mortgage Portfolio (October, 1937), 21. Fisher wrote two textbooks for the series.Historians of federal housing policy have documented the close ties between the real estate industry and the FHA, which were not limited to matters of appraisal.
23. See Hornstein
24. Pearl Davies, Real Estate in American History (Washington, D.C., 1958)
25. MarcWeiss, ''Richard T. Ely and the Contribution of Economic Research to National Housing Policy, 1920-1940,'' Urban Studies 26 (1989): 115-26.
26. Fisher, 11. The mutual mortgage insurance program was established in Title 2 of the National Housing Act, the legislation that also provided for the creation of the FHA.
27. T. M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton, N.J., 1995).
28. Reidy, 6.
29. Frederick Babcock, ''Risk Rating from the Lender's View,'' Insured Mortgage Portfolio, December 1936, 24
30. Fisher, 11. The rating of the borrower was an estimate of the likelihood that an individual or family would repay the loan in full. The rating of property aimed to forecast its future condition. The rating of neighborhood was an assessment of the possibility that default would totally liquidate the value due to declining neighborhood conditions. The 1935 manual mentions a fourth category relating the property to its neighborhood that was used only briefly.
31. Babcock, 16.
32. Stewart McDonald, ''Steps Toward a Sound Mortgage Market,'' Insured Mortgage Portfolio, June 1937, 4. Dun & Bradstreet, for example, compiled information on ''pecuniary strength'' on a scale of AA (over $1 million in assets) to M (less than $500), and, in turn, on general credit: high, good, fair, or limited. The letter-based approach was also used by local exchanges.
33. See Retail Credit Company, Credit Reference Book of Atlanta, Georgia (Atlanta, 1908)
34. Commercial Exchange Book of Ratings with List of Pay Days for City of Saginaw, 1911 (Saginaw, Mich., 1911)
35. Dun & Bradstreet, The Mercantile Agency Reference Book (and Key) (for Maryland) (New York, 1934). The view that the FHA offered consumer financing (and in so doing shared much in common with other creditors) is apparent in Joseph Coppcock, Government Agencies of Consumer Installment Credit (New York, 1940).
36. Reidy (n. 6 above)
37. Aaron Brown, ''The Origins and Evolution of Credit Risk Management,'' Global Association of Risk Professionals 20 (2004): 33.
38. Brown notes that credit-rating agencies chiefly used qualitative, rather than quantitative, approaches to estimate default risk during this period; quantitative approaches became the norm only afterWorldWar II.
39. See also Josh Lauer, ''The Good Consumer: Credit Reporting and the Invention of Financial Identity in the United States, 1840-1940'' (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2008).
40. McDonald, 4
41. Joanne Yates, Structuring the Information Age: Life Insurance and Technology in the Twentieth Century (Baltimore, 2005). Insurance had long been mutualized. Actuarial science dates back to the nineteenth century.
42. Babcock, 15
43. McDonald, 4.
44. Fisher (n. 7 above), 11
45. Ernest Fisher, ''What Is a Good Mortgage? Criteria Are Being Developed byWhich Soundness of ProposedMortgage Loans Can Be Judged with Increasing Accuracy,'' Insured Mortgage Portfolio, July 1938, 23. Given the importance of attending to local variation, there was some value to reliance on human judgment.
46. James S. Taylor, ''Factual Aids for Mortgage Lenders,'' Insured Mortgage Portfolio, May 1937, 15.
47. Address by Ernest Fisher to the National Appraisal Forum, 19 November 1937, in folder ''Copies of Addresses Delivered at the National Appraisal Forum,'' box 11,''National Appraisal Forum Correspondence, S-Z,'' in ''Miscellaneous Correspondence,'' record simultanegroup 207, Records of the Housing and Home Finance Agency, Records of the Central Housing Committee, Records of the Committee on Appraisal and Mortgage Analysis, 1935-1942, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.
48. Ernest Fisher, ''CanWe Immunize Mortgages?'' Insured Mortgage Portfolio (July 1936): 17.
49. ''The Training of FHA Underwriters,'' Insured Mortgage Portfolio, May 1939, 14. This field organization is described in ''The Field Organization of the FHA,'' Insured Mortgage Portfolio, May 1940, 17
50. A map and list of insuring office locations were frequently printed in Insured Mortgage Portfolio during this period, as well as in the Underwriting Manual (published by the Federal Housing Administration, Washington, D.C.) itself. These branch offices also administered other FHA programs. To underscore the importance of achieving the ''highest degree of efficiency in the application of prescribed FHA underwriting procedures,'' students received an ''efficiency rating,'' with implications for their future career advancement
51. see ''The Training of FHA Underwriters,'' 14.
52. See also Joseph Graham, ''FHA Underwriters and Their Functions,'' Insured Mortgage Portfolio, April 1937, 25.
53. ''The Training of FHA Underwriters,'' 13. Local insuring offices were still sorting out basic needs as a large volume of applications came pouring in, a problem exacerbated by the agency's publicity effort to sell its new programs to lending institutions and consumers.
54. See the advertisement in Chicago Daily Tribune, 5 June 1936, 20
55. ''FHA to Conduct Mortgage Clinic at Factories,'' Chicago Daily Tribune, 5 July 1936, 10
56. Chesly Manly, ''New Deal Found Embedded with Publicity Men: Work under Multiplicity of Titles,'' Chicago Daily Tribune, 14 October 1934, 5
57. ''Red Tape Still Delays Action of New FHA Unit: 'Title Two' to Insure Mortgages,'' Chicago Daily Tribune, 25 November 1934, 18
58. Al Chase, ''To Combine Chicago Offices and Speed Work: Takes Additional Space at 134 N. La Salle,'' Chicago Daily Tribune, 14 December 1935, 30.
59. McDonald (n. 13 above), 4.
60. Fisher, ''Some Problems of Mortgage Lending'' (n. 7 above), 11.
61. Letter, Homer Hoyt to Dr. Fisher, ''Instructions as to procedure in rating neighborhoods,''
62. July 1935, in carton 18, folder 0-109, ''Neighborhood Rating Technique: Miscellaneous,'' record group 31, entry 6, Research and Statistics, National Archives and Records Administration,Washington, D.C. (hereafter RS-NARA).
63. ''Realty Prices Off 20 to 30% in New Blue Book of Values,'' Chicago Daily Tribune, 7 May 1933, A10. Olcott recognized that some users might employ his atlas to reduce though not completely eliminate site visits; toward this end he included many blank pages for writing field notes close to the section maps. On Homer Hoyt's prior use of this source
64. see Hoyt, One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago (Chicago, 1933) on earlier uses of maps,
65. see ''The Board as a Center of Real Estate Information,'' in Herbert Nelson, The Administration of Real Estate Boards (New York, 1925), another book in the NAREB series.
66. Earl Edward Eubank, ''The Base Map as a Device for Community Study,'' Social Forces 6 (1927): 605. Indeed, Eubank characterized maps here as ''confined to objective data.''
67. Mary Jo Deegan, ''The Human Drama behind the Study of People as Potato Bugs,'' Journal of Classical Sociology 6 (2006): 101-22. Best known for sociology, the University of Chicago also drew economists and geographers into the fold
68. see Jennifer Light, The Nature of Cities: Ecological Visions and the American Urban Professions, 1920-1960 (Baltimore, 2009), for an account of the interactions among these scholars. Faculty simultaneously urged student researchers to stand apart from their objects of study and participate in part-time work in a variety of city venues to gain access to firsthand data. They also recognized many possible applications of their research
69. ErnestW. Burgess, ''The Value of Sociological Community Studies for the Work of Social Agencies,'' Social Forces 8 (1930): 481-91. For tensions between descriptive and prescriptive orientations,
70. Sudhir Venkatesh, ''Chicago's Pragmatic Planners: American Sociology and theMyth of Community,'' Social Science History 25 (2001): 275-317.
71. Daniel Breslau, ''The Scientific Appropriation of Social Research,'' Theory and Society 19 (1990): 417-46
72. Venkatesh. Particularly revealing is Vivien Palmer's methods textbook, a self-described ''laboratory manual'' for the science of sociological practice Palmer, Field Studies: A Student's Manual (Chicago, 1928), 185. On ecologists' praise for these social scientists,
73. see Light, The Nature of Cities.
74. Palmer, 185.
75. Martin Bulmer, ''Quantification and Chicago Social Science in the 1920s: A Neglected Tradition,'' Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 17 (1981): 312-31. For a discussion of the human desire to see numbers standing apart from interpretation
76. Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago, 1998).
77. Quoted in James Orcutt, ''Teaching in the Social Laboratory and the Mission of SSSP: Some Lessons from the Chicago School,'' Social Problems 43 (1996): 235-45. They therefore moved beyond the work of earlier reform-minded social surveyors, who viewed maps as ''technologies'' and ''media'' for gathering information and mobilizing public concern about urban conditions through visual display
78. see Carl Taylor, ''The Social Survey, Its History and Methods,'' University of Missouri Bulletin 20 (1919).
79. Ernest Burgess,''Residential Segregation in American Cities,'' Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 140 (1928): 105-6. As Dennis Smith has explained, Burgess's ''initial presentation of this model in the mid-1920s included an inventory of student research projects that would provide a cumulative empirical picture of the patterning and correlates of social disorganization''
80. see Smith, The Chicago School (Basingstoke, UK, 1988), 28. For a discussion of how ecological ideas found their way into the real estate industry before the FHA's creation,
81. see Light, The Nature of Cities (n. 27 above).Notably, Burgess used Olcott as a source of data for his own work
82. see Burgess, ''Residential Segregation in American Cities.''
83. Leonard D.White, ''The Local Community Research Committee and the Social Science Research Building,'' in Chicago: An Experiment in Social Science Research, ed. T.V. Smith and L. D.White (Chicago, 1929), 27.
84. See also Bulmer, which lists many of the types of data-processing machines on hand at the social science research building in his table 1, ''Equipment and Source Materials for Social Science Research Building 1929,'' 326. The University of Chicago's social science facility would provide a model for many other programs, including the University of North Carolina's Institute for Research in Social Science, which located mapping and drafting in the same building as a statistical laboratory with automatic calculators, adding machines, and other computing tools.
85. See Katharine Jocher, ''The Regional Laboratory for Social Research and Planning,'' Social Forces 23 (1945): 285-90.
86. With many of their mapmaking methods originating in other fields, associations with the ecological model and machine calculation put a new face on older techniques. Willard Brinton, Graphic Methods of Presenting Facts (New York, 1914)
87. W. Z. Ripley, ''Notes on Map-Making and Graphic Presentation,'' Quarterly Publications of the American Statistical Association, September 1899
88. H. Gray Funkhouser, ''Historical Development of the Graphical Representation of Statistical Data,'' Osiris 3 (1937): 269-404
89. James Beniger and Dorothy Robyn, ''Quantitative Graphics in Statistics: A Brief History,'' American Statistician 32 (1978): 1-11.
90. Rolf Lindner (in The Reportage of Urban Culture: Robert Park and the Chicago School [Cambridge, 1996]) also sees ties to traditions in newspaper reporting and social-reformsurveys. In her popular textbook Field Studies (n. 28 above), Palmer articulated the benefits of such map-based methods in the context of other scientific approaches to social analysis.
91. Robert Faris, Chicago Sociology, 1920-1932 (San Francisco, 1967), 52
92. Vivien Palmer, Social Backgrounds of Chicago's Local Communities (Chicago, 1929), 38.
93. The assumption about a likely familiarity with ecological knowledge is made not only on account of these ideas' presence in Fisher's and Babcock's pre-FHA work, but also on account of their prominence in the agency journal Insured Mortgage Portfolio and other agency programs.
94. See, for example, John Magee, ''City Growth and Population Patterns,'' Insured Mortgage Portfolio, September 1937, 6, 22
95. Fisher, ''Can We Immunize Mortgages?'' (n. 19 above)
96. and Light, The Nature of Cities. In his dissertation and later papers, Hoyt cited the influences of colleagues in sociological research.
97. Efforts to test Burgess's model in other cities include: National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, Report on the Causes of Crime, no. 13 (Washington, D.C., 1931), vol. 2
98. Stuart Queen and Lewis Thomas, The City (New York, 1939)
99. Elsa Schneider Longmoor and Erle Fiske Young, ''Ecological Interrelationships of Juvenile Delinquency, Dependency, and Population Mobility,'' American Journal of Sociology 41 (1936): 598-610
100. Calvin Fisher Schmid, Social Saga of Two Cities: An Ecological and Statistical Study of Social Trends in Minneapolis and St. Paul (Minneapolis, 1937)
101. Raymond Bowers, ''Ecological Patterning of Rochester, New York,'' American Sociological Review 4 (1939): 180-89.
102. Homer Hoyt, ''Instructions for Dividing the City into Neighborhoods'' (n.d.), in carton 18, folder 0-109,''Neighborhood Rating Technique:Miscellaneous,'' record group
103. entry 6, RS-NARA. Although the Underwriting Manual suggests that the research department or valuation section in insuring offices oversaw the preparation of these maps, Charlotte Munchmayer (in Preliminary Inventory of the Cartographic Records of the Federal Housing Administration [Record Group 31] [Washington,D.C., 1952]) reports for some offices the existence of a distinct ''neighborhood rating unit.''
104. Frederic Thrasher, ''Ecological Aspects of the Boys' Club Study,'' Journal of Educational Sociology 6 (1932): 52-53.
105. Thrasher's study, which used Hollerith machines for its tabulations, also depended on ''the construction of hundreds of experimental spot maps'' for analysis. Many other types of maps could be used to establish statistical correlations, including multiple maps to juxtapose variables or contour maps to analyze relationship strength.
106. Ernest Mowrer, ''The Isometric Map as a Technique of Social Research,'' American Journal of Sociology 44 (1938): 86-96
107. Palmer, Field Studies, 81
108. Calvin Schmid, ''Notes on Two Multiple-Variable Spot Maps,'' Social Forces 6 (1927): 378-82.
109. Hoyt, One Hundred Years of Land Values (n. 25 above), 298, 314.
110. From NAREB's first professional Code of Ethics in the early 1920s, when realtors were instructed not to ''introduce into any neighborhood a character of occupancy or of property, the members of any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will be detrimental to the neighborhood and to its property values,'' the notion of comparative desirability among populations was part and parcel of industry practices, albeit not on a scientific scale.
111. Ibid., 314.
112. While he never used the term ''social construction,'' Hoyt-like contemporary analysts such as Viviana Zelizer (in Morals and Markets: The Development of Life Insurance in the United States [New York, 1979])-understood value as socially determined. Where he differed from such more recent accounts was in his confidence that value nonetheless existed as a scientific fact to be discovered and measured with the proper tools.
113. Hoyt, ''Instructions for Dividing the City.''
114. ''Program for the Study of Sixty-Two Cities,'' in ''Records Relating to the Economic Data System,'' 1936, 1941, 1943, box 1, PI-164, entry 30, record group 207, Records of the Housing and Home Finance Agency, Records of the Division of Research and Statistics of the FHA, ''Economic Data System Records Containing Data on Cities, 1937-1945,''National Archives and Records Administration,Washington,D.C.Organized by the U.S. Department of Commerce and carried out by theWorks Projects Administration, this project surveyed more than 200 U.S. cities to gather basic information on housing and neighborhood conditions during the 1930s. In light of substantial efforts to standardize techniques, FHA officials were enthusiastic about the relative accuracy of these results: ''It is believed that the quality is above the average for surveys of this type.''
115. See Federal Housing Administration, The Structure and Growth of Residential Neighborhoods in U.S. Cities (Washington,D.C., 1939), 125.At the time this document was prepared, just over sixty cities' inventories were under way, but the program swiftly expanded.
116. According to Martin Bulmer: ''Burgess, it may be fairly claimed, was the father of modern census tract statistics''
117. see Bulmer, The Chicago School of Sociology (Chicago, 1997), 157.
118. Federal Housing Administration, Analysis of the Real Property Inventory and Financial Survey of Urban Housing for Peoria, Illinois, January 1, 1935 (Washington,D.C., 1935), 2.
119. Ibid., 99.
120. Hoyt, ''Instructions for Dividing the City'' (n. 39 above), 1.
121. Homer Hoyt, ''Exhibit J: The Preparation of Maps Showing the Dynamic Factors of City Growth: Prepared for the Research Division for the Underwriting Staff,'' 8 January 1935, p. 2, appended to Program for the Study of Sixty-Two Cities (n. 44 above).More than three informants were consulted in larger cities. The outsourcing was a practical response to the lack of published historical data for many cities. A subsidiary benefit of outsourcing some aspects of map work was the maintenance of ties to the real estate industry on matters of mutual concern, a theme of many articles in Insured Mortgage Portfolio.
122. ''Maps of Dynamic Factors,'' contained in the folder with the maps prepared by contributors in Clarksburg, West Virginia; see folder ''City Maps West Virginia Clarksburg,'' PI 45, entry 354 (330/10/31/4-3), Cartographic Collections,National Archives and Records Administration,Washington, D.C.
123. Hoyt, ''Exhibit J.''
124. Palmer, Field Studies (n. 28 above), 72. A variety of methods existed for presenting time-series information. Scholars aimed to theorize about dynamic trends and movements from past to present, as well as to make forecasts
125. see, for example, Eubank (n. 26 above), 604. For an interesting effort to visualize movement
126. William Albig, ''The Mobility of Urban Population: A Study of Four Cities of 30,000 to 40,000 Population,'' Social Forces 11 (1933): 351-67. Another popular approach used maps to depict positive or negative change in some variable from one year to another
127. see University of Chicago Social Science Research Committee, Census Tracts of Chicago Grouped into 180 Areas Showing Increase or Decrease of Population, 1930 to 1934 (Chicago, 1934).
128. Ernest W. Burgess, ''The Growth of the City: Introduction to a Research Project,'' in The City, ed. Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and Roderick McKenzie (Chicago, 1925).
129. Robert E. Park, ''Succession, an Ecological Concept,'' American Sociological Review 1 (1936): 171-79.
130. As Park explained, the research undertaken by students was well-coordinated to allow the construction of claims about urban change: ''There are a great number of studies, which represent small increments in a larger study and they are constantly accumulating. Every student that takes up a new project has access to the materials that have gone before, and so the accumulation goes on from year to year.'' Cited in Martin Bulmer, ''The Early Institutional Establishment of Social Science Research: The Local Community Research Committee at the University of Chicago, 1923-30,''Minerva 18 (1980): 51-110.
131. Palmer, Field Studies, on using interviews to compile natural histories of social areas.
132. Hoyt, One Hundred Years of Land Values (n. 25 above), x, 4, 6.
133. Ibid., 114.
134. Federal Housing Administration, The Structure and Growth of Residential Neighborhoods (n. 44 above), 112. As Hoyt had noted in his dissertation, the time-series data available for Chicago presented a unique case. ''Program for the Study of Sixty-Two Cities'' (n. 44 above), 17
135. Hoyt, ''Exhibit J'' (n. 50 above), 4.
136. The importance ascribed to consensus among appraisers in achieving accuracy in valuation was an idea circulating widely during this period, including among apprais-ers-for-hire (for example, the Cook County Real Estate Board) and companies that compiled appraisal data in atlas form (for example, the authors of the Los Angeles Blue Book).
137. See the advertisement for the appraisal services of the Cook County Real Estate Board in Olcott, Olcott's Land Values Blue Book of Chicago and Suburbs (n. 4 above), 1930 ed., A25
138. ''Land Value Blue Book Out: First Edition of Comprehensive Survey of Local Property Values Off Press after Nine Months Work by Two Authors,'' Los Angeles Times, 7 August 1932, 15.
139. Hoyt, ''Exhibit J,'' 5-6.
140. Federal Housing Administration, Analysis of the Real Property Inventory (n. 46 above), 99.
141. Hoyt, ''Exhibit J,'' 6.
142. Letter, Hoyt to Fisher (n. 24 above)
143. see also Homer Hoyt, untitled document (early 1935?), in carton 18, folder 0-109, ''Neighborhood Rating Technique: Miscellaneous,'' record group 31, entry 6, RS-NARA.
144. The 1938 Underwriting Manual (n. 20 above) refers to these cards as FHA Form 2082, ''File of Established Ratings of Location.''Their usage followed standard practice in social science cartography: ''If a large number of cases are to be plotted it will save time in the end to transfer the necessary data of each case to a card. These cards can then be sorted and classified to facilitate spotting''
145. see Palmer, Field Studies (n. 28 above), 189. Hoyt's instructions did not specify whether insuring officers should make comparisons by juxtaposition or overlay.
146. Due to constraints of available technologies, they collapsed continuous variables into classes for practical purposes of display.On this technique,
147. see Bowers (n. 38 above)
148. and Rosina Mohaupt, Social and Economic Rating of Detroit Census Tracts (Detroit, 1945). This work with indexical mapping had a rich history in anthropometric cartography
149. Heather Winlow, ''Mapping Moral Geographies: W. Z. Ripley's Races of Europe and the U.S.,'' Annals of the Association of American Geographers 96 (2006): 119-41.
150. Andrew W. Lind, ''Some Ecological Patterns of Community Disorganization in Honolulu,'' American Journal of Sociology 36 (1930): 209, 216.
151. He deviated from the wellpublicized work of Clifford Shaw and colleagues that claimed that the organization of delinquency in many cities followed Burgess's general concentric pattern (see National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement [n. 38 above]). Lind identified the differing cultural norms among ''the polyglot and polychrome population of Hawaii'' as complicating the standard pattern: ''A considerable proportion of the criminal acts defined by law in the territory prove to be quite normal and desirable forms of behavior as defined by the given cultural code, e.g., suicide among the Japanese, certain types of extortion or graft among the Chinese, and cock-fighting among the Filipinos.Statistical measures of disorganization, which presume a uniform cultural pattern, may, therefore, prove quite misleading'' (208-9, 220).
152. Hoyt, One Hundred Years of Land Values (n. 25 above), 4-6
153. see especially ''Statistical Summary of Sequence of Factors in the Chicago Real Estate Cycle,'' 405.
154. Hoyt, ''Instructions for Dividing the City'' (n. 39 above)
155. Letter, Hoyt to Fisher Hoyt, untitled document.
156. Letter, Hoyt to Fisher (n. 24 above)
157. Hoyt, untitled document (n. 62 above).Hoyt elaborated: ''The size of reject areas will vary from city to city, and in some urban communities there will be no reject areas, and in others a considerable proportion may fall into that class. Hence, such areas cannot be defined merely by taking the poorest sections of a city and assuming that their grades will fall below 50'' (letter, Hoyt to Fisher). In the agency's view, taking such alternate routes to arriving at risk scores did not interfere with the risk-rating system, and, furthermore, they were valuable additions to the underwriters' toolkit. The rationale was as follows: ''This device will serve to correct any tendency to treat the features and the system as a fetish, and will tend to orient and control judgment in connection with ratings.''
158. See ''A Plan for Analyzing Mortgage Risk,'' Insured Mortgage Portfolio (May 1939), 28.
159. Palmer, Field Studies (n. 28 above), 185. Palmer's book offers a typology of natural areas, as well as methodologies used for determining them.
160. Letter, Hoyt to Fisher.
161. J. Brian Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed. Paul Laxton (Baltimore, 2001)
162. Reidy (n. 6 above), 6.
163. James Taylor, ''A New Map Aid for Mortgage Lenders: Block Data Maps, One of FHA's New Factual Aids toMortgage Lending,Have Been Described as 'Magic Carpets' for Mortgage Lenders; as the Name Implies, They Permit Instant Visualization of Pertinent Facts Concerning Given Localities,'' Insured Mortgage Portfolio (June 1937), 8.Many stylized versions of these maps are contained in FHA files as part of record group 31 in the Cartographic Collections of the National Archives (see Munchmayer [n. 39 above]).
164. Taylor, ''A New Map Aid for Mortgage Lenders,'' 9-10.
165. ''Major Reasons for FHA Rejections,'' Insured Mortgage Portfolio (February 1939), 15. The other rejections due to property location followed detailed reviews of neighborhoods initially rated A, B, or C, or not rated at all. As agency officials explained, ''while a given location may appear suitable to the preliminary examiners, actual inspection during the complete processing may reveal disqualifying factors'' (ibid.). The map of Chicago reproduced here attests how in some cities, insuring officers did not classify undeveloped areas.
166. ''FHA Speeds Office Routine on Insurance,'' Washington Post, 13 September 1936, R5.
167. Program for the Study of Sixty-Two Cities'' (n. 44 above).
168. Federal Housing Administration, Tabulation Forms for a Mortgage Experience Study (Washington, D.C., 1937)
169. Federal Housing Administration, Technique for a Mortgage Experience Study (Washington, D.C., 1937).
170. This edition also retitled ''presence of civic, social, and commercial centers'' as ''adequacy of civic, social, and commercial centers.''
171. Evidence elsewhere attests to the slow acceptance of revisions to the manual; the following 1937 summary of FHA risk-rating categories listed those from 1935, ignoring the 1936 revision.
172. See ''FHA SystematizesMortgage Factors,'' Washington Post, 3 October 1937, R11.
173. The fine-grade data that these surveys presented-far finer than the censustract-level information used to test the applicability of Burgess's model in specific locations-had never before been assembled for so many urban areas in a standardized comparable form. 81. Federal Housing Administration, The Structure and Growth of Residential Neighborhoods (n. 44 above), 114.
174. Hoyt used the evidence in the time-series maps to conclude that, in contrast to Burgess's generalized succession that gave equal weight to the movements of people and property, it was ''not a movement of buildings but a shifting and a change in the character of occupants that produces neighborhood change.''As high-rent areas ''grow outward, the lower and intermediate rental groups filter into the homes given up by the higher income groups'' (ibid., 112-14).
175. For example, Hoyt made deliberate efforts to speak to audiences of economists and sociologists
176. see Homer Hoyt, ''Housing and Housing Research,'' American Economic Review 27, no. 1 (in Supplement: Papers and Proceedings of the Forty-ninth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association) (1937): 229-31
177. Hoyt, ''The Structure of American Cities in the Post-War Era,'' American Journal of Sociology 48 (1943): 475-81. Hoyt would serve this role as broker between academic and applied work throughout his career.
178. See Light, The Nature of Cities (n. 27 above)
179. Robert Beauregard,'' More than Sector Theory: Homer Hoyt's Contributions to Planning Knowledge,'' Journal of Planning History 6 (2007): 248-71.
180. Henrika Kuklick, ''Chicago Sociology and Urban Planning Policy: Sociological Theory as Occupational Ideology,'' Theory and Society 9 (1980): 821-45.
181. Federal Housing Administration, Underwriting Manual (n. 20 above), 1938 ed., sec. 1845
182. ''Compilation and Recordation of Data'' is section 18.
183. Federal Housing Administration, The Structure and Growth of Residential Neighborhoods, 48. He revised these eight factors to include: average rent; percentage of residences thirty-five years or older; percentage of owner-occupied residences; percentage of residences needing major repairs or unfit for occupancy; percentage of residences without private bath; percentage of residences with no heat; percentage of nonwhite residences; and percentage of overcrowded residences.
184. Ibid., 107. Although the U.S. Department of Commerce abandoned the idea of continuous real property inventories, the city of Cleveland continued the surveys at regular intervals. The U.S. Census Bureau did, as part of its 1940 census, include a census of housing and sample surveys at the block level that closely followed the real property inventories' lead.
185. See HowardWhipple Green, ''Origin and Development of a Continuous Real Property Inventory,'' Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics 16 (1940): 325-34.
186. Federal Housing Administration, The Structure and Growth of Residential Neigh-borhoods (n. 44 above), 48. In this report Hoyt also proved through correlation analysis how land value was a composite statistic that could stand in when other variables were not available
187. his confidence in this methodology continued throughout his career.
188. See Homer Hoyt, Where the Rich and the Poor People Live (Washington, D.C., 1966).
189. Federal Housing Administration, The Structure and Growth of Residential Neighborhoods, 132
190. see also appendix 3, ''Research in Urban Growth-an Aid in Selecting Mortgage Risks,'' 131-32.
191. Poovey (n. 30 above); Porter (n. 9 above); Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge, 1990).
192. As early as 1936 agency administrators noted how, just as foreclosed properties in some neighborhoods brought down the values of nearby homes, an insured mortgage on a single home in a neighborhood helped to stabilize property values across the community; see ''Effect of FHA on Real Estate Held General,'' Washington Post, 2 February 1936, R7.
193. ''FHA Considers 50 Factors in Mortgage Risk,'' Washington Post, 3 November 1935, R7
194. ''Mortgage Risk Yardstick Book Issued by FHA,''Washington Post, 24May 1936, R8
195. ''FHA Changes Lending Policy of Many Banks,''Washington Post, 20 June 1937, R10.
196. Bruno Latour, ''Visualization and Cognition: Drawing Things Together'' (1986), available at http://www.bruno-latour.fr/articles/1986.html (accessed 5 May 2011).
197. See, for example, Chicago Plan Commission, Master Plan of Residential Land Use of Chicago (Chicago, 1943)
198. Milwaukee Redevelopment Coordinating Committee, Blight Elimination & Urban Redevelopment in Milwaukee (Milwaukee, 1948)
199. Miami City Planning and Zoning Board, Dwelling Conditions in the Two Principal Blighted Areas (Miami, 1949)
200. Charles Bennett, Conditions of Blight, Central Area, City of Los Angeles (Los Angeles, 1947)
201. Detroit City Plan Commission, Redevelopment Study: Selection of Areas and Assignment of Priorities (Detroit, 1954). This practice was occasionally referred to as ''condemnation appraisal.'' These composite statistics varied in composition, although the American Public Health Association attempted to create a national standard. Other projects also made use of this methodology, although practical applications were unclear.
202. See, for example, Howard Whipple Green, Relative Desirability of Census Tracts in Greater Cleveland (Cleveland, 1939)
203. and Mohaupt (n. 64 above).
204. For financial data processing
205. Josh Lauer, ''From Rumor to Written Record: Credit Reporting and the Invention of Financial Identity in Nineteenth-Century America,'' Technology and Culture 49 (2008): 301-24
206. James Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge,Mass., 1989)
207. Lisa Fine, The Souls of the Skyscraper: Female Clerical Workers in Chicago, 1870-1930 (Philadelphia, 1990)
208. Sharon Strom, Beyond the Typewriter: Gender, Class, and the Origins of Modern American Office Work, 1900 1930 (Urbana, Ill., 1992)
209. Donald Mac-Kenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets (Cambridge, Mass., 2006)
210. Philip Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (New York, 2002)
211. Caitlin Zaloom, Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London (Chicago, 2006)
212. and Yates (n. 15 above).
213. While cartographic historians (for example, Arthur Robinson, Early Thematic Mapping in the History of Cartography [Chicago, 1982]) have documented aspects of their computational powers, classic histories of computing do not make a place for maps. For a partial exception,
214. see Beniger and Robyn (n. 35 above). The field of ''critical cartography'' is of special interest to technology historians.
215. See Harley (n. 71 above)
216. Denis Wood, The Power of Maps (New York, 1992)
217. and Mark Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps (Chicago, 1996).
218. Eubank (n. 26 above), 603.