Land, Capital, Information: Business Statistics and Economic Models in the American Built Environment, 1900-2020

Abstract

In this dissertation, I examine the historical relationship between quantitative data, economic models, and the urban development process in the United States. For centuries, local and national governments have recorded information about buildings, land values, and property transactions for the purposes of tax collection. Beginning in the final decades of the 19th Century, the building professions – architects, construction engineers, property developers, and their financial backers – began to significantly expand the scope of numerical information collected about the world of buildings, in order to guide decisions about what, where and how much to construct. This dissertation traces the history of data collection and analysis by the American building trades from the earliest statistical surveys of construction and property markets at the turn of the 20th Century to the rise of “big data” today. Throughout, I examine the ways in which the resulting datasets have been incorporated into models of urban change by the real estate development community, government policymakers, and scholars of the city. The data these actors collect does not merely reflect the present conditions of a given city’s built fabric or capture a snapshot of the “property market” at a given point in time. Rather, data collected about buildings, cities, land values, and construction transforms the urban development process: both by altering how builders conceive of the market for urban space, and by enabling new and more complex forms of construction and finance. The twinned history of data and urban development is necessarily also the story of finance and its particular relationship to property. Numerical information about the built environment is the interface between the building trades and the institutions that finance them, a common language for the transmission of market signals from local actors – architects, developers, and brokers – to capital markets, and vice versa. Each wave of intensification in the collection of property and construction data has coincided with a revolution in urban development patterns. This dissertation proceeds through four historical episodes, each defined by a significant expansion in the methods and purposes of data collection about buildings, construction and property markets: the turn of the 20th Century, in which the New York real estate community pioneered new analytic techniques to field capital for the first generation of steel-reinforced skyscrapers; the 1920s, culminating in the great building boom in American cities in the latter years of that decade; the Depression and post-war decades, in which property market data was put to new purposes of public planning, private development, and scholarly analysis; and the digital era beginning in the 1980s, in which computational methods were applied to property market analysis and investment, providing a basis for the “globalization” of real estate finance and development in the present day.