Real Estate and Global Urban History

Abstract

This is the text of the 2013 Ely Lecture presented at the American Economics Association convention in San Diego. I am grateful to Yueran Ma, Charles Nathanson and especially Kristina Tobio for extraordinary research assistance. Joseph Gyourko and Jose Scheinkman provided helpful comments. The Taubman Center for State and Local Government provided helpful financial support. The Taubman Center for State and Local Government provided helpful financial support. The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

Government-Made House Price Bubbles? Austerity, Homeownership, Rental, and Credit Liberalization Policies and the “Irrational Exuberance” on Housing Markets

“…The discussion is dominated by quantitative economic historians, while in-depth studies of historical housing crisis before 1970 remain a research gap (Yates, 2021). Although the history of urbanization (Jackson, 1985;Almandoz, 2002;Haiyan and Stapleton, 2006;Pinol and Walter, 2012;Lenger, 2013), urban planning (Hein, 2017;Glendinning, 2021), housing policy (Pooley, 1992;Schulz, 1993), transnational reform movements (Bullock and Read, 1985;Rodgers, 1998;Wagner, 2016) and the promotion of homeownership (Kwak, 2015;Kohl, 2017), and social housing (Harloe, 2008) are addressed in a large body of research, real estate markets as a research topic itself is largely neglected by historians (Weiss, 1989;Kramper, 2022), even though housing bubbles are hardly a new phenomenon.…”

Mapping Racial Capitalism: Implications for Law

“…government agencies such as property courts and title registrars' offices; profit-making businesses such as real estate agencies, surveyors' offices, assessment companies, land development firms, and financial institutions, and in larger settler societies, grassroots organizations of white property owners. (Nightingale 2012, 6) Racialized real estate practices ensured possession and stability for some (white) groups while facilitating the expropriation of (nonwhite) others (Yates 2021). As Yates observes, the "role of racialized uneven development is a phenomenon that has marked cities around the world" (Yates 2021, 14-15) from Chicago to Mumbai to Rio (ibid.…”

Built Orders of Finance, Risk, and Racial Capitalism

“…This was a period of feverish financial activity in the French capital and a thoroughly financialized moment in the production of the urban landscape globally. 40 In Paris, real-estate prices and financial markets soared and connected in new ways: dozens of small-scale building enterprises became joint-stock companies, gobbling up a massive influx of credit, while large financial institutions invested seriously in the residential property market, amassing portfolios of apartment buildings. 41 The Cr edit de France was entwined in the flows of real estate's financialization: one of the boom's most prolific architects, Paul Fouquiau, would be investigated for his links to the company, and it was also connected to the Baron de Soubeyran, a financial titan who helped administer the national mortgage bank, the Cr edit Foncier, before founding a short-lived competitor, the Banque Hypoth ecaire.…”