Assigning Property Values, Designing Urban Expansion: Reconsidering America's 1920s Standardization of Real Estate Appraisal

The American business of real estate appraisal was standardized by Chicago realtors, especially Frederick Morrison Babcock, who promoted his assumptions about property values by writing real-estate appraisal textbooks in the 1920s and designing community-college courses in real-estate appraisal before becoming the FHA's Chief Appraiser in the 1930s. Babcock and other leading Chicago realtors combined academic studies, business experience, and government power while making choices about suburbanization, obsolescence, race and space, and the value of mixing retail zones with residential areas. Some of Babcock's self-fulfilling prophecies of property-values linger in America's built environment and economy, yet those prophecies varied in their earliest forms, revealing paths not taken, options worth re-considering, and cultural assumptions underlying the business of American home-ownership.