The Value of Exclusion: Chasing Scarcity through Social Exclusion in Early Twentieth Century Atlanta

In recent decades, a powerful narrative has taken shape which explores the impact of federal housing policies in shaping the highly racialized geography of poverty and privilege which forms the landscape of today's American city. Called the “New Suburban History,” it documents the racial discrimination written into the subsidized home loan policies of the federal government after WWII, based upon the assumption that property values depended upon the maintenance of neighborhood homogeneity on the basis of race and class. The discussion launched by the New Suburban History has focused almost exclusively on the effects of such policies: by lavishing neighborhoods comprised exclusively of white homeowners with federal subsidies, while targeting the neighborhoods of non-whites and renters for red-lining, these programs, it is argued, became self-fulfilling prophecies of neighborhood growth and decline. Neglected in this discussion, however, is a rigorous examination of the roots of the assumption that the value of the single-family residential home depended upon practices of social exclusion designed to “protect” it from physical proximity to non-whites and renters. The guiding assumption, occasionally made explicit, is that racism precluded a more rational approach to the assessment of property values. This paper argues that there was nothing irrational about the regulations developed to protect urban property values in the first decades of the twentieth century. These regulations explicitly sought to boost and maintain real estate values by means of artificial limitations placed on the supply of urban land, an approach which ensured that segments of the population would benefit from the scarcity-induced rise in prices, while others faced exclusion in the process of effecting it. The development of these regulations, and the crisis narratives employed to justify them, is traced here from the municipal zoning framework developed at the National Conference on City Planning to its implementation in New York City in 1916 and Atlanta in 1922. The paper concludes with an analysis of the 1938 Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) “residential security map” of Atlanta, which assigned grades to the city's neighborhoods on the basis of their place in the 1922 zoning scheme, which essentially knew two categories, “exclusive” and “excluded.” Against the standard narrative, which holds that racism distorted conceptions of property values in the twentieth century American city, what is argued here is that the institution of value, and the social categories of privilege and exclusion which it requires, has fundamentally shaped our categories of race.

The new suburban history, New Urbanism and the spaces in-between

What a word we live in. The existential reality of being ‘suburban’–an unpopular adjective at the best of times – has been subject to some astounding criticisms recently. People who choose to live in a suburban home are still deemed to be contemptible by a self-consciously urbane commentariat who could never live somewhere so vacuous. According to one newspaper journalist, the religious fascists who attacked Paris in November 2015 were at heart suburban, exhibiting contempt for the diversity and heterogeneity of the sophisticated metropolis because it upset their reactionary world view. The transatlantic celebrity-historian Simon Schama, appearing on BBC Television's Question Time in October 2015, denounced a critic of unfettered refugee migration to Europe for turning away his ‘suburban face’ to human tragedy. Can a suburbanite possibly find the wherewithal to bounce back from such criticism? Sadly, there is no great volume of historical literature to give them much inspiration, and more recent scholarship offers little that is truly revisionist.

The Sydney History Group: From the Beginning

Formally speaking, the Sydney History Group (SHG) began in 1977, and ran for almost 20 years to 1995, when the last of its seven books appeared.1 The books all presented original research on aspects of Sydney history and were edited by members of the Group, all whom are here today except for first president, the Warrnambool-born economic historian and urbanist Max Kelly.2 His MA on the history of Paddington, later published as A Paddock Full of Houses in 1978, set a new standard in suburban history and whose outline for a history of Sydney delivered to an informal interdisciplinary gathering of economic historians in the early seventies was ahead of its time. Max died too soon in 1996.