William C. Baer

The Filtering of Households and Housing Units

The concept of filtering is about one hundred years old, yet much remains to be done to solidify a common understanding of the process and its policy implications-not the least of which is to clearly distinguish filterings processesfrom its results, and to clarify whether the focus is on households or housing units. This article presents a model of filtering gleaned from the literature and discusses its assorted criticisms. Next, the literature is cast in its one hundred-year historical context to show how it evolved and how it was influenced by housing policy considerations of different eras. The article then offers a unifying framework for filterings exposition. This framework allows the basic dimensions of filtering to be presented within its shelter system, and also shows how they are connected to larger economic and demographic forces in society that drive the filtering processes in the first place. The framework also allows a substantive rather than merely chronological organization of the literature. Finally, areas for future research are suggested based on this framework.

Expertise and Professional Standards

Although professional expertise is generally considered to be a key attribute of any profession, little analysis of it has been directly undertaken. Using a model that distinguishes the kinds of uncertainty faced by the profession from those faced by individual practitioners, this study suggests how uncertainty is absorbed through professionalization and managed by practitioners through the use of professional standards. Examination of this use reveals the professional contradictions in expertise between individual virtualities and collective science; the dilemmas that standards produce by permitting the democratization of expertise yet enabling the proletarianization of professionals; and how standards may be used by outsiders to analyze and evaluate directly a professions expertise, thereby facilitating a measure of societal control over seemingly autonomously generated knowledge.

The Institution of Residential Investment in Seventeenth-Century London

Little has been written about urban property investment in seventeenth-century London. Market norms for investors were developed in a relatively unregulated environment, and in response to surging urban growth. “Pattern books†(manuals of design, measuring, and building) provided information to investors, helping them to evaluate an assorted set of properties. While the methods of investment described in these books were initially rudimentary, there is evidence of increased sophistication in the latter part of the century. The gradual institutionalizing of real estate practices helped to attract the necessary capital to finance Londons remarkable physical growth.

Housing the Poor and Mechanick Class in Seventeenth-Century London

Abstract Housing increased markedly in seventeenth-century London despite numerous royal building proclamations and parliamentary statutes against its proliferation. A housing needs approach is used here to better understand the housing circumstance of the poor and mechanick classes in the face of these policies. The schema provides a consistency framework to order what is a composite of various household behaviours and housing opportunities. By partitioning these classes into their respective housing circumstances, we can begin to appreciate the types and relative magnitudes of housing deprivation they encountered. Depending upon their degree of poverty, the poor sought free shelter, charitably-provided shelter, or crowded into rooms, chambers, tenements, divided housing and so on. But the upper end of the mechanick class might have been able to afford new construction. This aspect is explored first by charting the distribution of the quality of housing enjoyed by most Londoners based on their occupation and the number of hearths in their housing. Then some tentative estimates are made of the cost to build new housing and what it might lease for annually. Finally, these costs and their associated number of hearths are plotted against the initial distribution of employment and hearths to make a rough assessment that some of the mechanick class could have afforded new construction built according to proclamation requirement and especially to the standards established in the Rebuilding Act following Londons great fire. Such an analysis also permits an assessment of the effects on housing provision by the various building proclamations.

Early retailing: London's shopping exchanges, 1550–1700

Location is an important aspect of retailing, and London entrepreneurs recognized it as early as the 1560s in building exchanges to house a collection of shops, taking them off the street. These shopping centres created a special shopping environment: shelter, safety, and shop agglomeration. Soon shoppers put on their own social display there, a further shopping attraction. Up to five of these centres existed in late seventeenth-century London, capturing about half of all shops. But the reputation of these facilities declined over time, the institution of shopping ‘mall’ apparently not continued or emulated again until the twentieth century.

Stuart London's Standard of Living: Re-Examining the Settlement of Tithes of 1638 for Rents, Income, and Poverty

The Settlement of Tithes of 1638 can be tested for biases in its London rents. Even so, it proves to be a relatively good source for seventeenth-century London, and for calculating associated median and mean rents, as well as a Gini coefficient of inequality for the distribution of resources. Through other evidence in the Settlement, rent/income ratios for London can be approximated, and from them estimates made of Londons median income. Median rents and income also allow estimates of the percentage of Londoners in poverty. Though the last is inevitably disputable, the estimate holds up well to testing by other evidence.

Landlords and tenants in London, 1550–1700

Historians have largely ignored the tens of thousands of landlords, and hundreds of thousands of tenants in early modern London. Society was not organized to readily reveal their relation and magnitudes, so the issue must be approached from a variety of directions. Modern stereotypes of both were well formulated by that period, despite the intricacy in and frequent dual role of landlord and tenant played by the same persons. Property holdings were dispersed among a variety landlords, so tenants faced no stranglehold over dwellings, while landlords in the main used rental holdings to supplement their basic incomes.

The house-building sector of London's economy, 15501650

London historians marvel at Londons population growth during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but never at how those hundreds of thousands of people got housed. It did not just ‘happen’; building tens of thousands of houses required marshalling land, money, materials and labour, and directing them at specific building sites. The task was performed by a myriad of small-scale builders from most walks of life, projectors who used contracts to have work done they could not perform themselves. All this was done in an environment of considerable risk in building new houses because of royal prohibitions against doing so, and facing large fines, sometimes imprisonment, and their new houses pulled down.

Using Housing Quality to Track Change in the Standard of Living and Poverty for Seventeenth-Century London

Abstract Housing quality is an important component of the standard of living, touching on aspects usually ignored in efforts to measure it, in part because housing quality itself is difficult to measure—especially over time. There are choices over inputs versus outputs for quality, and over objectively versus subjectively determined evaluations of it. Historians must also cope with todays versus yesteryears beliefs about housing quality and standards. Descriptions of Londons housing quality over the seventeenth century and changes in rents show that housing improved across income groups. Housing poverty apparently declined in percentage but grew in absolute numbers. Higher incomes, better-built housing, and processes of the housing market all contributed, including housing/household “filtering”—a unique process of the housing market whose London aspects others have reported but never placed in a coherent account.

The Seven Dials: “freak of town‐planning”, or simply ahead of its time?

A 300‐year‐old discarded urban design – the Seven Dials – has recently shown fresh life in London. This paper contrasts its star‐like, radiating streets with London’s more typical quasi‐grid pattern in the seventeenth century, and with London squares. The Dials concentrated a sense of mixed use that was common along London streets, whereas squares were purely residential. Assorted squares were created many times in London in subsequent centuries; the Dials were never imitated. The market judged the Dials a design failure, but through historic preservation, it has recently achieved commercial success. Might today’s urban designers reconsider the Seven Dials’ configuration for new development? Preliminary suggestions are offered.