Inventing Value: Mapping Atlanta’s Contradictory Geographies of Race and Real Estate Science

Scott Markley, National Zoning Atlas

The great imperative of so-called “real estate science” is to impose order and predictability onto the home value landscape. In the early twentieth century, an explosion of new academic fields (e.g., land economics), national datasets (e.g., Census of Housing), valuation techniques (e.g., sales comparison approach), theoretical models (e.g., sector model of cities), federal programs (e.g., City Survey Program), and policy tools (e.g., Euclidean zoning) were developed in service of this precise goal. However, this project was – and remains – rife with irreconcilable tensions, especially in a context where housing markets for white and Black households are believed to operate discretely. In this talk, I combine qualitative and quantitative GIS techniques to analyze Atlanta’s 1938 Residential security map and accompanying area description sheets, tracing the contradictions embedded in how institutional actors understood neighborhood value. In doing so, I argue that neighborhood appraisers resolved these contradictions by collapsing whiteness with value and Blackness with anti-value.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 36. Mapping Atlanta's Historical Geographies of Race, Class, and Justice II