Bibliography of Historically Significant Valuation, Land Use, and Mortgage Risk Documents, and Multifamily and Community Development Federal Housing Enactments

AEI’s Housing Center has assembled a bibliography of historically significant valuation and mortgage risk books and documents from the first half of the 20^th century. A new Part 3 has been added.  It contains a partial listing of federal rental housing programs enacted since 1932 (31 subsidized and 10 unsubsidized multifamily enactments).

The second oldest book (1903) is Richard Hurd’s Principles of City Land Values.   This book is widely considered to be the first United States’ treatise on city (non-farm) land values.  A few of his insights are noted below.

This bibliography is dedicated to Professor Richard Ely (“Under all, the land”), University of Wisconsin (1854-1943), the father of land economics and real estate studies as academic disciplines.  Many of the authors listed in this bibliography were his students and colleagues.   In 1920 Professor Ely founded the Institute for Research in Land Economics and Public Utilities initially at the University of Wisconsin (1920-1925) and then at Northwestern University (1925-1935).  In 1945, Richard Ratcliff (see below for role at FHA), a student of Ely’s student Ernest Fisher, transformed Ely’s program in land economics into a formal department–Real Estate and Urban Land Economics at the University of Wisconsin.  In 1971 James Graaskamp, a student of Ratcliff, became chairman of the department.  In 2007 the University of Wisconsin Center for Real Estate was formally named after James Graaskamp. James Graaskamp Landmark Research Collection may be found at http://uwdc.library.wisc.edu/collections/RealEstate/Graaskamp  Thanks to The University of Wisconsin Department of Real Estate and Urban Land Economics and The James A. Graaskamp Center for Real Estate for this background.

To receive access to PDF copies of the historical valuation and mortgage risk documents bolded and underlined below, please contact Sissi Li [email protected].  Sissi will share a Dropbox folder titled “Appraisal Theory History”, which will grant access to the requested documents.   Non-bolded/non-underlined items are not in the public domain; they may still be in print or vintage copies may be available for purchase over the Internet.