Exclusion in Arcadia

Formation

The 1890s heralded a new type of developer that would later be called the Community Builder. Changes in corporate structure, investment, and finance transformed the possibilities for capital accumulation during the decade. Branches of large mobile firms increased throughout the United States, as did the overall size of businesses. It was also easier to form large development companies than ever before because of changes to title searches and insurance. Consequently, the new companies differed from many older builders in their origins and large capital reserves.

The Roland Park Company was one such company. When it was incorporated on July 30, 1891, its investors eyed a Baltimore that was increasingly integrated into the international economy. ¹⁰ On average, the number of employees per firm increased from twelve to twenty-two between 1880 and 1900. It also experienced a sixfold increase in capital investment, which came from all over the world. The company reflected the changes in global finance and corporate structures: a British syndicate, mainly financed by the Society of Friends, created the Roland Park Company as one of several land-intensive investments across America. The syndicate’s Kansas City–based American representatives also managed its sugar-beet interests in Utah. Until the 1890s, locally financed Baltimore builders, often individuals, leased small plots of land close to built-up areas. They improved and sold them quickly in order to turn a profit before ground rent was due. ¹¹ Hitherto, growth in Baltimore City had been largely incremental and adhered to a connected grid.

The new development companies had a much longer time scale to recoup their investment. Accordingly, they had to control their holdings longer to maximize the probability of good returns. With an initial capitalization of one million dollars, The Roland Park Company turned to planning. Guided by its general manager and later president, Edward Bouton, it initially purchased 500 acres from the former estates of two Confederate sympathizers “on a high plateau . . . giving very fine views from many locations.” ¹² Bouton first hired Landscape Architect George Kessler and then the Olmsted Brothers who kept track of the placement of every tree and electric lamp. Bouton heavily involved himself in the process of building Roland Park along picturesque lines and even suggested pastoral names for the development’s curvilinear streets. He also guided the company’s construction of the street car that snaked through sparsely settled territory recently annexed by Baltimore to connect with City Hall four miles south. As a further measure to control its investment, the company retained the right to approve all sales, including resales—a decision that allowed the company a say in its suburbs even after it completed subdividing and building operations. ¹³

As developers experimented with planning and long-term measures of control, they tested how to give value to their property. They could not rely on standardized appraisal methods, as few existed in the 1890s, over a decade before the foundation of NAREB and two more before the organization began a campaign to create uniform standards. As late as 1913, Bouton’s lawyer informally advised him how churches and schools might affect value based on anecdotal observation. ¹⁴ Furthermore, most prospective buyers had not lived in planned suburbs and so developers occupied a key position as early taste-makers, which also affected appraisal in the long term.

Developers used tactics such as the deed restrictions that provide concretely traceable examples of how ideas about suburbs moved from local experimentation to national policy. Deed restrictions formed “a binding agreement between buyers and sellers of property, which took the form of an appendix or articles in the deed.” ¹⁵ The terms of deed restrictions changed over time and locale—the particular context proved important—but developers did not reinvent the wheel once they helped to widely popularize restrictions. Thus, echoes of a Roland Park Company deed restriction clause from Baltimore might be found in restrictions for Palos Verdes Estates in California, but with a local twist—the architectural ode to a Spanish romantic past prohibited Mexicans. ¹⁶ The Olmsted Brothers, vocal proponents of deed restrictions, served as landscape architects for the two unrelated projects.

The Roland Park Company used deed restrictions from its inception in 1891 even though it also acknowledged most buyers would be unfamiliar with them. Such restrictions had the long-term effect of defining and valorizing a particular “suburban” aesthetic as well as certain exclusionary social measures. It changed its deed restrictions over the years, but constants included specifying the minimum cost of a house, how far it had to be set back from the street, and the requirement that a lot be used only for private residential purposes. These clauses attest to how property investment entailed much more than owning a tract of land. It involved imbuing land with social value, or raising its desirability based on social relationships. Property, as legal historian Wendell Pritchett writes, “reflects relationships between people and between government and individuals that have changed over time.” ¹⁷ Bouton rarely distinguished between the social and aesthetic rationales in deed restriction clauses. The minimum housing cost, for example, foreclosed on certain materials and stylistic decisions buyers had when building their house, but the clause also worked as a type of class exclusion.Restrictions included a long list of prohibited “nuisances.” Residents of one Roland Park Company development could not operate a “brewery,” “slaughterhouse,” “asylum,” or “jail,” nor could they keep livestock. ¹⁸ Bouton asked attorneys if it could legally insert racial restrictions in 1893. They said no, citing property law as well as the Fourteenth Amendment. ¹⁹ The Roland Park Company heeded their advice but never consulted them again.

Instead, it planned physical boundaries into its design. These boundaries ostensibly contributed to Roland Park’s overall look but also signified its racial and socioeconomically homogenous environment. In a move that prefigured the logic of midcentury use of eminent domain, Bouton also purchased surrounding properties he deemed “eyesores” to “protect” the Roland Park Company “in all directions.” ²¹ Bouton also opted to face houses away from a sleepy lane because they would have faced the property of a black woman. 20 Additionally, the company planted a long hedge to cut off sightlines of a predominantly black settlement down the hill, the same settlement where it later located its sewage disposal field. For its next development, they built a stone wall instead of a hedge. For both subdivisions, they made sure that houses faced inward so that residents were exposed to tightly controlled spaces—meticulously landscaped curvilinear streets with neighbors hand-picked by company agents. ²² The effect was, according to one reporter, a place “where the wealthier and more fastidious among the population might have their ideal homes and be surrounded by other ideal homes.” ²³ The company thus linked homogeneity to desirability, even when it did not have explicit racial restrictions in its deeds.

The company did eventually, however, begin to use racial restrictions in 1913. The Roland Park Company matured as racial boundaries hardened in Maryland and throughout the world. Between 1891 and 1913, Baltimore’s black population fought various disenfranchisement attempts and racially motivated displacement. Simultaneously, as Nightingale writes, elite Baltimoreans with connections to the Roland Park Company borrowed from “transnational conversations” about race, health, and reform in order to push through one of the country’s first residential segregation ordinances. ²⁴ They included newspaper owner and Roland Park Company investor Charles Grasty, whose editorial pages provided readers with heavy doses of Social Darwinism and “analyses of race relations on a global scale.” ²⁵ Yet, surviving company correspondence indicates that officials did not talk much about the segregation ordinance. With little fanfare or discussion, it inserted the racial restrictions into its deeds three years later. It treated the race clause the same as any other nuisance that would impact the area’s aesthetic. As the case of Grasty demonstrates, local experiments with racial segregation were inseparable from global flows of ideas and, given Grasty’s interactions with the company’s British financers, from flows of capital.

Real estate developers also tapped into a small network of mobile consultants in order to plan communities. These included sanitary engineers and the aforementioned landscape architects. On occasion, consultants provided advice outside their specialties. The Roland Park Company’s deed restrictions arose in this way in 1891. Its preeminent sanitary engineer, George Waring, suggested that Bouton obtain copies of deeds from the few preexisting planned suburbs in the United States such as Llewellyn Park, New Jersey, and Tuxedo Park, New York. ²⁶ In contrast to a more middle-class clientele, these older developments, along with Frederick Law Olmsted Sr.’s oft-studied Riverside, served the very wealthy, including the Astors and Morgans. Waring gave Bouton “the proper legal phraseology” of deed restrictions through informal conversation.

The Roland Park Company received hundreds of letters every year asking for or offering information. Of these, it most frequently received requests for information on its deed restrictions. They came from the likes of H. B. Swope, Chattanooga Board of Parks Commissioner, who sought information about the “laying out of a residential park” from the American Civic Association, and whose secretary referred him to the Roland Park Company. ²⁷ Charles L. Strobel, chair of a land syndicate that developed parts of Chicago’s North Side, heard about Roland Park from a talk at Chicago’s City Club by British town planning expert Thomas Adams. ²⁸ Knowledge and prestige traveled by word of mouth along with technologies of exclusion.

The increase in planned communities at the turn of the century and their subsequent financial success led to the increased use of deed restrictions among other suburban developers. The author of an early study on deed restrictions in 1929 observed that it was easier to “plan than to replan.” ²⁹ Deed restrictions therefore worked best when land was being subdivided for the first time. Historians argue that when residents of unplanned areas tried to create deed restrictions, they were less able to enforce them because those areas lacked “clear boundaries and buffer zones.” ³⁰ Early suburban developers thus possessed the advantage of being able to create the strongest deed restrictions. That residents of unplanned areas tried to copy their methods attests to the rising cultural capital of suburban developers, who continued to spread the word about their work. But they would soon have more formal channels to communicate with the ever-growing number of their peers.

Institutionalization

The call went out from the Chicago Real Estate Board in early 1908. On May 12, 112 delegates representing nineteen local real estate boards convened in the Young Men’s Christian Association Auditorium on LaSalle Street. Real estate prices increased, even after a small panic in 1907. City populations were growing as did the number of incorporated real estate companies, and the housing market was about to begin a boom that would bring prosperity to suburban builders until the mid-1920s. The 1893 depression had quashed a short-lived attempt at a predecessor organization and cast a long shadow, but the Chicago Real Estate Board only displayed optimism. The time was right, it felt, to try a national organization. The National Association of Real Estate Exchanges (NAREE) was born.

Executive members claimed that the NAREE, later NAREB, continued the professionalization work of the failed National Real Estate Association, whose members had aimed to “elevate and dignify the real estate business” and “establish a high standard of ethics among real estate men.” As with that failed attempt, NAREB explicitly aimed to create a profession by disseminating information and fostering cohesiveness as well as through influencing legislation. Once again, “any respectable real estate dealer” could apply. ³¹

Whereas members of the old National Real Estate Association barely discussed planned suburbs or featured suburban developers as leaders, NAREB’s first president, William W. Hannan of Detroit, took office as developer of the planned suburb that is now the Medbury-Grove Lawn District. Hannan also established the association’s official magazine, The National Real Estate Journal (NREJ), the first issue of which contained articles about suburbs and deed restrictions.

NAREB emphasized that its respectable nature, indeed the respectability of real estate in general, depended on the ethics of its members and their vigilance in combating unsavory practices. Speaking at the failed organization’s first meeting in 1892, Nashville’s Mayor George Guild proclaimed, “In all professions and employments there are frauds and humbugs who run their business for selfish purposes alone . . . the real estate business is not exempt from this class.” ³² In its advance press release about the first NAREB convention, the Chicago-Tribune, likely aided by local real estate interests, penned that “real estate ‘sharks’ are in danger of extermination through the formation of [the NAREE].” ³³

As organization members, The Roland Park Company used NAREB as well as the National Conference on City Planning (NCCP), founded a year later, as new apparatuses for receiving and disseminating ideas, including those concerning deed restrictions. In 1911, the same year a young John Mowbray joined the company as a clerk, Bouton met George Burdett Ford at the NCCP. The Columbia University professor wanted to prepare “the first comprehensive course on City Planning in America” and was “impressed by the splendid work at Roland Park.” Ford wrote to the company to request information about their restrictions. ³⁴ Bouton thanked Ford for the request, explaining that “our residents have come to understand that our restrictions are absolutely necessary to their own protections.” ³⁵ Not only did he go on to teach the course but he became the president of the NCCP and the architect of New York City’s comprehensive zoning laws, among the first in the country. Members of the new profession of planning widely read and cited his publications, which included City Planning Progress in the United States. In that work, he praised the Roland Park Company’s work. ³⁶

NAREB also likely allowed Edward Bouton to first meet J. C. Nichols, who helped to popularize a narrow vision of the planned suburb. Their correspondence began in 1911 and marked a personal and professional relationship that lasted until Bouton’s death. In 1912, Nichols addressed NAREB members at its annual convention. Realtors and journalists celebrated the speech, which the association reprinted in its monthly magazine, as bringing the association national popular attention. In it, Nichols talked about the evolution of his developments: “In the early times,” he said, “I was afraid to suggest building restrictions, now I cannot sell a lot without them.” He continued, “I used to feel the road must be the shortest route between two points; now the longer I can make it with curves . . . the more it appeals in a home district.” ³⁷ Nichols went on to detail the advantages of his restrictions. He subsequently cited the work of the Roland Park Company as his main inspiration that divided “the early times” from his current work. Nichols went so far as to base hiring decisions on the advice of Bouton and the company’s landscape architects, the Olmsted Brothers. Nichols, who believed Realtors were “duty-bound to influence affairs,” went on to hold prominent roles in NAREB, alongside Bouton and Bouton’s successor in the Roland Park Company, John Mowbray. ³⁸ He also remained active in the NCCP. The three also frequently attended conventions, where they gave speeches. NAREB facilitated their interactions as well as their ability to network with Realtors both during formal convention business and designated social time.

Realtors also used convention space to play out ideas of race, gender, and modernity. From its very foundation, Realtors connected convention business with racial sentiment, most explicitly seen in the recreational program. They sang songs from an official booklet that included such selections as “Massa’s in De Cold Cold Ground” from the 1914 event in Pittsburgh. Sung in dialect, it included lines such as “Mas-sa made de darkies love him/Cayse he was so kind.” The same year, Realtors also sang “My Old Kentucky Home,” “I Want to Be in Dixie,” along with patriotic numbers such as “America,” “The Star Spangled Banner,” and, because Canadian delegations were in attendance, “The Maple Leaf Forever.” ³⁹ The next year they sang “When Greek Meets Greek,” which lampooned various European groups and ended with “But they’re a darn sight better than the Irish.” ⁴⁰ In 1928, a year after Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer and fourteen years after “Massa,” convention organizers treated delegates to “a real genuine ‘treat of thrills!’” that included a Charleston group, along with a black face quartette, a watermelon-eating contest, and spirituals (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

“A real genuine ‘treat of thrills.’”

Additionally, the cover of a convention issue of the Detroit Realtor features a dignified white man in classical garb, holding a car and surrounded by scenes for which Realtors took credit (Figure 2). Rendered in expensive color ink, they include a family in front of a red and white suburban house; bustling, clean contented white industrial workers; and the Detroit skyline, complete with belching black smokestacks. The cover conveys the industrious hard work and uplifting values of Realtors who embrace progress to turn Detroit into a thriving metropolis. Despite the organization’s official imagery of upstanding citizens and technocrats—trustworthy experts with a monopoly on ethical practice—Realtors used NAREB money and space to put on performances that were neither scientific nor rational but rooted in particular cultural and moral contexts. This had been the case years before when Charles Grasty used eugenic “facts” to push for Baltimore’s racial segregation ordinance. Rather than being disinterested experts, Realtors from around North America gathered in one place to discuss exclusion while they consumed a particular vision of different people, in the modern moment.

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Figure 2.

Convention issue of The Detroit Realtor.

Nevertheless, that image of expertise was crucial for NAREB to win the hearts and minds of the public and politicians. According to Hornstein, Realtors knew that to turn real estate into a profession, they needed “an uncontested field of specialized knowledge underpinned by scientific authority.” ⁴¹ J. C. Nichols became one of the most ardent supporters of lending real estate a scientific sheen. “Realology,” he argued, “should be as much an established science as geology and zoology.” ⁴² To this end, NAREB established licensing procedures and affiliations with research institutions. It also formed a national education committee that disseminated courses to local boards and, shortly thereafter, to schools such as The University of Michigan, which hired the NAREB Education Director for a full-time position. ⁴³ Such efforts represented what Andrew Abbott calls “jurisdictional expansion,” or a tightening hold on a domain of work. ⁴⁴ Members of NAREB called it “institutionalizing the Realtor.” ⁴⁵

In addition to its educational campaign, NAREB began a standardization drive in the 1920s. It formed specialty subdivisions in 1924, each complete with its own seal and leadership structure. It also created a library for subdivision advertising that contained “several thousand pieces of subdivision advertising” within one year. ⁴⁶ Homebuilders and Subdividers President Henry Grant Atkinson put out a call for standardized forms in its publication Idea Services, which promised “an intimate picture of the policies and practices of more than three score of America’s leading Realtors.” ⁴⁷ Atkinson’s asked that members submit “samples of the forms now in use” in order to create “a standard set…for the use of the Realtor Subdivider.” ⁴⁸ Ideas from developers filtered up by way of local real estate boards, were subject to the editorial hand of the leaders of the Homebuilders and Subdividers division, and were then disseminated back down to a national constituency through publications.

NAREB did not professionalize in isolation. Idea Services also published a pamphlet from the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company of New York that recommended sales managers keep “prospect files”—cards with the information of prospective clients and the results of an attempted sale. These prospect files indicated that NAREB was not alone in trying to create a social scientific, empirically based image of experts. In particular, it paralleled other sectors that would play a role in federal housing policy such as the insurance industry. Sometimes, members of the disparate but growing gaggle of professional organizations circulated ideas and disseminated information across industry lines. According to Metropolitan Life, prospect files offered a sales department better recordkeeping tools for fixing salesmen commissions. They heavily emphasized that sales departments gather as much data on the prospect as possible. ⁴⁹ Prior to that issue of Idea Services, the Roland Park Company already used prospect files to keep track of rejected potential candidates. The company stamped either “Exclusion File” or “Non-Operator” on top of each. Prior to the mid-1920s, the categories of information differed from card to card but Roland Park Company salesmen began to use standardized prospect files to keep track of unsuccessful sales in about 1927, after NAREB’s push for standardization. Each of these later cards contained a form number and the year the form was bulk-printed, potentially signifying a growth in the market for prospect files. Company salesmen often used cards within one year of their print date. In spite of limited surviving source material, the evidence suggests that circulation of sales practices among different professions created a demand for data-intensive files that could be used to facilitate exclusion. ⁵⁰ NAREB’s jurisdictional expansion thus occurred in tandem with and because of parallel professionalization movements across the country.

In another hallmark of professionalization, NAREB adopted a Code of Ethics in 1913—the same year the Roland Park Company began to use racial restrictions. Realtors unanimously approved the code’s revision at the 1924 convention in Washington, D.C.—which had begun with greetings from President Calvin Coolidge. The revised code’s Article 34 prevented a Realtor from “introducing into a neighborhood a character of property or occupancy, members of any race or nationality, or any individual whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood.” ⁵¹ Realtors deliberately worded the article broadly and, in doing so, both devolved wide-ranging discretionary powers to individual brokers and mandated that, as professionals, they use such powers. Thus, Realtors became duty-bound to “exercise their social responsibility” by considering how he (or occasionally she) affected the surrounding area. ⁵² In doing so, they also explicitly adopted what Freund calls “a racially-constructed theory of property” in which they linked the character of property to group traits as well as to the merits of individual people, as they affected surrounding values ⁵³ . Realtors, of course, defined character and value. They often used racial and ethnic classifications as prime criteria.

The Realtors revised the Code of Ethics just as expanded credit, generational change, and immigration quotas transformed who tried to buy suburban homes at the tail end of the 1920s real estate boom. Salesmen adapted their strategies to keep up with the times. ⁵⁴ Immigration policy, for example, proved a contentious issue among Realtors, leading to a scuffle at the 1923 national midwinter meeting during which delegates interrupted a speaker advocating lax immigration controls and forced him from the stage. The NREJ recapped the incident with the headline, “Oppose Further Immigration.” ⁵⁵ NAREB added immigration quotas to the types of restrictions it endorsed, along with suburban exclusion and urban Jim Crow.

It continued to extol the virtues of deed restrictions throughout the 1920s, especially those that explicitly prohibited Negroes. Indeed, it kept at least 84 restrictions on file, including those of the Roland Park Company. Forty included such a provision. ⁵⁶ NAREB assured its members of the legality of restrictions after the United States Supreme Court ruled in Corrigan v. Buckley that the Fourteenth Amendment applied to state action rather than private actions. Local real estate boards even prepared model restrictions for members throughout the 1920s and 1930s. They continued to do so after the first federal housing policies were on the books. ⁵⁷ By the late 1930s, the federal government recognized NAREB as the legitimate voice of the real estate profession. ⁵⁸

Codification and Conclusion

Shortly after the Roosevelt administration created the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) in 1933, NAREB officials proudly quoted a “public statement” from the agency that “appraisal forms and regulations were drawn up by the Corporation after consultation with a committee of experts from the American Institute of Real Estate Appraisers, a part of the National Association of Real Estate Boards.” ⁵⁹ The HOLC calculated the creditworthiness of metropolitan areas on a block-by-block basis and created color-coded maps with thick black boundary lines delineating which areas posed the safest investments for lenders. ⁶⁰ Perhaps more revealing was the extent to which HOLC administrators encouraged federal workers to “subscribe to the National Real Estate Journal and the Journal of the American Institute of Real Estate Appraisers.” ⁶¹ NAREB influence went far beyond direct collaboration; its literature formed the cornerstone of HOLC institutional culture. Consequently, NAREB practices were ensured a place in the federal government regardless of the number of Realtors that filled federal positions.

Many Realtors indeed served as government appointees or consultants. So many, in fact, that future Housing and Urban Development Secretary Robert Weaver admitted that it was no surprise federal agencies codified residential segregation, since men from “financial and real estate interests” ran them. ⁶² Among them were Roland Park Company employees such as Guy T. O. Hollyday, who served as head of the Federal Housing Administration under Dwight Eisenhower and Paisley Lemmon, who worked for the HOLC before becoming chief appraiser for the Baltimore office of the FHA. John Mowbray, who became Roland Park Company president in 1935, also worked for federal agencies. Prominent Realtors assumed federal positions much like leading developers had filled the ranks of NAREB leadership in the previous two decades.

Suburban developers implemented federal policies at the local level. Mowbray acted on behalf of the HOLC to implement an experimental rehabilitation project in Waverly, a neighborhood bordering the Roland Park Company district in Baltimore. There he advised residents to adopt deed restrictions to stop “encroachment” from the mixed-race and mixed-income neighborhood to Waverly’s south. ⁶³ He recommended that residents use the Roland Park Company deeds as a template, deeds dating back to the 1890s that the Roland Park Company first circulated by word of mouth, and then institutionalized via NAREB. ⁶⁴ Waverly residents may have been familiar with Mowbray from his work with the company, but when he spoke to them, he acted on behalf of the government. Thus, the Roland Park Company and the federal government literally spoke with one voice to endorse deed restrictions as a means to “protect” property values. ⁶⁵

The HOLC’s successor agency, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), took exclusion a step further by formally codifying common deed restriction provisions in its Underwriting Manual. Created shortly after the HOLC, the FHA insured mortgages and, to protect those mortgages, established construction and development guidelines. The manual’s criteria presented similarities to the Roland Park Company’s deed restrictions and also to NAREB’s 1924 Code of Ethics. ⁶⁶ Because of Realtors, the HOLC and FHA endorsed the same types of spaces to which NAREB had accorded the highest property values. As political scientist Michael Jones-Correa observes, “Private, local responses were inherently vulnerable to challenge. While they originated in the absence of a strong federal presence, they persisted because of that presence.” ⁶⁷ Developers beholden to FHA guidelines had to embrace curvilinear streets, racially and socioeconomically homogenous areas, and control for “nuisances.” They also adopted racial restrictions, which “spread rapidly after the FHA endorsed their use.” ⁶⁸ Furthermore, federal policies incentivized the creation of physical boundaries such as race walls and inward-facing streets—the same tactics with which developers experimented in the 1890s and spread through NAREB.

Even as NAREB institutionalized the practices of residential segregation, it never imposed a catch-all schema of whom or what depreciated local land values. Between NAREB’s insistent promotion of deed restrictions, immigration laws, and Article 34, it promulgated the language of racial separation from Progressive Era discourse that conflated the supposedly innate characteristics of blacks with urban environmental problems.. Realtors left other marginalized groups subject to the local discretion of Realtors who, after 1924, were ethically required by a broadly worded mandate to exclude whomever they deemed unrespectable for any reason. They based decisions on their personal understandings of the risk a client posed to the value of an area, be it due to individual or group characteristics.

The FHA removed explicit racial language from its Underwriting Manual in 1949 while NAREB revised Article 34 in 1950 to read, “A Realtor should not be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood a character of property or use which will clearly be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood.” ⁶⁹ Gone were the mentions of people. However, since occupancy constituted a type of use, the article stood as a thinly veiled attempt by the institution to preserve the status quo while distancing itself from the accusations of discrimination, which was beginning to become unacceptable in mainstream popular discourse. Nevertheless, NAREB continued to defend racial restrictions and encourage their use in documents not intended for the public eye long after the United States Supreme Court ruled such restrictions unenforceable in 1948. ⁷⁰

A mere three years before, as the Second World War drew to a close, Mowbray implored Baltimoreans not to “provoke disturbances” by selling to blacks in white areas. “Surely,” he wrote in his capacity as president of the Baltimore Real Estate Board, “it is not too much to ask that every citizen contribute to the maintenance of peace and harmony among all groups…” ⁷¹ His plea echoed the Progressive Era language of Roland Park Company associate Charles Grasty, who fought for Baltimore’s segregation ordinance in 1910 on the grounds of keeping peace between the races. Indeed, the Roland Park Company’s practices attested to the continuity between the developers of the 1890s and federal housing policy of the 1940s. It enforced segregation until the day it liquidated in 1960. ⁷²

This article has used a surprisingly overlooked group of actors—self-proclaimed suburban developers—to examine how ideas about suburban development moved through time and space, leading up to the oft-told narrative of the HOLC and FHA. Beginning in the 1890s, these developers—early Community Builders—turned to master-planning because of their relatively large capital reserves and the need to protect long-term investment. In order to sell new spatial forms, they emphasized aesthetic beauty as well as demographic homogeneity. Developers also corresponded regularly with each other and held up certain suburbs such as those by Roland Park Company as particularly useful models.

These same developers spearheaded attempts to professionalize real estate work and, in doing so, they institutionalized the experiments of the 1890s. By the 1920s, the National Association of Real Estate Boards successfully controlled what the government and the public accepted to be legitimate practice. Consequently, officials turned to Realtors to help create federal housing policy and to stock appointed positions. By the time the FHA codified building and lending standards in its Underwriting Manual, such practices were widely seen as common sense produced by experts. Thus, the logic went that exclusionary practices somehow were objectively necessary to protect property value.

Developers often ignored their own participation in production of that knowledge. Instead, they consistently defended the need to protect property values as if they themselves were not behind appraisal criteria and as if that criteria were divorced from past social context. Ironically, despite their role in creating HOLC security maps, which later formed the basis for FHA loans, developers like Mowbray claimed that “decay” came “without warning.” ⁷³ Furthermore, NAREB officially took the stance that “there are classes in this country who must be satisfied to inhabit housing which has grown obsolescent for the use of more fortunate ones, just as there are those who must of necessity drive second-hand cars and wear second-hand clothing.” ⁷⁴ Such sentiment echoed that of the FHA’s Principal Economist Homer Hoyt, often studied and criticized by historians for “repackaging” subjective “cultural values and prejudicial judgments” into “objective knowledge.” Hoyt had collaborated with NAREB from the 1920s onward. ⁷⁵

Perhaps the way developers failed to acknowledge their own agency was, in fact, another idea that moved from the local level to the national over the fifty years covered here. In 1912, during J.C. Nichols’s famous address at the annual NAREB convention, he attributed the success of exclusionary tactics to (white middle class) consumer demand. This was in spite of actively encouraging other developers to use deed restrictions before, during, and after the speech. Contrary to the passive picture he painted, Nichols helped make residential segregation standard practice. Likewise, two generations later, one of the country’s most well-known developers, William Levitt, simply stated, “We can solve a housing problem, or we can try to solve a racial problem. But we cannot combine the two.” ⁷⁶ Levitt had ample social and political capital after the Second World War. His endorsement of segregation likely served as a stamp of approval for the developers who used his Levittowns as models for their own work.

After the FHA changed its Underwriting Manual in 1949 and NAREB its Code of Ethics, both justified exclusionary decisions through a color-blind language of preserving property values. This, along with the refusal of developers to acknowledge both their historical and continuing role in entrenching discrimination, combined to render many of the structural causes of housing segregation and urban disinvestment invisible. Going forward into the 1960s and beyond, Realtors helped to open a space for white suburbanites, government officials, and politicians to define who constituted marginalized groups and locate their failures in individual members.