Preliminary Programme

Author: William C. Baer, Emeritus Professor of Policy, Planning, and Development, Price School of Public Policy, University of Southern California

I present a methodology for assessing change in standard of living by showing how housing quality is an important component. Authorities in many eras collected rent data for taxation purposes. Rents are both a confounding yet a superb method of assessing quality. Confounding because they compress so many tangible and intangible, objective and subjective factors into a single number; superb in that they are: (1) more complex composite assessments of housing qualities than modern “scientific” housing surveys can devise. (2) They are a collective judgment of housing quality made at the time, taking into account conventions of the time, and availability of resources, that ex post facto modern judgments cannot wholly appreciate or compensate for. (3) Rent records for taxation typically allow constructing urban rent distributions, themselves valuable measures of how wealth was distributed in society, and lending themselves to devising measures of central tendency like averages or medians. They also permit constructing indicators of inequality, such as Gini coefficients, where wealth inequality as a dimension of standard of living is not so often discussed.
Furthermore, from rent distributions we can (4) approximate household income (a rare measure for early modern times) by applying appropriate rent/income ratios. That is a crude measure to be sure, due to differences in social and economic situations between households (size, age, and incomes where the poor tend to have higher ratios than the well-to-do). (5) A distribution allows making the reasonable (but not scientific) judgment that 50% of median rent or income is a useful approximation for a poverty line (a modern practice) and allows comparison across time without elaborate cost-of-living adjustments. (6) Rents can be useful in measuring change over time in the standards of living and amount of poverty, providing there was not some cataclysmic event or social or economic upheaval between the two data periods.
This approach is taken for seventeenth-century London for 1638 and for 1693 when we have two reasonably good rent distributions for tens of thousands of observations in each period. Despite London’s main growth from in-migration rather than from births (in turn suggesting a great many poor youths were migrating to seek apprenticeships, perhaps lowering London’s economic growth), nevertheless the evidence suggests that median rents (and income) increased about 15% over this period. London must have been a powerful economic “engine of growth.”
The method has admitted flaws, and allows only rough estimates, but it allows approximations where often none were possible before, and suggest new hypotheses regarding a major city’s economic contributions to its nation.
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This paper will analyse the impact of economic and social change on the housing market in 16th- and 17th-century Bruges and its long-term effects on housing and investment patterns on the one hand and the social topography on the other hand.

While Bruges had been Europe’s main commercial and financial centre until the end of the fifteenth century, the city lost its gateway function to Antwerp during the sixteenth century. This caused the emigration of a large part of the international trade community, followed by many high-skilled artisans in the luxury industries. Bruges’ renowned textile industries overcame the crisis in the cloth sector by product differentiation and innovation. At the same time, the gradual reorganisation of the labour market degraded former independent masters into subcontractors and wage-dependent labourers and attracted many lower-skilled artisans. The combination of these processes affected the social composition of the population. A second effect of the reconversion in the textile industries was that the wages were frozen way too long during a period of high inflation, causing a drop in the purchasing power of labourers with 75% (1500-1580).

What were the effects of these processes on the housing market and on the social topography of the city? While many existing studies of housing prices usually focus on either rental prices or housing prices, and do so on the aggregate level only, this paper will focus on the shifts between owned and rented property and their effects on price formation, but will differentiate between housing categories. By combining a database on real estate transfers and mortgages with a micro-historical approach of five socially differentiated housing blocks, both the nature of long term processes and the exact mechanisms leading to them can be disentangled. More specifically, this paper will investigate the effects for the lower and middling social groups affected by the economic changes, but will also emphasize how wealthier groups profited from the investment opportunities on the housing market. When comparing the rental values (tax registers) from 1580 and 1670 for the entire city, the gradual changes in the social topography will by visualised.
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The private building market has received scant attention in historical research, unlike public building projects and semi-public (religious) building projects. The two latter were a much more fashionable subject in historiography, despite the fact that they represented only a fraction of early modern building. Most urban buildings are after all private property. Furthermore, cities have proved to be extremely resilient in maintaining this private infrastructure. In 1695, the Brussels city centre was struck by a devastating bombardment, performed by the troops of the French king Louis XIV. Some 4.000 to 5.000 houses were destroyed by mortars and canon balls fired by the French artillery troops of the marquis de Villeroy. In a period of economic crisis, the complete rebuilding of the city centre can be called a remarkable achievement. Within a period of five years, the city centre was completely rebuilt. Despite the important impact of this grand scale rebuilding campaign of the city, relatively little is known about possible shifts in property structures, as well as the real estate developers, entrepreneurs, speculative builders and master craftsmen that played an important role in the resurrection of the city, and the relations of these individuals with the corporative framework of the city.

This paper approaches this intriguing example of urban resilience from two perspectives. Firstly it will investigate how the property structures within the city of Brussels were changed by the bombardment of Brussels. Secondly, this article will investigate the relationship between property structures and the different actors on the building market, such as real estate developers, entrepreneurs, speculative builders, master craftsmen and the existing corporative structures within the city of Brussels. Research concerning the bombardment of Brussels has illustrated how the city magistrate abolished corporative regulations for a limited period of time, in order to facilitate the rebuilding of the city. However, the effects of these measures on the real estate market and possible shifts in entrepreneurial structures remain unclear. To what extent was the market for private building projects infiltrated by new entrepreneurs, master craftsmen and real estate developers and how were entrepreneurial structures and labour relations in the building sector reshaped by the bombardment and the rebuilding campaign that followed? In order to investigate this complex set of closely interrelated question, this paper will bring together data from different sets of source material, such as tax records, notarial deeds and the archives of the corporative institutions in the city of Brussels.
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