Observatory on Urban Futures: Samuel Zipp, "The Social Organization of Property"
The Social Organization of Property: The Homeownership System, Managed Hierarchy, and
the Challenge of Social Selfhood in the Early-Twentieth-Century United States”
This article investigates the intellectual history of homeownership in the
United States. Focused on the work of the economist Richard T. Ely, it
argues that this history should move beyond Ely’s intellectual influence
on the real estate industry in the 1910s and 1920s to incorporate his
critique of laissez faire economics, his ideas about “social property,” and
his visions of managed hierarchy, all of which originated in the late
nineteenth century. The essay tracks Ely’s connections to Progressives
like John Dewey—with their visions of a coming social self to displace
possessive individualism—and his influence on Herbert Hoover’s 1931
National Conference on Home Building and Homeownership—which
prefigured the New Deal’s housing policy. Following Ely’s work reveals
how homeownership institutionalized what Dewey called “social values,”
but did so by naturalizing a persistent rhetoric of autonomy and
individualism that relied on divisions of race, class, and gender for its
power.
