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Inequality in Nineteenth-Century Manhattan: Evidence from the Housing Market

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 May 2020

Rowena Gray
Rowena Gray*
Affiliation:
Economics, University of California Merced
*
Email: rgray6@ucmerced.edu
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Abstract

Historical inequality is difficult to measure, especially at the subcountry level and beyond the top income shares. This article presents new evidence on the level of inequality in Manhattan from 1880 to 1910 using housing rents. Rental prices and characteristics, including geocodable locations, were collected from newspapers and provide extensive geographic coverage of the island, relevant for the overwhelming majority of its population where renting predominated. This provides a measure of consumption inequality at the household level, which helps to develop the picture of urban inequality for this period, when income and wealth measures are scarce. For large American cities, but particularly for New York, housing made up a large share of consumption expenditure and its consumption cannot be substituted, so this is a reliable and feasible way to identify the true trends in urban inequality across space and time.

Type
Special Issue Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 44 , Special Issue 3: Selection Bias and Social Science History , Fall 2020 , pp. 571 - 582
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Social Science History Association

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