Hoyt, Homer (1895–1984)

Homer Hoyt pioneered academic and applied real estate market analysis in the mid 20th century. Academics know him primarily for his sector theory of urban land development. Practitioners also know him for advances in procedures that came about from his consulting and appraisal services, including his use of economic base calculations as input measurements to estimate the current and projected demand for commercial and residential real estate. Hoyt innovated procedures for estimation of the highest and best use of a site (“a site looking for a use”) and for analyzing location criteria for a real estate activity (“a use looking for a site”). A third legacy is his contributions to the development of institutions important to land economics and real estate, including the Federal Housing Administration, and his endowment of the Homer Hoyt Institute. Hoyt's legacy continues through his $8 million gift on his death in 1984 to the Homer Hoyt Institute, which today sustains Homer Hoyt's legacy by supporting land economics and real estate research and by providing educational forums for academics and practitioners in the field.

Hoyt was born in St. Joseph, Missouri, in 1895. In his early years, Hoyt lived in a tent near Kansas City with his mother, Elizabeth, who [Page 1449]homeschooled him. She helped him pay the college tuition fee of $15 per year at the University of Kansas, from which he graduated in 1913 at the age of 17. He won a fellowship from the University of Chicago, where he earned a JD in 1918. In 1917, he accepted a position as an economics instructor at Beloit College in Wisconsin.

At the start of World War I, Hoyt was pulled out of academic life and into public service as an economist for the War Trade Board in Washington, D.C. This pattern of employment would repeat throughout his life. Following the end of the war, he accepted a position as professor of economics at the University of Delaware. In 1920, he declined a professorship in economics at the University of Michigan, working instead as a statistician for the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) in New York City. Bored at AT&T, Hoyt returned to academia at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1921–1923) and then at the University of Missouri at Columbia (1924–1925).

In 1925, Hoyt again left academia for the private sector and public service. Hoyt thrived as an independent scholar. He became a real estate broker and consultant based in Chicago from 1925 to 1934, during which time he completed his PhD in economics at the University of Chicago (1933) and published his influential dissertation One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago: 1830–1933 (reprinted in 1970). Hoyt's dissertation provided the foundation for socioeconomic models of neighborhood change. He documented empirically his hypothesis that real estate values reflected sociodemographic indicators, particularly income and social standing. At the time, race was highly correlated to income and social status and so could substitute for income in thematic map overlays.

Hoyt pioneered procedures known today by geographers as the map overlay, an innovation typically credited to the urban planner Ian McHarg. However, McHarg's work was executed nearly 30 years after Hoyt used map overlays in his dissertation and long after Hoyt pioneered map overlays for business decision making and public policy analysis at the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). Hoyt pioneered rigorous economic models to understand and explain the market forces that create the spatial pattern of urban land use and urban land values. This understanding is a requirement for anticipating changes in land values and land use, which are necessary for business decisions and urban planning. Hoyt was the principal housing economist for the FHA (1934 to 1940), which was established under the National Housing Act. The mandate of the FHA was to revive the collapsed U.S. real estate market and to promote new housing construction. During this period of public service, writing as an independent scholar, Homer Hoyt published two important books: Principles of Real Estate (1939; 7th edition published in 1978), coauthored with Arthur Weimer (and later George Bloom), and Structure and Growth of Residential Neighborhoods in American Cities, a report for the FHA (1939; reprinted in 1971).

...