Hoyt, Homer

Homer Hoyt's research revealed how cities grow; his consulting shaped the suburbs that developed after World War II. Born in 1895 in St. Joseph, Missouri, Hoyt received his bachelor's and master's degrees in economics from the University of Kansas in 1913 and, after briefly teaching economics at Beloit College, earned a doctor of jurisprudence at the University of Chicago. For the next few years, he taught economics at various universities and had a short stint as a statistician with AT&T.

In 1925, Hoyt established himself as a consultant and real estate broker in Chicago. During this period, he conducted the research for his 1933 study, One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago, which, soon after publication, was submitted as his dissertation in land economics at the University of Chicago. Upon earning his Ph.D., Hoyt embarked on a varied career: principal housing economist for the Federal Housing Administration (1934–1940), director of research for the Chicago Plan Commission (1941–1943), and director of economic studies for the Regional Plan Association of New York (1943–1946). During these years, he cowrote Principles of Real Estate (1939), one of the first textbooks in real estate analysis, with Arthur Weimer. From 1946 until 1974, Hoyt directed an economic consulting firm, Homer Hoyt Associates; later, he became a real estate investor.

One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago is an innovative analysis of that city's rhythms of growth from 1833 to 1930. It became the basis for Hoyt's later work, specifically the research he did while at the FHA on the difficulties of securing mortgages in inner cities and his writings on economic base analysis and the importance of export industries to local and regional economies. The former appeared as The Structure and Growth of Residential Neighborhoods in American Cities in 1939. In it, Hoyt challenged Ernest Burgess's concentric zone theory of urban growth. Sectoral theory arrayed the areas of the city in wedges that emanated from the core, involved descending land value gradients, and followed radial transportation corridors. Hoyt also wrote on urbanization; as he did in many of his writings, he framed his topic historically and comparatively, for example, in World Urbanization, published by the Urban Land Institute in 1962.

As an independent consultant after 1946, Hoyt provided research and advice to state and local governments on population growth, economic development, and land use. He also prepared numerous property appraisals and market surveys for developers and real estate investors. One of his most significant contributions was the creation of analytic techniques for determining the location and size of suburban shopping centers.

Hoyt died in 1984 after a distinguished career in which he influenced the work of urban and suburban planners, shopping center developers, real estate appraisers, and property investment firms and made significant contributions to the literatures on urban growth, neighborhood change, and suburban development.