Reforming the Urban Environment: Sanitation, Housing, and Government Intervention in Germany, 1870-1910.

European and American cities grappled with severe housing and sanitation problems during the rapid urban growth after 1850. They responded with innovations in government intervention--massive investments in sewers and waterworks and the regulation of housing and l and use--that are today institutionalized in comprehensive urban planning. Breaking new ground in the economic analysis of urban history, the three essays of this dissertation examine the economic roots of these developments in Germany before 1910. The study of housing markets draws on a new microdata set of household characteristics and housing consumption to analyze the economic determinants of housing and sanitation problems. The study of the sanitation revolution uses a new set of data from over 100 cities to explain the diffusion of central water supply. The first and second essays apply the hedonic model of housing markets to examine the allocation of supply and the dem and s of households in a sample of several hundred tenants and owners from the 1889 Basel housing census manuscripts. They conclude that segmentation of housing markets along class lines raised the supply price of housing to the poor. Household dem and for access to the city's center and sanitation were most responsive, while the dem and for space was relatively unresponsive to differences in incomes. The rural origins and older housing traditions of households--where employer and employee lived under the same roof--are quite important in accounting for high housing densities, while income explains little. The final essay develops and estimates a model of city decision-making based on the median voter framework to explain the diffusion of the first major innovation of the sanitation revolution: waterworks technology. Using a comprehensive cross-sectional data set of cities in Rhenish Prussia, statistical estimation of the model reveals that the rising income of the median voter for town assemblies exerts much more influence on the spread of sanitation technologies than does evidence of incipient government bureacracies or of urban environmental deterioration.Ph.D.Economic historyUrban planningUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/161635/1/8801287.pd