Using Housing Quality to Track Change in the Standard of Living and Poverty for Seventeenth-Century London

Abstract

Housing quality is an important component of the standard of living, touching on aspects usually ignored in efforts to measure it, in part because housing quality itself is difficult to measure—especially over time. There are choices over inputs versus outputs for quality, and over objectively versus subjectively determined evaluations of it. Historians must also cope with today's versus yesteryear's beliefs about housing quality and standards. Descriptions of London's housing quality over the seventeenth century and changes in rents show that housing improved across income groups. Housing poverty apparently declined in percentage but grew in absolute numbers. Higher incomes, better-built housing, and processes of the housing market all contributed, including housing/household “filtering”—a unique process of the housing market whose London aspects others have reported but never placed in a coherent account.

Keywords:

• filtering
• housing
• housing markets
• poverty
• seventeenth-century London
• standard of living

Notes

1. The 1693–4 data showed some 5,000 instances of “0” rent. It is unclear how Spence counted these, but surely the units were worth more than nothing, even if no money changed hands. Nonetheless, since non-residential properties were also assessed, and he had to make other judgments in classifying the raw data, I use Spence's interpretation because he worked so closely with the tax records.

2. Shammas advised me that when number of rooms was not indicated in her data, it was better to assume that it was “one,” rather than not count those numerous instances at all.