The “Social Science” of Segregation: Between the “Charitable” Surveys of the Progressive Era and the “Appraisal” Surveys of the New Deal Era

Conceptions of Race and Space

This article expands upon the scholarship on urban housing and historical systems of racial oppression. Restricting Non-White access to housing and to geographies associated with financial appreciation has been instrumental to the construction of racial difference and to what George Lipsitz has called a “possessive investment in whiteness.” ⁴ As Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton famously stated “residential segregation is the linchpin of racial stratification,” and continually, “compared with other minority groups, Blacks are markedly less able to convert their socioeconomic attainments into residential contact with Whites, and because of this fact they are unable to gain access to crucial resources and benefits that are distributed throughout housing markets.” ⁵ Historians and scholars have traced these trenchant realities to the formation of legal, financial, and urban systems of exclusivity. Richard Rothstein described the historical influence of law on segregation, highlighting the landmark 1896 Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson. ⁶ The case established clear “separate but equal” policies, while less overt legal instruments defined segregation on local and community scales. Robert Fogelson understood legal action to be one aspect of a larger network of urban interventions, including transportation and urban planning, aimed at “fragmentation.” ⁷ Paige Glotzer’s recent book How the Suburbs Were Segregated extends the field of inquiry by asking “what is the prehistory to the policies that helped segregate the United States?” ⁸ Glotzer expands studies of suburban segregation beyond the dominant periodization, arguing that post-WWII developments such as Levittown were influenced by late nineteenth and early twentieth century practices.

Individual, developer, and real estate practices were enlisted, codified, and extended by the federal government through the creation of the HOLC and the FHA in the 1930s. These federal initiatives have been charged with institutionalizing “redlining” or the practice of denying mortgages and insurance based on an individual’s or neighborhood’s racial composition. ⁹ While the HOLC and FHA’s surveys, risk assessment maps, and lending histories indicate strongly racialized (and racist) biases, their contributions alone cannot be credited with the state of segregation in American cities. ¹⁰ Access to homeownership had been affected by a dual market in banking far prior to the formation of the HOLC and FHA. Mehrsa Baradaran has argued that money had been “colored” since the 1850s, at which point an “invisible hand had set the price of Black credit, the value of Black homes, and the cost of Black labor.” ¹¹ Despite their limitations, the HOLC and FHA surveys provide a clear picture of the impetus to scientifically and objectively document neighborhood characteristics by correlating value and risk with factors such as race. This article extends the scholarship on the historically complex nature of segregation as considered by scholars such as Baradaran, Glotzer, Fogelson, and Rothstein, by considering how federal risk assessment maps and lending policies of the New Deal Era were influenced by “ways of seeing,” that were formulated in and exemplified by the social surveys and municipal regulations of the Progressive Era.

“Charitable” Surveys of the Progressive Era

The field of social work emerged with the COS, formed in the late nineteenth century to document and reform the nation’s poor by consolidating and governing philanthropic practices. Funding for COS and their surveys was provided by the Russell Sage Foundation, formed by financier and railroad mogul Russell Sage’s wife after his death, for “the improvement of social and living conditions in the United States.” ¹² The COS touted a “scientific” approach to philanthropy, deploying “friendly visitors” to homes of poor families receiving assistance to determine their “worthiness.” ¹³ Their approach was promoted through the annual National Conference of Charities and Corrections, and the weekly Charities and Commons journal. Reputable social reform workers including Lawrence Veiller and Paul Kellogg worked for the COS, producing two of the most widely known surveys of the time, the New York tenement survey, and the Pittsburgh Survey, respectively. Each of these surveys reflected the growing desire among Progressives to pair scientific inquiry with reformist efforts. Quantitative measures of neighborhood statistics and demographic information were paired with qualitative measures of personal inspection and photography to develop what they believed to be a more complete and “scientific” picture of the issues associated with working-class housing. In both cases, the surveys were used to justify the enactment of municipal regulations aimed at improving detrimental urban conditions. By looking at each of their influences, methods, and trajectories, the connections between local philanthropy and national legislation can be seen.

Lawrence Veiller began his career in social work by volunteering for the COS. After working for the NY Building Department, Veiller began advocating for legislation to improve New York’s tenement house conditions. While serving as an Executive Officer of the Tenement House Committee, Veiller worked with journalist and photographer Jacob Riis to survey and exhibit the most intimate of tenement settings and experiences. Aligning with sentiments of the Progressives and the COS, Veiller associated urban poverty with moral deficiency, advocating for legal cooperation and corrective measures to improve the physical, and therefore moral, suasions of the working class. With Teddy Roosevelt, a devout Progressive, serving as Governor of New York, Veiller was appointed secretary of the New York State Tenement House Commission in 1900, through which they would establish the Tenement House Act of 1901. Although New York and its overcrowded tenements were of central concern to reformers like Veiller at the turn of the century, many recognized the housing issues associated with urban industrial cores to be a national issue. In 1910, Veiller formed the National Housing Association (NHA) to “secure reasonable, scientific and economic building laws” and “to aid in the defending of such laws when once enacted, from the attacks of adverse interests.” ¹⁴ Although “adverse interests” would be directly associated with the presence of Black and Brown populations through the FHA in the New Deal Era, the term held relatively ambiguous connotations at the time Veiller used it. But Veiller expressed race consciousness in his analysis of the “housing problem in American cities” in his writings, stating, for example, that “where it is a city composed of people from every nation, alien to our life in nearly every way, ignorant of our language and brought up under conditions, social and political, that are entirely foreign to the ones under which they are now living, the results are fraught with the most serious consequences to the community.” ¹⁵ These sentiments were embodied by the NHA, for which John M Glenn, director of the Russell Sage Foundation, served as treasurer, and Robert W. de Forest, NY’s first tenement house commissioner and president of the COS, served as president. The philanthropy of the Russell Sage foundation and the COS were linked to big-business and legislation through Veiller, Teddy Roosevelt, and the Tenement House Commission.

These linkages can also be seen, in addition to those between race consciousness and reform legislation, through the production of the Pittsburgh Survey. The Pittsburgh Survey was similarly financed by the Russell Sage Foundation and was directed by Paul Kellogg, editor of COS’ weekly journal Charities and Commons. Pittsburgh attracted thousands of foreign-born White immigrants (of Slavic, Polish, and Russian descent, primarily) and Black migrants, with its monopoly over steel production and its northern geography in the years of Jim Crow segregation. ¹⁶ As early as 1837, 110 Black families lived in downtown Pittsburgh, concentrated near factories in the Lower Hill District. ¹⁶ By 1929, the population in the Upper and Lower Hill and Strip Districts was over 50 percent Black. Although Pittsburgh’s Black population was still relatively small, their concentration near industry along with the city’s foreign-born population garnered increasing attention among city officials and Progressive reformers as concerns of overcrowding, disease, and moral depravity amassed. As in New York, the line between observation and surveillance was blurred by the survey and its invasive housing investigations. While privacy was a foundational ethos of the Progressive movement, associated with a healthy family life and self-determination, the survey hinged upon entering the private domains of working-class communities. The results of the survey were published and promoted in the Charities and Commons journal over a period of five years, between 1909 and 1914. The journal and its editor, Paul Kellogg, often spoke of the survey’s efforts to generate a system of social accounting, encouraging “methods of social bookkeeping as would show something of the larger waste of human life and private means.” ¹⁷ With chapters titled “A Slav’s a Man for a’ That” and “One Hundred Negro Steel Workers,” race was a primary consideration, as were the “private means” of disparate groups. As with the COS’ “friendly visits,” and Veiller and Riis’ NY tenement surveys, the Pittsburgh Survey and its incorporation of photography and journalism served to expose the intimacies of urban poverty. Persons of Color and Eastern and Southern European Immigrants were disproportionately represented in these poor communities and were therefore disproportionately linked with moral deficiency.

Although the COS and the Russell Sage Foundation hoped to influence positive reform for the working poor, the racialized nature of their surveys led to disproportionate policing and the institutionalization of policies designed to strengthen racial and spatial boundaries in the city. In a survey chapter titled “Colored Girls from the South,” the Hill District was described as heavily populated with prostitution houses in which “colored girls” worked various service jobs. ¹⁸ “The Negroes of Pittsburgh” chapter similarly focused on the racially and economically segregated Hill and Strip Districts, highlighting overcrowding and inferior living arrangements and further tying Populations of Color to crime and conditions of squalor. ¹⁹ If the reformers’ concerns stemmed from the moral and environmental depravity of Pittsburgh’s Immigrant and Black neighborhoods in isolation, the survey and its outcomes targeted instead the issue of intermingling between racial groups. The Morals Efficiency Commission was established in 1913, with the capabilities to determine and enforce appropriate legal and administrative measures based on the Pittsburgh Survey. The commission closed 71 of the 247 prostitution houses in the city within eighteen months. They stated to have selected for closure “all houses with colored inmates receiving White visitors,” arguing that “five out of nine men make frequent trips to the segregated district at least once a week.” ²⁰ Their issue was not with the illegal practices of “colored inmates,” but with the enticement of White men into central geographies associated with depravity. While prostitution houses in peripheral White neighborhoods were preserved, Black establishments in the urban core were targeted for closure, illustrating how the survey was used as a tool to support and maintain segregation.

While the surveys of philanthropic reformers influenced segregationist policies between disparate racial and geographic regions of the city, the Chicago School of Sociology was working to develop racial and geographic models to guide the social survey. Allen T. Burns, a social reform worker and one of the founders of the Chicago School of Sociology, contributed to the Pittsburgh Survey with his chapter on “The Pittsburgh District’s Civic Frontage.” Burns urged for transformation of the city’s civic core, located within blocks of the Hill District, which was noted for its squalid conditions. Of the most famous of Chicago School Sociologists were Burns’ colleagues Homer Hoyt, Ernest Burgess, and Robert Park. Park contributed to The Americanization Survey that Burns directed in 1918, along with Teddy Roosevelt and Dr. John Glenn, Director of the Russell Sage Foundation. ²¹ Park shared “field study” methods in his chapter in The Americanization Survey, as he did in the classroom at the University of Chicago. In a course Park taught with Burgess, students were introduced to an “understanding of the significance and the possibilities of the social survey as an instrument for social investigations,” along with urban models following the Darwinist tradition of social evolutionary theory. ²² Burgess and Park promoted the “Concentric Zone Theory” as a way to understand and represent the life cycle and evolution of the city. The “Central Business District” was denoted as the “slum,” while the “Zone in Transition” just outside of the inner loop was denoted as home to the “ghetto,” “China Town,” “Little Sicily,” and “Black Belt.” The outermost ring contained “single family dwellings” and was denoted as the “Bright Light Area.” ²³ The Chicago School theorized that as the central city became overcrowded and unsanitary, those with social mobility would continually move to the outer rings, while the inner ring would be continually run down and rebuilt. By the Concentric Zone Model, those with social mobility were White, represented by “Deutschland” and “bright light” areas, and those without were Chinese, Italian, and Black. Park asserted his belief that those located in “the great city of the poor” were “peculiarly fit for the environment in which they are condemned to exist,” further associating Non-White races with stagnation and decline. ²⁴ The transference of these models to the federal surveys and policies of the New Deal Era will be revisited later, but their channeling through Park, Burns, Roosevelt, and the Russell Sage Foundation suggests a connection to the social surveys of the Progressive Era and to earlier codifications of race and space in the city. Despite outwardly stated philanthropic intentions, the Pittsburgh Survey was enmeshed with urban models and ideologies that associated Persons of Color with depreciating values. Although the NY tenement house survey was used to inspire legislation for the improvement of living conditions for the poor, the Pittsburgh Survey, utilizing similar methods of survey and publication, was used to inspire policing to prevent the spread of negative attributes to outside neighborhoods and demographics.

The segregationist attitudes of the “social scientists,” represented by the urban models of the Chicago School of Sociology, were practiced by the Pittsburgh branch of the NHA in the decades following Veiller’s formation of such. The Pittsburgh Housing Authority (PHA) recommended “racial and ethnic stratification” in their Three-Year Report 1931–1932–1933, conclusions of which were based on the 1930 “Hill Survey.” ²⁵ In chapters of the survey devoted to the guidance of “realtors in the Hill District,” realty professionals provided “expert” advice by outlining key housing problems and potential solutions for the Hill District. The physical condition of houses, lack of proper sanitary laws, and lack of care by tenants were noted as primary problems. The segregation of properties racially, “so that White and colored tenants don’t live in the same houses nor on the same immediate streets,” was proposed as a solution. ²⁶ The PHA argued that migration from Ward Three (the Lower Hill District) had left the area with a dwelling surplus of poor-quality housing, necessitating removal. In the census survey produced for 1933, however, a 96 percent utilization rate was documented in Ward Three, compared with the city average of 69 percent. ²⁷ Ward Three was over 50 percent Black and housed some of the city’s earliest steel-working populations. Based on Park and Burgess’ model, the Hill District would have been the “Central Business District,” denoted as the “slum.” The PHA justified their promotion of a large-scale reconstruction of the “slum,” by fabricating illusions of outward migration, vacancy, and decline. These fabrications were supported by the Concentric Zone Theory popularized by the Chicago School of Sociology, despite any lack of scientific evidence.

“Appraisal” Surveys of the New Deal Era

The career path of Edith Elmer Wood, from Progressive social worker to New Deal legislator, provides an important link between the two eras and their respective interests. ²⁸ Wood began her career as a social worker under the educational guidance of the Sage Foundation at the NY School of Philanthropy. After graduation, Wood published a report on The Housing of the Unskilled Wage Earner, citing the Tenement House Commission and the NHA for their contributions to the field of inquiry. Wood included “evidence from housing surveys” to support her argument that reform required comprehensive legislation as touted by Veiller, as well as government provisions for homeowner financing and demolition and property reconstruction as touted by Theodore Roosevelt. ²⁹ In 1902, Roosevelt created the President’s Homes Commission (PHC) to guide the “improvement of existing houses and elimination of insanitary and alley houses.” ³⁰ Roosevelt’s call for government aid under the PHC was extensively cited by Wood as an example of positive reform. Along with two other leading reform women, Wood founded the National Housing Conference, held in New York City in 1911, which was stated to have originated from Roosevelt’s New York State House Commission and the Tenement House Committee of the COS. ³¹ With the 1932 election of Franklin D. Roosevelt to the presidency, the conference became the National Public Housing Conference, and Wood was appointed as a consultant to the Public Works Administration (1933–1937) and to the US Housing Authority (1933–1945). ³² Wood advocated for the allocation of government aid based on the kind of social surveying exemplified by the work of the Tenement House Commission and Pittsburgh Survey. Wood’s career trajectory is indicative of the knowledge transfers that took place between the practices of social workers and value appraisers, and their promotions of philanthropic reform and risk mitigation, respectively.

By examining the surveys that directly emerged from and influenced New Deal legislation, and their overlapping considerations with the Chicago School of Sociology’s urban models, we can gain a better understanding of the ideological transfers embodied by Wood’s career. Following the stock market collapse of 1929, the federal government worked to define property appraisal as an “actuarial science” to increase home purchasing and decrease risk to lenders. ³³ FDR’s National Housing Act of 1934, drafted under consultation with Wood and NY Senator Wagner, was established to save homeowners from the perils of the unpredictable rental and home markets. The federal Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB), and the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) were among those New Deal legislative bodies that utilized urban modeling and surveying to guide government aid. Wood’s experience with social surveying, along with her advocation for government aid, positioned her to facilitate federal housing intervention under FDR’s New Deal. As an appointed consultant to the WPA and the NHA, Wood and her ideologies would have a significant influence on federal legislation under the National Housing Act and the FHA. Wood’s studies of the Tenement House Commission and Pittsburgh Survey, and her promotion of Teddy Roosevelt’s contributions to legislative action during the Progressive Era, would coalesce under FDR’s administration, beginning with the WPA.

WPA Real Property Surveys were conducted from 1934 to 1936 in 200 cities across the nation to inform federal lending agencies as to the characteristics and risks of different neighborhoods. Surveyors recorded a wide range of material, financial, and social characteristics within each census tract following a thirty-two-question schedule defined by the WPA. Objective questions, including numbers of vacancies, real estate conveyances, recorded mortgages, foreclosed mortgages, construction permits, and demo permits, accompanied more subjective questions such as of the “value of property.” Valuation was to be determined by asking the owner of the property “what do you think you could get for this property if you wanted to sell it now?” ³⁴ Despite the usage of a standardized form, WPA surveys left room for interpretation. If White property owners were to have perceived the value of their homes as higher than those of Persons of Color based solely on the racial composition of the occupants and neighborhood, this would perpetuate racial biases in value appraisal and lending. Individual biases such as these were correlated with geography by the FHA, as they translated WPA forms into summary tables and maps. Those properties closest to the central business district, where the city's Non-White populations were concentrated, were expected to decline in value, while those on the periphery were enmeshed with a “possessive investment in whiteness,” following the Concentric Zone Theory.

The HOLC’s Residential Security Maps and surveys, produced around the same time as the WPA’s Real Property Surveys, indicate a more homogenizing picture. The HOLC, under the 1933 Home Owner’s Loan Act, was given the authority to exchange government bonds to creditors for delinquent mortgages over a period of two years. ³⁵ HOLC’s City Survey Program was a separate initiative, though it has often been understood in relation to their mortgage lending practices. In 1935, the HOLC, in contract with local officials, brokers, appraisers, and attorneys, surveyed and produced area descriptions and residential security maps for 239 cities. While elements of HOLC’s area descriptions overlapped with those defined by the WPA for their Real Property Inventories, HOLC was the first federal agency to incorporate neighborhood “risk factors” in their maps. HOLC granted security grades (A–D) to regions of the city, shaded accordingly in the map, to indicate the perceived risk associated with lending in that area. Dozens of census tracts and their respectively unique housing conditions were conflated into large “districts” with a single grade. If a district had a significant Non-White or “Negro” population, it was given a rating of “D,” suggesting to lenders that they refrain from offering financing to any potential homeowner, and especially Black and Brown homeowners, within this region. Of the cities surveyed was Pittsburgh, completed in 1937. ³⁶ HOLC’s District “D10” contained Pittsburgh’s historically Black and Immigrant neighborhoods, including the Hill District and census tracts within Wards Three, Four, and Five. The Area Description lists the Security Grade as “D,” and indicates “50 percent Negro,” “20 percent Foreign Born White” and an “Infiltration of Negro.” The survey also notes that the “value of residential structures is expected to continue down,” aligned with the ecological thinking practiced at the Chicago School. On the schedule line for “availability of mortgage funds for home purchase and home building” the survey indicates “no.” Black potential homeowners, already disadvantaged by segregationist housing and banking practices, would be further excluded from New Deal opportunities in alignment with the attitudes reflected in, and encouraged by, HOLC’s security maps.

The Federal Home Loan Bank Board Review regularly featured HOLC’s methods of survey, influencing banking practices and the future formation of government lending insurance policies. The FHLBB distributed 6,000 copies of the review per month by 1936, including “one to each member of the Federal Home Loan Bank System.” ³⁷ By 1940, 150 banks were registered with the FHLBB in Pittsburgh alone. The review included textual accounts on “techniques for making a security map” along with standard appraisal forms for use by city appraisers. ³⁸ The FHLBB suggested the usage of four broad categories for assessing loan worthiness, ranked from most to least desirable, represented by colors and letters reflective of those used by HOLC in their residential security maps. Although they exhibited a clear interest in scientific methods, integral to the growing survey profession, the FHLBB simultaneously encouraged personal bias. In a 1935 issue of the review, the FHLBB projected insecurity in the judging of property by age, suggesting instead that “a study of the characteristics of buyers in a given neighborhood map might reveal that they are not what we would consider stable purchasers.” ³⁹ With this assertion, the FHLBB promoted the assessment of buyer identity over property characteristics. Like Veiller had done with his assertion that the “foreign element” contributed to the “housing problem,” the FHLBB and HOLC, following the WPA, correlated a person’s race with value. The “fill-in-the-blank” format of the federal forms, including prompts such as “detrimental influences,” necessitated interpretation by the surveyors, who were susceptible to the racialized understandings of urban models being promoted by the Chicago School.

Perhaps the most critical legacy of HOLC’s security maps was the FHA and their institutionalization of racist risk assessment strategies. The FHA is known to have explicitly supported segregation, denying federal mortgage insurance to Persons of Color, and to White developers for properties without racial deed restrictions in place. Although their lending practices differed from those of the HOLC, the FHA’s proposed methods for assessment were remarkably similar. FHA’s Underwriting Manual was developed “to establish standards of quality with respect to neighborhoods, construction, architecture, and factors contributing to more satisfactory housing in order to encourage improvement in housing standards and conditions.” ⁴⁰ In the manual’s “General Rating Instructions” for property assessment, “protection from adverse influences” was to be weighted the second most heavily. The manual instructed appraisers to value this aspect based on the presence of restrictive zoning and deeds and to prevent the mixing of “incompatible racial or social groups.” ⁴¹ As in the HOLC’s area descriptions, “adverse influences” were often correlated with the presence and suspected “infiltration” of Black, Brown, and Immigrant populations. If we recall Lawrence Veiller’s usage of the term “adverse interests” to describe the potential threats to social reform legislation, and his racialized understanding of the “housing problem in American cities,” we can see the transference of racialized beliefs from vague social descriptors, to seemingly standardized and codified systems of appraisal.

While the Chicago School of Sociology held direct ties to social work, exemplified by Burns’ contributions to the Pittsburgh Survey, it also held direct ties to value appraisal, exemplified by Homer Hoyt’s transfer of “expertise” to the FHA. Hoyt was a former student and colleague of Burns, Park, and Burgess at the University of Chicago. In his thesis, Hoyt applied an urban model on the life cycle of neighborhoods to real estate appraisal in Chicago. Like Burgess and Park, Hoyt associated race with property valuation and certain racialized geographies of the city with economic decline. Hoyt believed that social forces could be controlled through surveying and policy, stating that “with increasing knowledge of every phase of social life, measured in both qualitative and quantitative statistical terms, we may weld together a method controlling these social forces into one organic, creative method of control.” ⁴² That method had been under development by social workers since the Progressive Era and would continue to be developed by the FHA under Hoyt’s direction. While employed by the FHA as their “principle housing economist,” Hoyt and the FHA published One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago, where they promoted the rating of neighborhoods using color shading and a ten-point scale based on race. ⁴³ This method is illustrated in the FHA mortgage risk map for Chicago. Large blocks traversing several census tracts of the WPA Real Property Survey were encircled, ranked, and shaded according to security grades A–D. ⁴⁴ The map further notes that “FHA will not insure mortgages in class ‘D’ districts.” ⁴⁵ The value appraisal and risk assessment methods institutionalized by the FHA were directly correlated with their mortgage insuring practices, leading to widespread disinvestment in Persons and Communities of Color.

Conclusion

From the 1900s to the 1930s, two camps emerged in the field of surveying: one focused on social welfare and the introduction of policies intended to improve conditions of inequality and depravity and the other on developing scientific standards for the appraisal, prediction, and avoidance of risk in lending. Progressive reformers highlighted class divides, as with the Pittsburgh Survey, with the intention of contributing to the dissolution of them. Appraisers looked to make property valuation and lending more predictable by enforcing strong economic and racial boundaries. Although these two camps did not always align with respect to intention, they shared techniques of survey and assessment with each other and with the urban models and field survey methods promoted by the Chicago School of Sociology. While the social reformers entered the intimate dwellings of the working-class and sensationalized their conditions through journalism and photography, the value appraisers buried their biased assessments in the language of standardized forms. In either case, by pairing quantitative and qualitative analysis, their methods were justified as scientific and objective. But officials used Progressive and New Deal Era surveys alike to heighten racial divides in the city, as with the policing initiatives of the Morals Efficiency Commission of 1913, and the insurance policies of the FHA in the 1930s. Non-Whites were disproportionately affected. Social surveys amounted to descriptions of abandonment and decline in the urban core, as in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, despite census statistics proving the alternative.

The overlaps between the philanthropic surveys of the Progressive Era, the social survey methods promoted by the Chicago School of Sociology, and the risk assessment surveys of the New Deal Era demonstrate the production of “ways of seeing” that correlated race with space and risk. Crossney and Bartelt’s regression on the 1930s mortgage distribution in Pittsburgh by lender type illustrates how these “ways of seeing” influenced lending during the New Deal Era. The “percent black” of a neighborhood, for example, had a strong influence on lending patterns exercised by building and loan societies, commercial banks, mortgage companies, and individuals. ⁴⁶ This evidence supports the argument that it was not the FHA that initiated “redlining,” but rather, that they institutionalized a set of ideas and practices that had been in development decades earlier. These ideas and practices were intertwined with the formation of the discipline of Social Science and its utilization of the social survey to pair a scientific approach with social reform. As the research presented in this article demonstrates, the leaders and attitudes to emerge with Progressive Era social surveying contributed to the formulation of New Deal Era federal appraisal surveying in the following decades. Although their forms of representation varied, they both utilized the survey to combine qualitative and quantitative analysis of urban conditions and to justify their objectivity in enforcing accompanying legislation. Despite any differences in their stated intentions, through their contributions to the social survey, the philanthropist reformers and the value appraisers correlated race with space and influenced segregationist policies.