The recent economic recession was widely framed in relation to the Great Depression. Reporters, critics, and scholars trying to make sense of the collapse, or who otherwise sought to reform United States housing policy (such as by eliminating tax deductions for mortgage interest), compared high rates of unemployment, the failure of financial institutions, and, most of all, the poor housing market in the two eras.

The comparison was instructive, but only up to a point. Similar claims had been invoked at every major downturn since the OPEC crisis. Yet while these earlier dips also saw dramatic disruptions in housing, the so-called Great Recession felt somehow greater. The failure of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and major lenders; the high rates of foreclosure; the abandoned half-built subdivisions; and the proliferation of tent camps all suggested a situation in 2008 as unstable as that of 1929. This pessimism was reinforced by the apparent failure of much of the government apparatus in housing, from emergency correctives like HARP and HAMP to longer-standing policies expanding opportunities for homeownership that may have precipitated the crisis to begin with. Indeed, the run-up in home prices, lax underwriting, the proliferation of “creative” mortgages and mortgage-backed securities, and subprime and racialized predatory lending all implied a deeply broken system.

Curiosity about the past—parallels, what went wrong, what could have happened differently, tools for recovery—inspired the volume under review, or more precisely, a conference on the topic in 2011 funded by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). The event, whose polished-up proceedings more or less comprise the book (the editors note that “many” of the chapters were presented there), brought together economists associated with NBER to turn their attention from 2008 to earlier eras in terms of investigating what went wrong. The editors frame their purpose: “The central role of housing in the ‘Great Recession’ of 2007 raises a series of questions that need to be addressed in historical perspective” (p. 1). Chief among them are the following: Were the crises caused by similar things? Did they spread in similar ways? And did policies introduced in the 1930s exacerbate or alleviate things in the twenty-first century? In short, “What was different this time?” (p. 13).

All of these questions are important. The essays in the volume, however, answer them only in part, while leaving aside many equally crucial ones. A good deal of this gap stems from the fact that, as advertised, the studies are not histories of housing and mortgage markets but studies of them in historical perspective. The difference is significant. In practice it means explorations of the past by scholars with little proficiency in history. The editors, to take just one example, make the erroneous claim that following a “burst of scholarship” in the 1940s and 1950s, the history of residential housing and finance “received little attention” before the crisis of 2007 (p. 13). It also results in some baffling periodization and, at least to this historian of housing, equally baffling technical language and mathematical formulas—the significance of which, admittedly, were lost on me.

The book's peculiarities are most evident in the introduction, which summarizes the contents without articulating an overall perspective; in the first chapter, “A Historiography of Early NBER Housing and Mortgage Research” by Kenneth Snowden, which contains little historiography; and in the first two (of four) sections that comprise the remaining ten chapters: “Housing and the Interwar Business Cycles” (with a chapter by Alexander J. Field, one by Steven Gjerstad and Vernon L. Smith, and one by Eugene N. White) and “A Closer Look at the Interwar Housing Crisis” (with a chapter by Michael Brocker and Christopher Hanes, one by Price Fishback and Trevor Kollmann, and one by Jonathan D. Rose).

Many of these essays conflate economic history with the NBER's backlist, substituting historiography—and familiarity with the rich multidisciplinary literature on housing and mortgage markets—for a narrative catalog of studies published by NBER and discussion of the quantitative data they employ. And rather than draw upon the existing literature to explain housing and mortgage markets before and after 1929, including histories exploring the business of producing and consuming housing, the tendency is to recount the kind of data presented more digestibly in chronicles like Mason C. Doan's American Housing Production, 1880–2000: A Concise History (1997). In these respects, much of these early chapters reads like an NBER Festschrift—a topic that most readers will find arcane, especially since nowhere in the book do the editors explain what NBER is and how its research on housing matters to the field.

If these earlier sections will be of interest chiefly to particular economists, the last two sections have somewhat broader appeal: “Securitization in Earlier Times” (with a chapter by Rik Frehen, William N. Goetzmann, and K. Geert Rouwenhorst, and one by Kirsten Wandschneider) and “Postwar Housing Policies” (with a chapter by Matthew Chambers, Carlos Garriga, and Don E. Schlagenhauf, and one by Daniel K. Fetter). Two fascinating chapters present original archival research: Wandschneider explores the long, successful history of a consumers' cooperative type of mortgage-backed security in Prussia, the Landschaften, which became popular in the 1770s; while Frehen, Goetzmann, and Rouwenhorst consider early mortgage-backed securities in the United States, using the example of Dutch investments in American land markets after the Revolution. Fetter and Chambers, Garriga, and Schlagenhauf, by contrast, tread on the more familiar terrain of Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration homeownership programs after World War II, but through novel analyses of data that refine our understanding of the impact of these policies on housing behaviors.

Technical and specific, Housing and Mortgage Markets in Historical Perspective succeeds most as an economic analysis of particular historical episodes. A few broad claims are made, but overall the collection cannot escape a narrow focus on investigating the recent mortgage crisis through the lens of one now-historical institution, the NBER. Without a broader historical context, it struggles to shed new light on either the Great Recession or the Great Depression.