A new open-access article in academic journal Explorations in Economic History by Daniel R. Curtis from the history department of Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication uncovers how three major epidemics in 17th-century Leiden (most notably the devastating outbreak of 1635) affected the city’s housing market and the distribution of housing wealth. The article was written in collaboration with Bram van Besouw (UU) and Roos van Oosten (LU) and is the product of seven years’ worth of careful work.
Using exceptionally detailed data on 15,000 houses, 5,300 owners, and street-level mortality patterns, the study reveals a striking paradox: even when epidemics caused enormous mortality and increased turnover in the housing market, they did not lead to lasting changes in housing wealth inequality.
Overall, Curtis concludes that epidemics hit poorer streets hardest, where many residents were tenants rather than owners. The low-value houses in these neighbourhoods were frequently owned by wealthy investors, so high mortality among the urban poor indirectly rippled through elite property portfolios. Yet instead of opening the market to new buyers, these crises largely kept property circulating within the same circle of established investors. As a result, overall housing wealth inequality remained strikingly stable between 1632 and 1668—even as repeated outbreaks claimed the lives of more than a third of the population.
By combining micro-level ownership data with spatial mortality patterns, the article offers new insights into why even severe crises did not necessarily disrupt entrenched wealth structures in premodern cities.
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Read the full open-access article: Epidemic mortality and redistribution of housing wealth in Leiden, 1632–1668 - ScienceDirect
