The Peculiar, Diverse, and Vital Business of Personal Mortgages, 1890s–1950s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract As a source of credit on residential real estate in North America, private individuals played a vital role well into the 1950s, especially in Canada. Rare national surveys, together with varied case studies in Canada and the United States, indicate that they provided land contracts, construction loans, and first and junior mortgages to a variety of people, including family and friends and many strangers. Contacts were arranged through social networks, agents, and brokers. By comparison with major lending institutions, their role and significance have been overlooked, their loans often unrecorded. In the early decades, lenders included men and women in a range of occupations, not least because many owners offered credit to buyers to facilitate sales. By the 1950s, women, professionals, and businessmen were the main investors, the chief beneficiaries being lower-income households in less desirable districts. Some personal lenders were ill-informed or exploitive, but most enabled families to realize their aspirations to own. This sector’s decline was a consequence of federal policies that promoted national mortgage markets, making the business more professional but displacing practices that had enabled many home buyers and builders.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".