When my white cousin was looking for a home in a wealthy DC suburb, he was “steered”away from a specific neighborhood by his white realtor. Turns out the neighborhood was predominantly black. The truth is he wouldn’t have bought a house there. He said in discussing it with others, he got the distinct impression that the people in that neighborhood would be glad he didn’t purchase a home there. Reminds me of the TV sitcom The Neighborhood.
No one is just blaming the realtors for housing segregation. But realtors are obligated to follow the law, which those profiled in the article are not doing. I can understand why a realtor would want to show a potential buyer a home they are more likely to want to buy, but the realtor is required to NOT use race as a factor when showing homes. Clearly, many of the realtors in the study followed the law.
Of course that will not change the reality that many people tend to buy homes in segregated communities. to live among those that look like them. Many others value a racially diverse community, but not necessarily economic or educational diversity.
Yes.
@“Cardinal Fang”
Paired testing may be the best assessment, but it is certainly flawed. I’ve never seen two humans next to each other, one black and one white, where I could not tell them apart aside from skin color. So many other differentiators.
Realty is a cutthroat business, with the only survivors being those that pick up on these differentiators and give the customers what they want. One of the realtors that the article skewered is a top producer in her firm. Maybe she knows what she’s doing.
Also worth noting that the article recognizes that none of their findings prove illegality.
Based on what? Race? LOL
Is it realistic to expect people to obey the law when it is extremely unlikely that they will be caught and penalized for disobedience, and they believe that disobeying the law is in their self interest (when dealing with a customer base that they have observed to have racist preferences)?
In terms of racial steering, posters on these forums are guilty of it. Why is it that, when a student looking for big merit scholarships with high stats shows up, many posters mention forum favorite UAH, but its neighbor AAMU with better scholarships rarely gets mentioned?
Public school ranking K-12, within a state, are much more objective. It’s not like college rankings.
Here’s the link to NYSED data since this article targeted NY: https://data.nysed.gov
You can plug in an individual school and build a report based on the information that is important to your family. Then you can compare and contrast for different districts based on where one would be house hunting.
Do you mean to say that either or both (a) he was racist enough that he did not want to live near black people, and/or (b) he believed or was led to believe that the black people living there are racist against white people?
No one gets a pass here. But pointing the finger only at the agents looks like an attempt to give racist buyers who influence both the agents and the overall market a pass.
I agree that racist buyers exist, and plenty of them. But those white suburbs would be less lilywhite if the nonwhite buyers weren’t illegally steered away from them. The nonwhite buyers weren’t choosing those more racially diverse suburbs, in this study. Rather, they were illegally led to believe that they couldn’t afford the white suburbs with the better schools, and thus kept from buying houses in areas they might have wanted to buy in.
Let’s not say here that all buyers want this segregation. The white ones (maybe) want it, but the agents are keeping the nonwhite buyers from their full range of choices.
@ucbalumnus - I didn’t ask him that question specifically when this happened (about 4 years ago) but I would say that he definitely felt uncomfortable with the idea of living in a predominantly black community.
It masks the reality when one or two keep pointing to “racist buyers.” No one bought, in this study. They were testing agents.
The point isn’t whether some prefer a neighborhood where they match in race. It’s what happened when agents detected race and based recommendations on that.
No hypothesizing needed. It comes out sounding like laying blame on the minorities. Maybe this, maybe that.
Personally, I think one needs to be darned insulated to think these service prejudices don’t exist.
And the agents, to some extent, have been “trained” by other buyers with unstated racist preferences. I.e. others who are racist cause market effects that negatively impact non-racist participants in the market.
But some appear unwilling to understand that there is more to it than the agents themselves having their own racism (which they do, but is not the only reason). Or perhaps they prefer to pin it on the agents, rather than noticing the rest of the racism iceberg that may be closer to home and that “trains” agents to be racist and reinforces existing agent racism.
I’m the one who started this thread. I want to be clear that I believe the study shows that real estate agents act in a racially discriminatory manner. It doesn’t exonerate other actors from also acting in a racist way.
Also, I reaffirm that in addition to “steering” different races to different areas, the agents treated nonwhite buyers objectively worse, by showing them fewer properties, in some cases refusing to show them anything when similarly situated whites were shown properties. They were not doing these things because they believed the nonwhite clients wanted to be treated worse.
Those realtors should be penalized for their differences in treatment. Unacceptable.
@momofsenior1 , thanks for the link to NYSED school ratings. Unless I’m missing something, it seems entirely assessment-based, of which many people (including myself) don’t place much emphasis on.
Unless the black tester specified exactly what they mean by “good schools”, the realtor did nothing wrong. And even then, realtors can’t be the judge and jury about what is good. Buyers must be specific, or even specify their school district.
Where is it being said that the realtors are the ONLY factor here? It seems to me that the study was simply examining a specific factor, realtors, and looking to see if they behave in a discriminatory fashion. How does this perpetuate any idea that only realtors are to blame for the problems faced by minorities?
From HUD: https://www.hud.gov/program_offices/fair_housing_equal_opp/examples_housing_discrimination
These realtors were in violation of the Fair Housing Act. IMO, they should have their licenses suspended.
The realtors are acting as gatekeepers. And they are breaking the law aimed at minimizing that gatekeeping effect. So yeah, they deserve the blame, no matter who else in the scenario might also be racist.
It is illegal to show a white applicant houses in one area and a similarly situated black applicant only houses in a completely different area. That’s just illegal on the face of it.
@“Cardinal Fang”
There is no “similarly situated black applicant” here. If a white person says they want good schools, and a black person says they want good schools, the lack of specificity is likely to make the realtor think to themselves, “I’ll just show them houses where 90% of people that fit their profile have purchased in the past.”
And by profile, you mean, race. Exactly what the law prohibits.