I have no doubt that discrimination happens on a very regular basis, but I’m not sure this particular story proves that.
We really can’t know that the new appraiser would have valued it differently had they seen it without all the changes, can we?
The attitude of the current President of the United States and the attitudes of the groups that enthusiastically support him pretty much says it all.
The only ‘changes’ were to take the ‘blackness’ out of the house.
How, exactly, does that increase or decrease the value of the building itself?
It doesn’t, but it was a different appraiser. Maybe the appraiser who valued it at the higher amount would have valued it at the higher amount without the changes? I just think the story would be more impactful if the same appraiser changed his valuation after the changes to the home.
If they had sent out the same appraiser, you don’t think he would have recognized the name, the address, and the house?
Even if it did change his perception of the valuation of the house, do you think that he would admit to his previous racism?
Now, if you can make the argument that the first appraiser was just unqualified, and didn’t know how to properly value a house, then maybe you’d have a case here. But given that he appraised it at lower than the lowest value in the neighborhood, there was definitely something about that house, something that a later appraiser did not see, that he thought brought down the value.
Whether the second appraiser would have appraised the house fairly without racial bias was not tested here. That the first did appraise the house with racial bias is almost certain. (Either that or he was simply incompetent.)
The fact that Jacob Blake, who seems to have been unarmed (or armed with a knife at most) was shot in the back by a cop seven times, but the (white) 17-year-old illegally carrying a military-style weapon was able to shoot three protestors, killing two of them, and then walk right by the police unmolested and go home to sleep in his own bed before being arrested.
To be fair, that’s also evidence of police corruption and complicity in overthrowing our democracy in exchange for authoritarian rule.
Not that it’s not racist, just that it’s also worse than racist.
Or perhaps (as I vaguely recall) the inequitable penalties by weight for crack vs powder cocaine.
[quote=“k9bfriender, post:45, topic:919067, full:true”]
If they had sent out the same appraiser, you don’t think he would have recognized the name, the address, and the house?
Of course. That’s why I’d prefer a controlled study as proof.
Even if it did change his perception of the valuation of the house, do you think that he would admit to his previous racism?
I don’t know, but I think that would be really interesting and it would be awesome if it did cause the appraiser to give it some thought.
I didn’t intend to make a big deal about it. I know without a shadow of a doubt that discrimination happens. It just stood out to me as a loophole in the argument.
Controlled studies are hard, because it’s pretty hard to not let people know that they are in a study if you are doing such a thing, which will drastically alter their behavior.
The “loophole” as you call it is the plausible deniability that is often used to dismiss acts of racism.
The fact that there was absolutely no reason to appraise this house at lower than the market rate of all the houses in the neighborhood is pretty good evidence to me that the first appraiser was racially biased, even if only subconsciously (and I don’t know that it was that much of a “subconscious” act).
Maybe he was the only biased appraiser, maybe he just wasn’t good at his job, maybe maybe maybe… There will always be a loophole, an uncontrollable in any social experiment that can be used as a fig leaf to dismiss the results.
I mean, you really can’t get a better control than they had, where the appraiser valued the house at less than any other house in the neighborhood. All the other houses acted as controls to this one house that was the “experiment”. And then to follow up, to be sure that there was not an objective flaw in the house (like a cracked foundation or leaky roof or something) that brought down the value, they did a second experiment, where they removed the only factor that made it different from other houses, and made it a controlled experiment.
A far as experiments in the wild, I don’t see how you can get a whole lot better data than that.
And like I said, it only proves that the first appraiser was racially biased, it doesn’t prove that all are. But, once again, controlling for everything, what are the chances that they get the only biased appraiser?
This sort of thing has a very real effect on the ability for minorities to grow and develop generational wealth, something that they have been explicitly prevented from doing for generations, and are still very much hampered unofficially by (let’s be very generous here) unconscious racial bias.
Does this article convince you there’s a problem?
Homeownership has long been considered a ladder into the middle class and a marker of prosperity. Owning a home propels financial security and provides families with a means to accumulate wealth over many years — as long as the economy is in a healthy state.
Yet the prospect of building wealth through that route is also undercut by another trend: Black homes are consistently undervalued by the housing market, experts say. A report from the Brookings Institute released last year found that each black home was undervalued by $48,000 on average.
In Minneapolis, a black owner-occupied home was worth $33,000 less than a white one.
“That metric shows there’s racism in the housing market,” Andre Perry, a fellow at the Brookings Institute, told Business Insider. “There’s something going on in the practices and policies of appraisals, real estate agent behavior, and lending.”
Studies have shown that a long history of structural racism in the housing market dragged down black homeownership rates, given federal homeownership programs that shut out black families from gaining access to loans for much of the 20th century. Today, black people are also denied mortgages at higher rates than whites, even though many are credit-worthy.
And this really isn’t some nebulous thing, it has real effects.
I was a home owner for 15 years when the economy and my finances went south.
But, I still had a bunch of equity in my home. I was able to use that equity as collateral to open a business, which is now doing pretty well.
If I had just been renting, or did not have much value to my house, then I would not have been able to. A poor appraisal like the one in the story, or the study that @monstro has provided, prevents people from advancing their lives and the lives of their families. It is theft, pure and simple, from those who have the least.
I was never not convinced there’s a problem. I guess I wasn’t clear enough.
I just had a problem with that particular detail in that story because I see it as a loophole that could be used to argue against the discrimination I KNOW exists.
That was my only issue.
This combined with other shittiness can explain a lot of the wealth disparities between white and black folks.
A lot of folks whose roots in the US go back several generations are beneficaries of the Homestead Act of 1862. This includes some black folks. But because of that whole slavery thing, most black people were excluded from the program, since it required being a citizen and having money. Post emancipation, many black Americans were coerced into signing labor contracts they couldn’t get out of without facing prison time. It’s kind of hard to go blazing the wild western frontier when you have that kind of gun pointed at you.
So white people were able to enjoy a source of wealth that black people were denied. Wealth begets more wealth. We all know this. Being able to use land as collateral means you can easily get a small business loan. Having your own successful business means you can acquire more land. You can be a landowner and charge rent. You can use your profits to send your kids to college so they can become members of the professional class. A while guy might have been an illiterate with two bucks to his name, but the Homestead Act enabled his great-grand children to be doctors, lawyers, college professors, and senators. A black guy in the same situation was denied that trajectory through no fault of his own. Even if everything else had been equal between them, that one little piece is enough to cause disparity between their descendants. Since everything else between them was not equal, it definitely should be no surprise why their descendants don’t enjoy the same outcomes.
Are we talking about houses in the same neighborhood here? Like say… one house is owned by a white family and is appraised at $X per square foot, and the house next door is owned by a black family and is appraised at a lower per square foot value, despite being in the same general condition, same neighborhood, etc…?
I guess what I’m curious about is whether it’s an individual thing, or more of a neighborhood-based thing, like ALL houses in this predominantly black neighborhood are undervalued, like some sort of latter day redlining, or legacy of the older redlining?
The NYT article talks about it as an “individual thing”. The Business Insider article talks about it as a “neighborhood” thing. To me, as a black person, it doesn’t matter which it is. Both of them show that black people get screwed in the housing market. And it is easy to see how this can be a self-perpetuating problem. If you don’t make as much money from your “starter home” investment as someone else, then someone else will be able to buy your dream home in the neighborhood with the best schools, while you and your children must settle for something less valuable, less good, thereby ensuring you will always be in the inferior position relative to “someone else.”
Appraisals are wrong, or undervalued, all the time. Your bias is showing when you have this need to tie everything back to racism, with very little (none) evidence. Not to say that it might not be happening, but not a proven thing in the first MS Horton story.
I understand what the OP is asking about but I’d like to point out that looking for the one piece of evidence that most clearly proves the deeply ingrained racism in the US is a way to obscure the decision through a variety of reductio ad absurdum. It is often impossible to take a single incident and prove that it results from racism. Any person can be rejected for a job for any number of reasons, but when people with certain characteristics unrelated to the job are rejected at a much higher rate than all others then we see the evidence of racism. And it is not just found in one circumstance such as hiring, it affects every aspect of life, how people are treated in public, how they are treated by the state, how they are treated as business customers, as students, as parents, as children, in every aspect of society there is evident racism when you look at the forest instead of trying examine the trees one by one.
I don’t mean to criticize the OP or any responses here, I’m saying that it is quite clear that the numerous examples shown in this thread cannot be explained away as cultural differences, or remnants of racism past, or misperceptions of the victims that suffer the worst effects of racism. They are the cumulative proof that racism is deeply ingrained in our culture.
Two undercover testers – for example, one black and one white – separately solicit an agent’s assistance in buying houses. They present similar financial profiles and request identical terms for houses in the same areas. The agent’s actions are then reviewed for evidence that the agent provided disparate service.
Newsday conducted 86 matching tests in areas stretching from the New York City line to the Hamptons and from Long Island Sound to the South Shore. Thirty-nine of the tests paired black and white testers, 31 matched Hispanic and white testers and 16 linked Asian and white testers.
Newsday confirmed that agents had houses to sell when meeting with testers based on analyses provided by Zillow, the online home search site. Zillow draws an inventory of available homes daily from the Multiple Listing Service of Long Island, the computerized system used by agents to select possible houses for buyers. MLSLI said that it does not maintain its own database of past daily inventories, as Zillow does, and so could not provide the same type of tallies. As permitted by law, all tests were recorded on hidden cameras to ensure accuracy in describing interactions between agents and customers.
…
In fully 40 percent of the tests, evidence suggested that brokers subjected minority testers to disparate treatment when compared with white testers with inequalities rising to almost half the time for black potential buyers.
Black testers experienced disparate treatment 49 percent of the time – compared with 39 percent for Hispanic and 19 percent for Asian testers.
In seven of Newsday’s tests – 8 percent of the total – agents accommodated white testers while imposing more stringent conditions on minorities that amounted to the denial of equal service between testers.
“This is something that didn’t happen in the deep South,” said Greg Squires, professor of public policy at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., who offered advice about structuring the testing program.
“It happened in one of the most educated, most liberal regions of the country. These are significant numbers.”
Most commonly in the seven cases, agents refused to provide house listings or home tours to minority testers unless they met financial qualifications that weren’t imposed on white counterparts.
“I won’t do it,” Signature Premier Properties agent Anne Marie Queally Bechand said in refusing to take a black customer to tour houses unless the customer produced evidence that a lender had preapproved a mortgage loan.
One month earlier, Queally Bechand had asked a white customer who had yet to secure mortgage preapproval, “When can you start looking at houses?”
Here’s one I just remembered.
I have a cousin who anyone would call white, who is married to a man most people in the US would call Black (he’s actually Israeli, and his mother was an Ethiopian Jew, while his father is olive-skinned Sephardic with curly hair, and most Americans would probably this is Arab, but he’s not).
So, their children are what a lot of people call “biracial” (my cousin just prefers to call then “Jewish,” but that’s another issue).
Here’s the thing: when my cousin is-- well, probably I should say was, because they’re in college now, and this happened more when they were little-- but when the kids were out with just their mother, people frequently assumed they were adopted. However, no one ever made that assumption when they were out with just their father.
Basically, people found it more plausible that my cousin would adopt child of another race, than that she would marry a Black man, but people also knew that Black on white adoptions are so rare as to approach zero (I personally know of one, and it was a step-parent adoption, so they do happen, but vanishingly rare), so it was quite doubtful that the father of these children was an adoptive father.
So, there’s a whole cluster of assumptions that reflect the racism in our society, and it’s a vicious circle, because those assumptions aren’t entirely unfounded-- white on Black adoption happen fairly frequently; Black on white, almost never. The roots of that are racist too, though.