There are different ways that bigotries and bias infiltrate our lives and fuel the cycle of systemic racial and economic inequality in our communities at large. The New York Times published a story on Tuesday highlighting real estate appraisals and the racial bias faced by Black Americans across the country. The first example covered is Abena and Alex Horton, a biracial couple who began the process of refinancing their Jacksonville, Florida home in June.
The couple’s expectations were that their home would be appraised at somewhere around $450,000. This would put their home in the middle of their neighborhood’s expected range. Instead, their appraiser put it at $330,000. Abena Horton, who is Black, told the Times she knew exactly what had happened. So she and her husband set up a new appraisal, cleared their home of all signs that Black folk lived in the home (i.e., removing family photos, Zora Neale Hurston books, etc.), and Mrs. Horton left with the couple’s child to go shopping. Mr. Horton, who is white, stayed home in his racially sanitized home and got some great news!
According to the couple, the new appraiser bumped up their home’s cost from $330,000 to $465,000. That’s a hair shy of a 41% increase, and all the Hortons had to do was get rid of a little more than half of their family and the shared culture of their lives together! Racism in real estate, like racism in every avenue of our country, has a long history. Our current president’s father was a racist monster, immortalized for his terror by Woody Guthrie, who was a scumlord who discriminating against and abused people of color.
The issue in the case of the Hortons—an issue faced by Black people across the country—is that while laws like the Fair Housing Act have been in effect for more than five decades, this doesn’t stop people’s personal racial biases from affecting housing market outcomes. As Horton told the Times: “My heart kind of broke. I know what the issue was. And I knew what we needed to do to fix it, because in the Black community, it’s just common knowledge that you take your pictures down when you’re selling the house. But I didn’t think I had to worry about that with an appraisal.”
The Hortons shared this experience on Facebook, and their post received thousands of responses and tons of commiserating from other Black homeowners and prospective homeowners sharing very similar experiences of racial discrimination. As the Brookings Institute reported back in 2018, Black communities see consistent devaluation of their collective assets in relationship to white Americans and their communities.
Majority-black neighborhoods hold $609 billion in owner-occupied housing assets and are home to approximately 10,000 public schools and over 3 million businesses. We find that in the average U.S. metropolitan area, homes in neighborhoods where the share of the population is 50 percent black are valued at roughly half the price as homes in neighborhoods with no black residents.
And while many people within the real estate industry have attempted to sidestep their culpability in these matters by saying that Black residential markets are of lower value and they are just following the market, the issues that people like Abena Horton face defy that excuse. Horton and her family live in a predominantly white neighborhood.
Successful comedian, author, and television personality D.L. Hughley told his version of the same story about a house he tried to get appraised years ago. At the time, the appraisal was so egregiously low “that the bank wondered what? It had to be damaged or repossession or destroyed.” The bank got another appraisal that added no less than $125,000 to the value of his home. “So he (the original appraiser) took real wealth from me, just because he could and I was Black.”
There’s a larger theme here having to do with the draining of resources and business from Black communities across the country and forcing any Black person attempting to add to their personal equity to take a percentage less than their white counterparts. “There's never there's never been a place designed for Black people to live in large numbers. Not even the projects. The only place they ever build for niggas to live was jail,” Hughley told Vlad TV in a 2018 interview.
He isn’t wrong.
