Know Your Price. Andre M. Perry

are in agreement that discrimination is at play.25 In one study published in the academic journal Social Forces, Valerie Lewis, Michael Emerson, and Stephen Klineberg collected detailed survey data on neighborhood racial preferences in Houston, Texas.26 Researchers asked 1,000 participants from each racial group from a variety of neighborhood types to imagine that they were looking for a new house and to find one within their price range and close to their job. Respondents were then told about the neighborhood context using randomly generated combinations of characteristics about the public schools in the area, property values, the crime rate, and racial percentages. Consistent with previous research, they found that certain neighborhood features strongly predicted whether someone said they would buy the house. Racial composition strongly predicted the preferences of White buyers in neighborhoods that were otherwise identical, meaning White buyers refused to buy houses in Black neighborhoods but bought identical-seeming houses in White or mixed neighborhoods.

      Researchers Jacob Fabera and Ingrid Gould Ellen, in the academic journal Housing Policy Debate, examined rising housing prices through the housing bubble from 2000 to 2007 and through the bust of 2008.27 They reported that Blacks and Hispanics gained less equity than Whites during that period and were more likely to owe more than their home was worth in 2008. In addition, their findings show that “Black-White gaps were driven in part by racial disparities in income and education and differences in types of homes purchased.” The researchers hypothesized that racial segregation and the resulting economic and education stratification between neighborhoods exacerbated equity disparities within neighborhoods that already had high concentrations of poverty. Consequently, the recession hit impoverished neighborhoods disproportionately harder, creating intense volatility in those markets. Declining incomes reduced people’s ability to purchase homes, thus further deflating prices in those neighborhoods. The findings around education and income may result from the disparities in wealth as it is “a powerful predictor of individual educational and economic outcomes, and despite their significantly lower homeownership … the long-run consequences of these gaps are substantively important and difficult to overcome.”28