Editorial: Housing discrimination

Saturday, April 29, 2006 | 7:28 a.m.

The nonprofit National Fair Housing Alliance, by sending people out to pose as home buyers, has undertaken tests to see if racial discrimination exists among real estate agents. The Washington-based alliance, which works to promote equal access to housing, found that real estate agents illegally "steered" white home buyers to predominantly white neighborhoods and steered minority buyers to minority neighborhoods in 87 percent of the cases in which testers were given the opportunity to tour homes.

In testing that began in 2003, the alliance sent 145 pairs of test buyers to 73 real estate sales offices in 12 cities in the East, South and Midwest: Atlanta; Austin, Texas; Birmingham, Ala.; Chicago; Dayton, Ohio; Detroit; Mobile, Ala.; New York City; Philadelphia; Pittsburgh; San Antonio, and Washington, D.C. In each case, a white test buyer and either a black or Hispanic test buyer was sent to the same sales office.

The study, partially funded by the Housing and Urban Development Department, also reported that agents offered financial incentives to whites but not black and Hispanic buyers.

In some cases, real estate agents attempted to avoid the appearance of racism by steering white buyers to neighborhoods with what agents described as good schools - almost always white neighborhoods, according to the report. In other cases, agents were more direct: One agent in Georgia told a white tester, "Once blacks move in then property values go down - it is impossible to sell your house."

The impact of housing discrimination is insidious in so many ways, such as perpetuating segregated schools and feeding the roots of racism that are still planted in the nation's vast fabric of neighborhoods and cities.

Congress and HUD should adopt some of the recommendations from the National Fair Housing Alliance. Among those is a call for increased federal spending for fair housing investigations and enforcement and the creation of new fair housing groups, which often help real estate companies set up effective self-monitoring programs.

We must do better. It's a disgrace that, nearly four decades after passage of the Fair Housing Act, home buyers are suffering discrimination in their pursuit of the American Dream.