Essay On Housing Discrimination

Words: 454
Pages: 2

Buying a house of one’s own represents the classic realization of the American dream. However, many Americans are not given the same treatment or opportunities when buying a house, because of their race. In 2012, a study was conducted where one caucasian and one person of color of the same age and gender with similar qualifications, visited the same housing provider or agent. This study proved how housing discrimination greatly affects achieving the American dream by purchasing a home. The American dream of buying a home is complicated by race in multiple ways. One of these ways is in the number of houses shown to each individual. In more than half of the study’s cases, the white and African American tester were shown the same amount of houses. In the remaining cases, the white tester was usually favored, resulting in the outcome of whites being shown more properties overall. People of color were also not often asked about finances and rarely offered help with financing a loan. There were cases where the real estate agent was especially racist; when they said there were no units available after just showing the white tester two available units, and not helping the person of color because they were not prequalified for a loan when not even asking the white tester if they were prequalified. …show more content…
The article states that white testers were offered lower rents, had negotiable moving-in and deposit prices, and were quoted a lower price. These things add up, and cause the first year rental price for African Americans to be slightly higher than the price for whites. Over a long period of time, blacks would be paying much more for rent than whites. The article also talks about the housing boom. People of color have suffered significantly from predatory lending and were more likely to be offered subprime loans when they qualified for conventional mortgages for a cheaper