What It Will Take to Close the Race Gap in Home Appraisals
In a major shift, appraisal industry leaders have acknowledged bias in setting home values. Will it be enough to fix the problem?
Disparities in how homes in Black neighborhoods are appraised have widened the wealth gap between Black and white families.
Photographer: Charles Fenno Jacobs/The LIFE Images CollectionNews stories about racial discrimination in appraising home values have been piling up over the last several months, usually with a narrative like this one, reported Feb. 12 in San Francisco: A Black couple saw the appraisal of their home increase by $500,000 after they took down photos of themselves in the house and had a white friend pose on their behalf during the appraiser’s visit.
The lesson in these stories is that if you want to get a fair appraisal and maximum selling price potential for your home, you might need to pretend to be white. That kind of individual bias is just one part of a broader, systemic problem, called “appraisal discrimination” or the “racial appraisal gap.” It’s supported by a long span of research showing that homes in majority-Black neighborhoods have been severely undervalued for decades, widening the wealth gap between Black and white families.