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The devaluation of majority-black neighborhoods is penalizing home owners in black neighborhoods by
an average of $48,000 per home, amounting to $156 billion in cumulative losses. Over the years,
segregation has negatively affected neighborhood conditions—fewer quality schools, in particular—and
reduced the quality of homes by limiting access to finance. However, differences in home and
neighborhood quality do not fully explain the lower prices. In addition, there are positive but overlooked
assets in black communities like walkability of black neighborhoods and access to public transportation.
The finding that black children born into low-income families achieve higher incomes as adults if they
grew up in metro areas where homes were less devalued is noteworthy and could be strengthened with
further work that more directly links discrimination to barriers to mobility and explores the potential for
neighborhood devaluation to serve as an active agent that worsens outcomes for blacks and their
children.
The undervaluation of black assets in housing markets has other important social implications. Black
homeowners realize lower wealth accumulation, which, among other effects, makes it more difficult to
start and invest in business enterprises and afford college tuition for their children.
We hope to better identify some of the causes for this devaluation—including potential psychological
mechanisms—in subsequent research. Some of the most enduring and pernicious effects of the more
than 350 years of slavery, Jim Crow racism, as well as de jure and de facto segregation in the U.S., have
been the internalization of stereotypes, insults, and dehumanizing innuendos about black people,
stemming from the malevolent use of such tropes by the (white) people in power to justify
discrimination—what researchers describe as unconscious bias. Our findings were generally consistent
with the widespread presence of anti-black bias—whether unconscious or not, ingrained stereotypes and
automatic associations of a particular group, and even outright discrimination and racism.
By controlling for commonly held causes of price differences including education, lower home quality, and
crime, the work of myself and my colleagues suggests that bias is likely to be a large part of the
unexplained devaluation of black neighborhoods and some perspective on how anti-black beliefs distort
the value of assets. In the absence of representative survey data on racist beliefs at the metropolitan scale,
we can’t see the degree and nature of devaluation in the context of cities. Our future work aims to collect
and analyze subjective survey data to see how people from different races view each other and their
neighborhoods.
Chairwoman Clay, Ranking Member Duffy, Ranking Member Gooden,
Thank you again for inviting me to be here with you today. I look forward to addressing your questions
and hope to work with you in the future.
The author would like to thank Jonathan Rothwell, David Harshbarger, and Anthony Fiano for their help in
compiling this testimony.
The views expressed in these written remarks are those of the author alone and do not necessarily represent
those of the staff, officers, or trustees of the Brookings Institution.