Chapter 1.1: Introduction
March 2005
This e-book is a compendium of
articles I have published on discrimination in housing. It includes
all of my publications on this topic that are available on the
internet. Some of these publications require a subscription to
www.jstor.org or
www.sciencedirect.com,
which are now provided by virtually all universities.
This e-book also includes a working paper and a policy brief. My
hope is that organizing these articles and papers and presenting
them in this form will help to make my research more accessible to
scholars interested in this topic.
Many of the chapters in this e-book are
co-authored, and I am grateful to my co-authors for their vital
contributions to these projects.
This e-book is a complement to my 1995 book
on discrimination in housing (Yinger, 1995). That book provides a
broad overview of the literature, whereas the chapters of this
e-book provide an in-depth look at specific questions about
discrimination in housing.
Both books rely heavily on data collected
using fair housing audits, which are a matched-pair technique
designed to determine how often and under what circumstances housing
agents treat customers differently because of their race or
ethnicity. This technique is described in all the articles in Parts
1 through 3 of this e-book, which proves that repetition is a
disadvantage of the e-book form, and in even more detail in Yinger
(1995, Chapter 2).
The main sources of these audit data are
two national studies sponsored by the U.S. Department of Housing and
Urban Development, namely, the 1989 and 2000 Housing Discrimination
Studies. For detailed discussions of these two studies, see Yinger
(1995, Chapter 2) and Turner et al. (2002), respectively.
This e-book has six parts.
The first part, “Introduction and Overview,” includes not only this
chapter, but also several publications that provide a broad look at
the level and causes of discrimination in both the sales and rental
markets. Chapter 1.2, “Measuring Racial Discrimination with
Fair Housing Audits: Caught in the Act,” develops an econometric
framework for studying discrimination with fair housing audits and
presents results for discrimination in the number of housing units
shown based on audits conducted in Boston in 1981. This part concludes with Chapter 1.3, “Evidence on
Discrimination in Consumer Markets,” which provides a recent survey
of the literature on discrimination in the housing and automobile
markets.
Part 2, “Measuring Discrimination,” includes articles that discuss
basic questions about defining and measuring housing
discrimination. The one chapter in this part is “How Common is
Housing Discrimination? Improving on Traditional Measures,” which
is co-authored with Jan Ondrich and Stephen Ross. This chapter
explores the question of how to measure the incidence of
discrimination using fair housing audit data. This topic is
introduced in Part 1, but covered in more depth here. Other
publications of mine that discuss this issue include Yinger (1993,
1995).
Part 3, “The Causes
of Discrimination by Rental Agents,” focuses on the rental market
using data from the 1989 and 2000 Housing Discrimination Studies.
Chapter 3.1 (co-authored with Jan Ondrich and Alex Stricker) is
based on the 1989 HDS and Chapter 3.2 (co-authored with Jan Ondrich
and Seok Joon Choi) is based on the 2000 HDS. Both of these
chapters focus on discrimination in discrete actions by landlords,
such as the decision to show an advertised unit to a customer, and
both chapters make use of the fixed-effects logit technique. The
causes of discrimination in other types of rental agent actions in
1989 are examined by Yinger (1991, 1995).
The sales market is
examined in Part 4, “The Causes of Discrimination by Real Estate
Brokers.” This part contains three chapters.
The
first and second chapters, which use data from the 1989 HDS, are
based on a new approach to studying the causes of discrimination. In
particular, these chapters, both of which are co-authored with Jan
Ondrich and Stephen Ross, change the unit of observation from an
audit to a housing unit. Instead of investigating the circumstances
under which a minority auditor is treated less favorably than his or
her majority teammate, these chapters investigate the circumstances
under which a particular housing unit is shown to both auditors, to
the majority auditor only, or to the minority auditor. Chapter 4.2,
“Geography of Housing Discrimination” uses this technique to study
to spatial dimension of discrimination in five urban areas. Chapter
4.3, “Now You See It, Now You Don't: Why Do Real Estate Agents
Withhold Houses from Black Customers?,” applies this technique to
the full HDS 1989 sample and asks whether discrimination depends on
the match between a housing unit and the unit initially requested by
the customer.
The third chapter,
co-authored with Bo Zhao and Jan Ondrich, examines the causes of
discrimination in discrete actions by real estate brokers using the
2000 HDS. This chapters relies on the same technique used for the
chapters in Part 2, namely, a fixed-effects logit. A comparable
analysis based on the 1989 HDS is provided by Ondrich, Stricker, and
Yinger (1998).
The second and third chapters
in Part 4, which use data from the 1989 HDS, are based on a
different approach to studying the causes of discrimination. In
particular, these chapters, both of which are co-authored with Jan
Ondrich and Stephen Ross, change the unit of observation from an
audit to a housing unit. Instead of investigating the circumstances
under which a minority auditor is treated less favorably than his or
her majority teammate, these chapters investigate the circumstances
under which a particular housing unit is shown to both auditors, to
the majority auditor only, or to the minority auditor. Chapter
4.2,
“Geography of Housing Discrimination” uses this technique to study
to spatial dimension of discrimination in five urban areas. Chapter
4.3, “Now You See It, Now You Don't: Why Do Real Estate Agents
Withhold Houses from Black Customers?,” applies this technique to
the full HDS 1989 sample and asks whether discrimination depends on
the match between a housing unit and the unit initially requested by
the customer.
The causes of discrimination
in other types of behavior by real estate brokers in the 1989 HDS
are examined by Page (1995), Turner and Mickelsons (1992), and
Yinger (1991, 1995). In addition, Zhao (Forthcoming) uses the 2000 HDS to
examine the causes of discrimination in the number of houses a
broker shows to a customer.
Part
5 of
this e-book addresses “The Consequences of Discrimination.” It
includes one chapter, namely, “Cash in Your Face: The Cost of Racial
and Ethnic Discrimination in Housing.” This chapter provides a
way to measure the monetary cost of housing discrimination by
calculating the loss in consumer surplus it imposes on the
households that encounter it. Other publications of mine that
address the consequences of discrimination include Courant and
Yinger (1977) and Yinger (1976, 1978, 1995, 2001).
The final part of this book addresses “Fair Housing Policy.” Chapter
6.1
is titled
“Opening Doors: How to Cut Discrimination by Supporting
Neighborhood Integration.” This chapter explains how government
programs to promote grass-root integration efforts might help to
combat discrimination in housing.
The second chapter, “Housing Discrimination is Still Worth Worrying
About,” examines the available evidence concerning housing
discrimination and argues, based on this evidence, that strong
fair-housing enforcement actions by the federal government are still
needed. Finally,
Chapter 6.3,
“Sustaining the Fair Housing Act,” examines the history and legacy
of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and argues that it still has a vital
role to play.
Housing
discrimination is still a disturbingly common type of behavior with
important implications for our society. I hope this e-book proves
helpful to people interested in this topic. In addition, interested
scholars can also obtain fair housing audit data elsewhere on my
website (http://faculty.maxwell.syr.edu/jyinger/Computer_Programs/Downloadable_Data_Sets/DataSets.htm).
References
Courant, Paul N., and John
Yinger. 1977. “On Models of Racial Prejudice and Urban Residential
Structure.” Journal of Urban Economics, July, pp. 272‑291.
Ondrich, Jan, Alex Stricker,
and John Yinger, "Do Real Estate Brokers Choose to Discriminate?
Evidence from the 1989 Housing Discrimination Study." Southern
Economic Journal, April 1998, pp. 880-901.
Page, Marianne. 1995. “Racial
and Ethnic Discrimination in Urban Housing Markets.” Journal of
Urban Economics, September, pp. 183-206.
Turner, Margery Austin, and
Maris Mickelsons. 1992. “Patterns of Racial Steering in Four
Metropolitan Areas.” Journal of Housing Economics,
September, pp. 199-234.
Turner, Margery A., Stephen L.
Ross, George Galster, and John Yinger. 2002. Discrimination in
Metropolitan Housing Markets: National Results from Phase 1 HDS
2000. Washington, D.C.: The Urban Institute, November.
Yinger, John. 2001. “Housing
Discrimination and Residential Segregation as Causes of Poverty.”
In Understanding Poverty in America, edited by S.H. Danziger
and R.H. Haveman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), pp.
359-391.
Yinger, John. 1995.
Closed Doors, Opportunities Lost: The Continuing Costs of Housing
Discrimination. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Yinger, John. 1993. “Access
Denied, Access Constrained: Results and Implications of the
1989 Housing Discrimination Study.” In Clear and Convincing
Evidence: Measurement of Discrimination in America, edited by M.
Fix and R. Struyk (Washington, D.C.: The Urban Institute Press),
pp. 69-112.
Yinger, John. 1991.
"Acts of Discrimination: Evidence from the 1989 Housing
Discrimination Study." Journal of Housing Economics, December 1991,
pp. 318-346.
Yinger, John. 1978. “The
Black‑White Price Differential in Housing: Some Further
Evidence.” Land Economics, May, pp. 187‑206.
Yinger, John. 1976. “Racial
Prejudice and Racial Residential Segregation in an Urban Model.”
Journal of Urban Economics, October, pp. 383‑396.
Zhao, Bo. Forthcoming. “Does
the Number of Houses a Broker Shows Depend on a Homeseeker’s Race?,
Journal of Urban Economics.
