Black couple win discrimination case after their house value was lowballed

The couple sued for discrimination.

The Austins, whose case was featured in the ABC documentary Our America: Lowballed, settled a federal civil rights lawsuit on Tuesday against Janette Miller and Miller and Perotti Real Estate Appraisals Inc, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

They will receive an undisclosed amount in financial compensation from Janette Miller and her firm, Miller and Perotti Real Estate Appraisals, the publication reported. Miller is also required to attend housing discrimination prevention training and to watch the documentary.

Those devaluations exacerbated the already-growing wealth gap between families of color and white ones. In 2021, an analysis of more than 12m housing appraisals from Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, also known as Freddie Mac, found that homes in Black neighborhoods were devalued as much as 23% on average compared to homes in white neighborhoods.

Unlike previous studies, Junia Howell, a visiting professor of sociology at the University of Illinois Chicago, and Elizabeth Korver-Glenn, an assistant professor of sociology at Washington University in St Louis, analyzed more than 47m appraisal reports collected from licensed appraisers between 2013 and 2022. The data had been made public for the first time, a decade after Howell and Korver-Glenn first pursued it.

And the largest appraisal gap came between the value of homes in white neighborhoods and those in American Indian, Alaska Native, south-east Asian and Pacific Islander communities.

Between 2020 and 2022, driven by the pandemic and monetary policy choices, the average value of a home in a white neighborhoods rose more than twice that of homes in neighborhoods of color.

But it went beyond the way individual appraisers determined home values and pointed to structural racism: when controlling for property size, quality and neighborhood factors at identical properties in white, Black and Latin neighborhoods, they found that homes in white Houston neighborhoods were worth more than twice that of similar properties in Black and Latino neighborhoods in 2015.

Years later, Howell and Korver-Glenn found that among the 107 largest metropolitan areas from 1980 to 2015, homes in white neighborhoods were valued as $246,000 more than comparable homes in socioeconomically comparable communities of color. And those values in white neighborhoods rose seven times that of those in neighborhoods of color.

Howell noted the cases that captured attention and emerged in public lawsuits indicated that there were far more cases among the millions of appraisals that take place each year where disparate home valuations go unnoticed.