This will now be my favorite example of anyone who says people are not affected by racism in the US anymore.
All this particular stunt shows is that two appraisers can and will appraise a home wildly differently — which anyone who has their home appraised already knew.
This is not an isolated incident, there are dozens of lawsuits and the study from the Brookings institute linked elsewhere in this thread.
It would be nice, however, if the paper of record didn’t call out a home appraiser, by name, in front of a national audience, with no evidence, as being a racist.
A) the historical evidence about discrimination at every level in the housing system
B) the study from the brookings institute showing bias with housing appraisal
I’m also not claiming all of the burden of proof should lie with the accused.
What I am saying is given the anecdotes, lawsuits, and retrospective analysis, I think it’s fair to put more pressure on the system to help with investigating the issue more systematically.
Getting the type of statistical evidence you are talking about is expensive and I think there are enough indications that 0% of the cost seems like too low of a cost to expect a huge industry to cover.
If you want the state to fund systematic investigation of systemic crimes, then fine.
> I’m also not claiming all of the burden of proof should lie with the accused.
None of the burden of proof should lie with the accused.
So I think we are probably aligned that Government Sponsored Enterprises should be spending some time looking into this given the (weaker) evidence that's already there.
If systemic issues with appraisal are found there, it seems fair to me that there should be some regulation and/or state-sponsored investigation of whether the same systemic issues are happening with purely private appraisal.
People do a bad job all the time, and people are assholes all the time. This is what makes the entire thing so tricky: if we could clearly identify what is or isn't racism then we could simply investigate allegations, fine people, and the problem would be solved in a year. But we can't; all we can do is do some sort of broad study and say that in general there may be some racism at play, and even doing that well is hard because there's loads of factors to control for.
If he had done ten of these appraisals and the "black family" ones consistently came out lower than the "white family" ones then yeah, that's pretty clear-cut. But two? It doesn't prove anything.