I find the news sections of the Wall Street Journal so much more reliable (which is to say, among other things, bias free) than the rest of the mainstream press that it seems almost churlish to pick a nit with one of its articles. Still, if DISCRIMINATIONS had a mission statement it would require us to be as vigilant and unforgiving with our allies as with all others, and thus I must say that I found Troy McMullen’s “Trouble in Paradise” troubling.
It purports to report an increase in housing discrimination, paying particular attention to the market for vacation homes. “Discrimination,” McMullen writes somewhat ominously,
apparently doesn’t go on vacation. As part of the past decade’s real-estate boom, minority home-ownership has grown. About 52% of minorities owned their own homes in 2005, up from 48.8% in 2001. Affluent minorities have also been scooping up vacation homes, nearly doubling their share of the second-home market in recent years: African-Americans, Latinos and Asians accounted for 11% of vacation-home purchases between 2003 and 2005, up from 6% in 2002 or earlier, according to the National Association of Realtors.
And now comes the kicker:
But as second-home purchases by minorities have risen, so have the number of real-estate-related discrimination complaints in those markets, say housing watchdog groups and lawyers.
But what does this really mean? If, let’s say, less than 1% of all minority home buyers file discrimination complains (I just made us that number; I have not idea what the real number is), and lots more minorities are buying vacation homes, then of course “the number of real-estate-related discrimination complaints in those markets” will increase. But does that mean discrimination is increasing? Who knows. Certainly can’t tell from the article.
The author actually seems to be aware of this fairly large ambiguity (Is discrimination increasing, or not?) at the core of his report. Thus:
Such discrimination isn’t new, of course, and it’s unclear whether the growth in bias complaints outpaces the growth in minority second-home purchases. And vacation-home cases constitute a small portion of overall race-based housing discrimination matters, with the vast majority still coming from low- and middle-income neighborhoods.
Still, some housing experts say they’re struck by the number of complaints in many popular vacation-home markets….
/But if, for example, the rate of discrimination complaints have actually declined, do we really care enough about what “housing experts” are “struck” by to read a large article about it in the Wall Street Journal?
Overall, the picture of minority housing seems rosier than stressing an increase in discrimination cases would suggest. As McMullen acknowledges,
General homeownership rates for minorities stand at record levels, and the number of housing-discrimination claims for all federally protected classes (disability, religion, sex, race, family status, national origin and color) declined more than 4% in 2005 from the previous year, to 26,092. The percentage of discrimination claims based solely on race declined as well, according to the NFHA. African-Americans filed the most racial complaints, followed by Hispanics.
As with many discussions of housing discrimination, in short, the anecdotes presented here are telling, but the picture these anecdotes are meant to reveal remains murky and unclear.
It’s almost as though a reporter uncovered data revealing a dramatic increase in automobile ownership by minorities and then wrote a story lamenting the increased numbers of blacks experiencing car trouble.
