Nothing is more natural when buying a house than looking into how safe the neighborhood is, and, if you have or plan to have children, whether the schools are any good.
Yet the last Democratic presidential administration tried to prevent real estate agents from answering those kinds of questions because it prioritized “diversity” over safety and education.
The Trump administration revoked the de facto gag rule this year, but the damage the Biden administration inflicted is still being felt.
What’s worse, state regulations in New York and elsewhere still prevent real estate agents from speaking freely to homebuyers about crime and schools.
Interfering with homebuyers was a first-week priority for the Biden administration:
Six days after he was sworn into office, Joe Biden issued his directive establishing enforcement priorities for the Department of Housing and Urban Development that would scare real estate agents into remaining silent on two of the subjects most important to their clients.
“Diverse and inclusive communities strengthen our democracy,” the executive memorandum began.
What mom or dad wants their community to be “inclusive” of failing schools?
Who wants diversity to mean mixing criminals with innocent people?
Black families don’t want to live in dangerous or educationally dead-end neighborhoods any more than people of any other color do.
Yet too many progressives believe racial equality is best achieved by demolishing standards for everyone.
That was the effect of Biden’s memo, which made clear that racial politics and the doctrine of “disparate impact” would now guide HUD’s enforcement of federal housing laws.
The major online real estate companies understood immediately what was being demanded of them — Realtor.com and Zillow stopped providing crime data, while Redfin, going out of its way to embrace the party line, even posted a blog proclaiming, “Neighborhood crime data doesn’t belong on real estate sites.”
The National Association of Realtors put up a webpage in early 2023 titled “How to handle client questions about schools and neighborhoods,” which told realtors to point homebuyers to other sources of information rather than providing the facts themselves.
The page is larded with the jargon of DEI — “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” — but it also testifies to the association’s worry that fair-housing laws will be interpreted aggressively, with Realtors who do tell their clients too much running the risk of punishment.
The Trump administration this April announced that Realtors and other real estate agents should not feel intimidated — “the Fair Housing Act does not require withholding useful information on school quality and crime statistics,” HUD announced.
The “Dear Colleague” letter from Assistant Secretary Craig Trainor goes into considerable detail and “strongly urges” the real estate industry “to revisit ethics training materials and reconsider public statements that stifle real estate agent speech …”
But the New York Association of Realtors, for one, says it can’t do that because “NYSAR members may be subject to liability under (New York state) law” if they do speak frankly to homebuyers about schools and crime.
How many voters know some state governments — and, under the last Democratic administration, the federal government — are muzzling real estate agents in this way?
How many know how easily the industry rolled over when Biden decided to put homebuyers’ safety and their children’ s education at risk?
What the Biden administration did was unethical, and the industry did a disservice to its clients by giving in — though perhaps the prospect of selling more homes in bad neighborhoods appealed to the least scrupulous members of the profession.
Buying a home is a trust-intensive process: it’s not only expensive but it ranks alongside marriage as one the most consequential decisions anyone can make, holding the potential for decades of happiness or misery.
Buying a home is buying a future.
It isn’t right to withhold any information a family needs about the neighborhood, and state laws as well as federal ones must put homebuyers — of all races — first, above any political commitment to abstractions like diversity and inclusion.
The point of withholding information about crime and schools is to get more people to buy homes where they otherwise wouldn’t want to live.
What could be more wicked, more destructive, than that?
The intrepid journalist Helen Andrews, who’s never afraid of a controversy, deserves credit for calling attention to this corruption of the real estate industry in a recent essay for the web magazine Compact.
This is a big story, one that ought to be on voters’ minds as they think about the state and local elections, as well as federal ones, coming up in November.
If Americans don’t want their real estate providers gagged, they have to speak up themselves at the ballot box.
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