When embarking on the journey of buying a home, two paramount considerations often come to mind: the safety of the neighborhood and the quality of the local public schools, especially if you already have or anticipate having children.
However, during the Obama administration, there was an effort to curb real estate agents from providing answers to these crucial questions, as the focus shifted towards promoting “diversity” at the expense of addressing safety and educational quality.
This year, President Donald Trump’s administration rolled back these restrictions, yet the repercussions of the policies instituted by Joe Biden’s team continue to be felt by many.
Compounding the issue, state regulations in places like New York are still silencing real estate agents, inhibiting them from freely discussing vital information about crime rates and school performance with prospective homebuyers.
Intriguingly, the Biden administration made meddling with home buying one of its early actions after taking office.
Six days after he was sworn into office, Biden issued his directive establishing enforcement priorities for the Department of Housing and Urban Development aimed at scaring real-estate agents into remaining silent on two of the subjects most important to their clients.
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“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 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 — 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 diversity, equity and inclusion — but it also testifies to the association’s worry that fair-housing laws would be interpreted aggressively, and that realtors who did tell their clients too much would run the risk of punishment.
In April, Trump’s HUD 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,” the department proclaimed.
The “Dear Colleague” letter from Assistant Secretary Craig Trainor went into considerable detail to “strongly urge” 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 its members “may be subject to liability under (New York state) law” if they 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, 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 a prospective 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 shielding 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.
It’s a big story, one that ought to be on voters’ minds as they consider 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 must speak up themselves — at the ballot box.
Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.