Are you being steered? You’re not alone.

This recent article is a painful reminder of the housing inequalities still prevalent today.

Study finds steering still far too common
-By Kenneth R. Harney, Seattle Times

Are minority home buyers treated differently from whites by real-estate agents? Ask that question to most agents, and you’ll almost certainly get indignant denials. But a new two-year study, funded in part by the federal government, suggests that at least for some agents, discriminatory practices are routine.

The study, from 2003 through mid-2005 in 12 metropolitan areas, used teams of “paired testers” — individuals or couples posing as home seekers to compare how agents treat African Americans, Latinos and whites. The 73 unidentified real-estate firms tested were in the Washington, D.C.; New York; Chicago; Philadelphia; San Antonio; Detroit; Atlanta; Austin, Texas; Birmingham and Mobile, Ala.; Dayton, Ohio; and Pittsburgh areas. The nonprofit National Fair Housing Alliance conducted the tests with financial support from the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The methodology involved sending testers of different racial backgrounds to the same firms looking to buy a home. Each firm was visited by white testers and by either African-American or Latino testers. The African-American and Latino testers were assigned financial qualifications slightly superior to those of white testers. They had higher incomes, could make larger down payments, had longer employment tenures and could afford costlier houses than the white testers.

The results were sobering: White shoppers routinely were steered away from houses in predominantly minority or racially mixed neighborhoods, even when they expressed interest in those areas. African-Americans and Latinos routinely were steered to minority neighborhoods and away from more affluent, white neighborhoods, even when they wanted to see houses there.

Steve Cook, a spokesman for the National Association of Realtors, said, “We agree there is still work to be done in fair housing.” He noted that the 1.3 million-member association actively offers training programs to agents and member companies across the country.