Collaborative Research: The Impacts of Racial Discrimination on Housing Choice and Economic Well-Being in the United States

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This award funds research on how renters choose where to live. The choice of residential location is a critical economic decision for households in the United States. Renters search for housing that best meets their needs given their budget. This includes considering affordability, the specifics of the apartment or house as well as desired neighborhood features. However, some renters may face discrimination from landlords and property managers. Housing market discrimination could steer renters into specific neighborhoods and distort the housing search process. This project seeks to understand how possible discrimination affects the search process. The team will conduct an innovative field experiment to see how discrimination affects housing searchers. The team will use the results to develop estimates of the social costs of discrimination in rental housing markets. The project will yield new insights to improve fair housing policy.Experimental research on discrimination on housing markets has ignored the role of housing search, making it difficult to disentangle the effect of discrimination behavior on household sorting from the effects of location characteristics. This project integrates a field experiment with an online rental housing platform with a welfare-theoretic framework that takes housing search into account. The field experiment will make use of an innovative use of supercomputing infrastructure to send inquiries to rental housing listings. By examining how landlords and property managers respond to rental inquiries, they will be able to evaluate the impacts of possible discrimination on the choice sets faced by some renters. The welfare-theoretic approach accounts for impacts of discrimination on multiple neighborhood characteristics. It is currently unclear whether discrimination disproportionately hinders the location decisions of households who have preferences for certain attributes of housing or neighborhoods: affordable housing, school quality, safe neighborhoods, or harmful pollution exposures. This project will examine whether certain types of renters are disproportionately affected by discriminatory behavior in the housing market. Finally, the project will give us more accurate estimates of the lost social welfare from housing discrimination.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.