I’m still waiting for Trulia’s changes to Voices, but this question that was asked today was perfect for what I had planned to write about anyway:
Is central Phoenix an African American area of town?
Already in Trulia Voices, the question has a few answers, many of them asking for the question to be removed. Honestly, I don’t know if the question violates Trulia’s terms and conditions, but it seems to me to be a fair question for a person to want to ask. It doesn’t scare me in the slightest, and I don’t see the need for it to be removed.
The dilemma is that it’s not a question that a real estate agent can answer directly, per fair housing laws. Specifically, Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 (Fair Housing Act), as amended, prohibits discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of dwellings, and in other housing-related transactions, based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status (including children under the age of 18 living with parents of legal custodians, pregnant women, and people securing custody of children under the age of 18), and handicap (disability). The preceding is pulled directly from HUD’s website.
When a question like this is asked (and you can change “African American” to any race, religion, etc.), one can assume it’s being asked for 1 or 2 reasons: a) the person desires to live near the people being asked about b) the person desires to live away from the people being asked about. And honestly, as a real estate professional, you can never be sure which it is. Any assumptions about the motivations for the question an agent may make are likely to lead to serious legal and ethical violations, which can further lead to fines, loss of license, and even jail time. It’s federal law, and thus perhaps this is why the respondents at Trulia want to see the question removed.
My guess, is that the person asking the question doesn’t know the law. It’s not a law that many people ever come in contact with, so why should we assume they know the law? Because of this, I assume the person asking the question doesn’t know the law. I then answer as follows: Per fair housing laws, I’m prohibited from answering your question. Instead, if the answer to that question is of material interest to you, I would advise you to drive and/or walk around the neighborhood. Possibly knock on a few doors and talk with the neighbors. Researching a neighborhood can take time, and as a suggestion, you might want to come back at various times of the day and/or days of the week.
I’m reminded of an apartment hunting expedition I was on, when I was in college (some 20 years ago). During my junior year, I took a co-op with IBM in Dallas, TX for 7 months. I had researched some apartment locations before heading out, and thought I knew where I wanted to live, due to the proximity to IBM and the rent. Upon arriving in Dallas, I started to feel uneasy about the complex I had selected. There wasn’t any one thing in particular that caused my unease, but a culmination of factors, like the types of cars in the parking lot, the condition of the complex, and the neighboring businesses. I was looking in the middle of the day, so (presumably) most people were at work. After 30 minutes I told the leasing agent that I couldn’t live here. It was a decision I made after, “walking around” and realizing I wouldn’t feel comfortable in my own apartment. That’s a decision a real estate agent cannot make for their client, but one the client must make for themselves.
As a licensed real estate agent, I can limit property locations based upon financial and geographical needs. If someone wants to live within ABC minutes of X, at a price of no more than Y, that defines the search area. Within that search area, I must include every candidate home that matches their internal and external feature requests. Most people will have a rough idea of where they want to live, as it relates to either where they work, where someone goes to school, or the hobbies they most enjoy. Some people are extremely flexible when it comes to location, and honestly they can be the most difficult to help place, because nearly every part of town will have a home that is suitable. But regardless, I cannot use any discriminatory selector, as defined by HUD, in further narrowing down a search area.
So again, the best advice I can offer to someone that wants to live near or away from certain other people, is to walk or drive the neighborhoods in question and then meet the people that live there.
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