Homes in the Cincinnati Metropolitan Area’s predominantly black neighborhoods appraise for roughly $10,000 less than comparable homes in majority white neighborhoods, according to new research from national think tank the Brookings Institution.
Brookings’ study looked at home values in 113 metropolitan areas across the country, comparing the values in neighborhoods that are 50 percent or more black with those where less than one percent of residents are black. The research found that in most of those places, owner-occupied homes were worth less in areas with high concentrations of black residents, even when controlling for the structural characteristics of housing found in those communities as well as neighborhood amenities there.
In Cincinnati, that devaluation translated to about a 9 percent lower home value when it came to owner-occupied homes in neighborhoods where the population was more than 50 percent black. The median value of a house in predominantly-black neighborhoods in the Cincinnati metro was about $112,000 — about $10,000 less than it would be if the home was in a white neighborhood with the same kind of houses and neighborhood features. That’s still lower than the area’s overall median home value of $135,000, likely because higher-quality housing stock and neighborhood amenities tend to cluster in whiter, higher-income neighborhoods.
“According to our analysis, differences in home and neighborhood quality do not fully explain the devaluation of homes in black neighborhoods,” the study’s authors wrote.
Cincinnati fared better than other Ohio cities in the study. The study found a 20 percent devaluation in Cleveland’s black communities and a 21 percent devaluation in Columbus’.
Nationally, the report found that homes in predominantly black communities are undervalued by as much as $48,000 on average.
The large disparities between black and white neighborhoods when it comes to property values, housing stock and wealth came about in large part due to federal policies and market dynamics in the 20th century, including discriminatory lending practices called redlining that made it hard to get loans in black communities. A CityBeat analysis found that income and wealth gaps existed in almost all of the city’s black neighborhoods due at least in part to these policies.
The authors of the Brookings study contend that while those policies and, to some extent, lending practices have changed, racial disparities persist.
“If we can detect how much racism depletes wealth from black homeowners, we can begin to address bigotry principally by giving black homeowners and policymakers a target price for redress,” the study’s authors write. “Laws have changed, but the value of assets — buildings, schools, leadership, and land itself — are inextricably linked to the perceptions of black people. And those negative perceptions persist.”
This article appears in Mar 13-20, 2019.