CREATIVE NON-FICTION
Housing Discrimination is Not a Thing of the Past in the United States
She was cold and suddenly had concerns about whether we would qualify for a loan
When my wife and I entered our very first model home to begin house-hunting 5 years ago, we experienced the sort of racist incident that most white people I’ve known assume doesn’t happen anymore, thanks to “long established legal advances in Civil Rights”.
I had forgotten something in the car, so my wife walked in first. They later told me that the real estate agent refused to speak to them at all or acknowledge their presence. They walked out and passed me. Misinterpreting the situation, I assumed they needed to get something out of the car as well, so I walked inside.
The real estate agent welcomed me and was very warm and kind. She seemed excited to see me and eager to show me the list of options for houses we could buy. Then, my wife entered again behind me. The change was instantaneous, as soon as the real estate agent realized we were together. She never made eye contact with my wife. She just pretended they had never entered the room again.
She seemed excited to see me and eager to show me the list of options for houses we could buy. Then, my wife entered. The change was instantaneous.
Her demeanor was completely different. She was cold and suddenly had concerns about whether we would qualify for a loan. She didn’t have time to show us any houses just then, despite there being no evidence of anyone else to keep her busy. We’d need to come back later. I don’t remember the list of things we now needed to do to get her to show us a house. Her added barrage of words faded behind the change in her tone and her abandoned smile.
It was clear what was happening, so it no longer mattered to either of us what she was saying. We weren’t going to get to look at any houses with her. There would always be another reason to justify that. If we could somehow get past all of her new roadblocks, she certainly wouldn’t be showing us the customer service required to earn her commission. My wife grabbed my hand and lead me out of there without another word. Wanting to feel like we had accomplished something, we walked next door to the model home of a different builder in the same neighborhood, where we were welcomed and shown the home that we later purchased.
The first builder owned every other home in our neighborhood. If your address was an odd number, the racist real estate agent sold your home to you. I noted this as I walked though our neighborhood even a couple of years later. If your address was an odd number, my quick visual verification performed over and over across many walks on many days noted that everyone in your household was white. If your address was an even number, there was at least a chance that you could be POC.
There are lots of subtle ways to limit “diversity” to a token number of homeowners.
If your address was an odd number, you probably would have been none the wiser about your whiteness making this process easier for you because you would have been focused on all the other ways that buying a house is difficult. I would think about it every time I walked around this neighborhood though, especially when I saw signs advertising people of different races living in our “diverse” community. There are lots of subtle ways to limit “diversity” to a token number of homeowners.
When I tell this story, people almost always respond with this question: “Why didn’t you report her for housing discrimination?” My answer is similar to the reason why I haven’t reported my most recent employer for firing me illegally, much less tried to sue them. Even if the evidence of this wasn’t all verbal and difficult for one couple experiencing it to prove in court, these things don’t tend to happen when you have lots of time and money on your hands to drop everything for a lawsuit.
When I tell this story, people almost always respond with this question: “Why didn’t you report her for housing discrimination?”
We would likely have had to find other people of different races to help us verify that discrimination was happening by replicating the scenario, so they could serve as additional witnesses. At the time, we were paying a little rent to live with family members who really wanted us to move out ASAP and let us know it as often as possible. We needed to buy a house fast.
Moving into another apartment would lock us into a lease or give us a much higher month-to-month rent payment that would turn buying a house back into a fantasy that was out of reach. As it was, we only qualified to buy this house because it was in a rural area, allowing us to take advantage of an almost zero down loan. Had we known we were both going to come out as trans while living here, we might have thought twice about going this route into homeownership in the South of the United States, where rural areas aren’t famous for being welcoming to trans people. We’re currently in the process of preparing to sell our house for this very reason.
If you’ve ever put your house up for sale the traditional way, you may have heard someone tell you to “neutralize” your house. This will mean something very different to you, if you are cis, heterosexual, a monolingual English speaker, and white where we live. For most people, it means making sure your walls are a beige or white color. It means hiding any overt signs of a political affiliation. For us, “neutralizing” our house means hiding evidence of parts of ourselves that prejudiced people might find offensive.
For us, “neutralizing” our house means hiding evidence of parts of ourselves that prejudiced people might find offensive.
That goes beyond the obvious layers of prejudice. When you want someone to buy your home, you want them to picture themselves in it, right? You don’t want them to be distracted by anything that makes them think the owner of the house is culturally very different from them. That’s easier if everything about you is more like the majority of the people walking through your house.
We’ve been packing away and hiding identity markers. We bought a different welcome mat to replace the rainbow one, for example. Some cis heterosexual people might have such a welcome mat to show allyship, but even that is considered a political statement, not “neutral”, and certainly not common enough to make people assume that we could be kind allies instead of a married couple collecting as many letters of the LGBTQIA+ acronym together as possible. We’ve hidden the sorts of artifacts of other cultures and languages that a white person wouldn’t be likely to appropriate to appear more “exotic”. It’s not as profitable to have such items if people don’t know for sure that you’re white.
“Neutralizing” our house has been one reminder after another that we aren’t considered normal here and that we aren’t welcome here. We’re taking that in stride the best we can. No one buying our house should have a right to know that we are a queer, trans, interracial married couple, anyway. They should be focused on whether they like the house and whether it is clean. In the end, we hope to take their money and use it to flee to a place where we both feel safer to be ourselves.
Edit (May 26, 2022): After reading some of the comments, I wanted to clarify that this writing was in no way meant as a criticism of our current realtor, who we deeply appreciate and absolutely love. This person’s honesty has been refreshing and protective of our interests as we sell our house. My goal in writing this was to raise awareness that housing discrimination is a current issue that still needs to be addressed. I hope that this encourages readers to perhaps examine our unconscious biases. We all have biases; awareness is key to overcoming them. I also wanted to offer solidarity with readers who may have experienced similar things and provide a space in my comments for anyone who wanted to share and receive support for their own stories of discrimination.
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