An IDS-funded study led by Max Besbris has found important differences in how ethnic and racial groups perceive and evaluate neighborhoods and how online advertisements shape feelings about how desirable a neighborhood is. In the United States, there are longstanding patterns of residential segregation. Where people live has significant impacts on their access to good schools, jobs, health, and chances to move up economically. A majority of urban residents report using online advertisements and tools as a primary way of finding housing. However, we don’t know much about how these online sources matter for housing inequality.
Besbris and colleagues’ study, titled Ethnoracial Variation in Neighborhood Knowledge and Neighborhood Desirability in the Market for Rental Housing, aims to better understand how online information about housing and neighborhoods matters. Besbris and coauthors Ariela Schacter and John Kuk used millions of rental listings with location data from Craigslist. From these, they developed surveys specific to five large, racially diverse U.S. metro areas by using language from actual listings and neighborhoods to better understand renter knowledge and preferences.
Specifically, they wanted to find out how much new information about neighborhoods mattered relative to prior knowledge. In this case, new information could be information taken from online advertisements while prior knowledge could include information from taken from people’s social networks or housing agents. They additionally measured how perceptions about neighborhoods varied depending on the race/ethnicity of both the neighborhood and the survey respondent. To put it another way, does the information housing seekers see online actually impact where they end up living and, if so, do these differences depend on race and ethnicity?
To do this, Besbris and colleagues used real neighborhood names and language from real online housing ads. They found that people do have prior knowledge about neighborhoods in their metro area, but primarily about neighborhoods where their racial group is the majority. They additionally found that ads do have an impact. A key finding was that online ads for properties in predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods were consistently ranked as less desirable than equivalent properties in predominantly white neighborhoods with lower rates of poverty. This finding suggests that the language used in online ads acts as a signal of how desirable a neighborhood is, which reinforces ways that race impacts perceptions of an area. The study shows that seemingly race-neutral aspects of the housing search process, like the language in online ads, are still influenced by racial biases.
Questions about how and why people choose where to live matter because those choices shape people’s life and socioeconomic outcomes. The research conducted as part of this study has been submitted for peer review, but you can learn more about this work in this Diversity Science Podcast episode with Professor Besbris or this article.