Light camera action.
One of those like paper
things that's like, that
goes well, I do actually.
Quiet on the set. Action, action.
When is breakfast getting ready?
That's about it.
In the Clark home kitchen.
Conversations sizzle in life lessons
you handed down from Father to son.
Generational wealth is property
or money that you pass down for
generations, generations to come.
Even at just 10 years old, jaxton knows,
OK, dreams are free, but wealth takes work.
The first step setting
down roots. It's been four years since the
Clarks bought this Columbia City home.
The homes are selling for over $1,000,000.
I'll go wears this off OK.
But while the Clarks were renovating,
put in the new kitchen,
a home appraiser sent by their
mortgage company told them the
value of their home had gone down.
My agent asked me how was
the appraisal is like?
It came in really low.
He's like, oh, what was it,
809 hundred thousand?
And I'm like, no, no,
it was in the sixes
$670,000. Would be exact.
It was quite amazing to have appraisal
that low in this neighborhood.
Earlier this year, Seattle real
estate prices hit record highs.
So Joe's appraisal seemed questionably low.
According to Zillow data,
the typical home value in Joe's neighborhood
this spring was over $900,000. I just
want to make sure that we
get the fair market value
for the home. So
Joe staged an experiment.
He scheduled a second appraisal
and asked his white neighbor Marta
Yewell to be his stand in. The
objective was to see if you
had a person that was not
someone of color in the house.
Changed the amount that he got
for the appraisal to see if there
was some kind of bias there. Here
we have the African art. I took these
down as well.
Joe began the process of what he
calls whitewashing his home. This one
here is a picture of my grandparents,
this picture of my daughter at
Christmas time. I took him down.
So the second appraisal
and this time when the new appraiser
came weeks later, they saw Mardas
white face instead of Joe's.
The second appraisal came back over
$300,000 higher than the first one. We got
the lower price and the neighbor got a
higher price than what the house is worth.
The good thing of that thing,
that's a bad thing for us, yeah.
But I was mad that that we had to
go through that in order to get him
an appraisal that was in line with
what the rest of the neighborhood has
because it is part of our systematic
racism that we have here in America. We
took a closer look into the differences
between the two appraisals to find
out how they could be so far apart.
It's taken away our generational wealth.
We know appraisals are largely
based on what similar homes in
the area have sold for, but
there's no set standard of what that is.
Where they draw those lines differ,
and that can be a problem.
Doctor Junia Howell is an urban
sociologist and race scholar
who studies home appraisal
disparities across the country.
Am I surprised by this case?
I've seen a lot of them.
They're not an anomaly.
Take a look at Joe's first
low appraisal from April.
To assess the value,
the appraiser chose comparable or
similar homes that had sold up to
two miles away for around $600,000
over the previous six months.
Now look at Joe's second appraisal.
Need to continue?
Count some homes nearby sold
for more than $1,000,000,
including the home right next door to Joe's.
Using that critical context to compare,
the second appraisal was $300,000.
Higher homes
and communities of color are
worth 70% less on average.
When holding everything else constant
as homes in white neighborhoods.
It's really insane
that disparity adds up.
A recent study by the Brookings
Institute found the appraisal
differences amounted to roughly 48.
$1000 per home,
or $156 billion cumulatively in
majority black neighborhoods.
Because our black and brown
families homes are often devalued,
they're often taken away from us.
Joe and his family are navigating
a system that is deeply rooted
in documented racist rhetoric.
Appraisal manuals from the 1930s all
the way to the 70s had perpetuated the
belief that race was linked to value.
Look at this manual from 1946.
They ranked, in their words,
******* and Mexicans at the bottom
of this list of who brings value
to a neighborhood at the top,
white Europeans.
That's racist and historically
deeply problematic and contemporarily
affecting real people's lives and
ways that we can collectively
push against and say we want.
And we demand better. Such
discrimination became illegal under
the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
But while the manuals may have
changed the diversity of the people.
Determining home values hasn't according
to the US Department of Labor,
96.5% of appraisers are still white.
We have to have those conversations
about race that most other white
families do not have to have.
He wants me to be successful in life. We're
fighting for the next generation.
For Joe, that means not worrying if the
color of his skin will impact the value
of what he can pass down to his kids.
So I wouldn't have to struggle
or minimize those struggles as
a black man in America. Nice.
Several States and Congress are now
considering legislation that would
deal with these appraisal disparities.
So far, Washington's not on that list.
If you feel like you've
received a bias home appraisal,
we have information about
where you can report it.
Text the word home to
20644845454. Facing race. I'm PJ randhawa.