The Reliability of Fair Housing Audits to Detect Racial Discrimination in Rental Housing Markets

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Abstract
Racial discrimination against black Americans continues to exert a pervasive influence on all aspects of American life. This paper investigates the reliability of two techniques currently used by local fair housing groups to measure the extent of racial discrimination in the rental housing market: in‐person audits and telephone audits. When we do not control for the presence of vacancies, we observe a moderate rate of reliability between the in‐person audits and the telephone audits. When we control for the presence of vacancies, we observe a much higher degree of reliability between the two methods used to detect racial discrimination in rental housing markets. We conclude that these techniques are useful devices to detect racial discrimination in housing markets.

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