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Nothing is more natural when buying a house than looking into how safe the neighborhood is, and, if you have or plan to have children, whether the schools are any good.
Yet the last Democratic presidential administration tried to prevent real estate agents from answering those kinds of questions because it prioritized “diversity” over safety and education.
The Trump administration revoked the de facto gag rule this year.
The Trump administration this April announced that Realtors and other real estate agents should not feel intimidated - “the Fair Housing Act does not require withholding useful information on school quality and crime statistics,” HUD announced.
The “Dear Colleague” letter from Assistant Secretary Craig Trainor goes into considerable detail and “strongly urges” the real estate industry “to revisit ethics training materials and reconsider public statements that stifle real estate agent speech …”
But the New York Association of Realtors, for one, says it can’t do that because “NYSAR members may be subject to liability under (New York state) law” if they do speak frankly to homebuyers about schools and crime.
How many voters know some state governments - and, under the last Democratic administration, the federal government - are muzzling real estate agents in this way?
How many know how easily the industry rolled over when Biden decided to put homebuyers’ safety and their children’s education at risk?
Buying a home is a trust-intensive process: it’s not only expensive but it ranks alongside marriage as one the most consequential decisions anyone can make, holding the potential for decades of happiness or misery.
Buying a home is buying a future.
It isn’t right to withhold any information a family needs about the neighborhood, and state laws as well as federal ones must put homebuyers - of all races - first, above any political commitment to abstractions like diversity and inclusion.
The point of withholding information about crime and schools is to get more people to buy homes where they otherwise wouldn’t want to live.
What could be more wicked, more destructive, than that?
The intrepid journalist Helen Andrews, who’s never afraid of a controversy, deserves credit for calling attention to this corruption of the real estate industry in a recent essay for the web magazine Compact.
This is a big story, one that ought to be on voters’ minds as they think about the state and local elections, as well as federal ones, coming up in November.