This whole thing essentially spawned from the advocacy groups which sought to force loan renegotiation with lenders on behalf of the struggling indebted, often urban focused. The groups whom were engaged in such efforts are the same ones advocating legislative proposals, forming new organizations and coalitions along with their lender contacts acquired through that process, to solidify the process of offloading reorganized debt to the taxpayer in the form of pricing subsidies. Helps the lenders too, codifying what was otherwise a charitable write down, transmorphing that into long term government subsidies and a higher corporate bottom line. If the goal is truly for equal access, they’ll need to drive the prices down not up.

Imagine being in the shoes of a home buyer and being asked to check your ethnicity, knowing you could get a substantial government subsidy or price reduction if you checked one box instead of the other one. The list of possible gray areas of qualification consideration are endless. Proposals to see end pricing based on race will inevitably lead to new and innovative forms of fraud. Obviously a common play will be similar to common lending fraud today; acquire home and loan (now at artificially low price), cash out as possible, never pay, default, repeat with another family member who has not defaulted recently.

If there is a problem with the economic standing of any group of persons, the solution is more high paying jobs, better financial education in primary school, etc. Perhaps even something radical like work programs where after you helped build a hundred homes, developing skill sets and a good career in the process, the next home being built would be for you. There are better solutions than using the power of government to impose parity pricing.

I’m not going to touch the racial disparity aspect. AGA has offered several times (to ABC7) to perform appraisal reviews on several alleged erroneous appraisals (attributed to racism in the media). No takers so far.

What I will address is the issue of ‘affordable’ housing. In major urban areas like Los Angeles or any other built-out city, ‘affordable’ housing is a complete myth. It is NOT attainable. Giving developers windfall bonus densities makes a lot of money for them, but does very little in terms of creating affordable housing.

Developer bonuses don’t produce significant numbers of “affordable” units that poor people can actually buy.

Instead, a small percentage of bonus units are sold to “lower-income” than the median for an area (which counts as ‘affordable’). That is not the same as being affordable to the general population or non-owners.

California recently adopted state laws that destroy the concept of low-density single-family residential neighborhoods when they decided that everyone can now build rental units. Even in R1 areas. That MAY have produced affordable rental housing EXCEPT that California then turned around and also told people that ALL rental units in California are now subject to rent control.

Need a tenant to move so your teen age son or daughter can move into the apartment yet still be close to home? No problem. Give the tenant 60 days notice and a check for $4,500 relocation allowance.

I chose to let my rear apartment remain vacant rather than try to rent it out during the Covid “nobody has to pay for anything” epidemic. Since I have to pay water and trash for BOTH units I’d rather not have a tenant using water, without paying anything for rent.

“Affordable” housing is no secret. It’s attainable the same way it was for our grand parents or parents. You MOVE AWAY to lower cost areas.

And that’s exactly the tactic…those who espouse the current en vogue position vis a vis appraisal bias seek to change the thoughts & positions of others not thru meaningful study of causal relationships & often cold truths…but thru the use of fear, intimidation, threat to destroy your business, your income, have you ostracized from colleagues. Such tactics have been used in many countries throughout history, but that’s not a way we as Americans are used to experiencing. As Americans we don’t expect to be forced thru fear to “get on board” with a thought or “conform” our behavior relative to a particular allegation (other than codified law) if they are not consistent with our own thoughts & beliefs. The only thing missing in such tactics is a shovel to knock us over the head with. Other countries do that too. We can and should be better than that in America.

Good insight by the courageous author.