🚀 go-pugleaf

"Graphic Queen" <xxx.xxx@xxx.xxx.com> wrote in message
news:m97ng11k0lpr7lkoufa77ao5vbn0tqroug@4ax.com...
> I personally can understand why a realtor would do this. I mean, I
> think it proves that the realtor was looking out for the buyers. Hell,
> at least they were telling the truth about the neighborhoods and that
> seems to be racism now, telling the truth. Hahahahaha
>
> GQ

To hell with the law. Homebuyers need protection.

Hank
> Realtors accused of ethnic selection
>
> August 23, 2005
>
> BY NATASHA KORECKI AND DAN ROZEK Staff Reporters
>
> While shopping for homes with his white client, an Elmhurst-based
> Realtor slowed the car past a group of blacks and allegedly posed a
> question:
>
> "Look out the window. Does anything out there bother you?"
>
> The client's response doesn't matter. The question itself, based on
> race, is illegal for a real estate agent to ask, two housing groups
> charged Monday in a complaint with the Department of Housing and Urban
> Development.
>
> In the complaint, the Washington, D.C.-based National Fair Housing
> Alliance and Hope Fair Housing Center in Wheaton charged that real
> estate agents from the same Re/Max office in Elmhurst brought white
> home buyers to white neighborhoods and minorities, predominantly
> Hispanics, to minority neighborhoods.
> Re/Max did not return phone calls for comment Monday.
>
> The investigation also claims that three real estate agents outright
> bad-mouthed heavily Hispanic or minority areas to white clients while
> bringing minority home shoppers right to those same neighborhoods.
>
> The national group targeted 12 metropolitan areas to test real estate
> practices and filed similar complaints in Detroit and Atlanta. A
> complaint in Chicago is expected in the next six months.
>
> Posed as home buyers
>
> The National Fair Housing Alliance sent testers to real estate
> agencies that HUD found to show possible discrimination patterns in a
> 1999 study, said housing alliance president Shanna Smith.
>
> Their alleged findings came after sending groups of testers -- white,
> black and Hispanic -- on more than three occasions to Re/Max. Smith
> said under the Fair Housing Act, three or more instances constitutes a
> pattern.
>
> In the Re/Max investigation, white home buyers who asked to look in
> DuPage towns of Bensenville, Villa Park or Lombard for instance, were
> told the schools were bad, crime was high or that the areas were
> heavily Hispanic. Whites were instead taken to Roselle, Elk Grove
> Village, Wood Dale, Geneva or St. Charles. A Hispanic home buyer,
> however, was steered to predominantly minority communities. That
> allegedly happened even though Hispanic testers showed up with a
> larger down payment and reported a higher income than white home
> shoppers.
>
> "That's where you see the duplicity," Hope Fair Housing Executive
> Director Bernard Kleina said. "It's not a good neighborhood for the
> white home seeker. It's fine for the minority home seeker."
>
> In another case, a Realtor drove a white home buyer to St. Charles and
> Geneva, even though the person asked about homes in Hillside.
>
> Circumvents integration
>
> Steering home shoppers to certain areas based on race or ethnicity
> results in housing segregation, Smith said, and artificially prevents
> different cultures and races from integrating. When real estate agents
> bring the same kinds of people to the same areas, it becomes a
> self-fulfilling prophecy, she said: bad schools never get better, low
> tax bases stay low, homogenous towns remain homogenous.
>
> The real estate agent's motivation? Smith said historically a
> community might lash out at a realty company if it is the first to
> bring a minority into the neighborhood, so Realtors are afraid to lose
> business.
>
> She said if the Re/Max agency doesn't settle the claims in 120 days,
> the group will file a federal lawsuit.
>
> News called 'distressing'
>
> Some elected officials were unhappy at hearing claims that real estate
> agents steered whites or Hispanics from buying homes in their towns.
>
> "It's distressing to us to hear those allegations," Bensenville
> Village Manager Jim Johnson said of claims that white home buyers were
> discouraged from buying homes in the village. "It works at cross
> purposes to what we've been trying to accomplish."
> Roselle Mayor Gayle Smolinski said her town is proud of its history as
> an ethnically and economically diverse community.
>
> "This community has always been inclusive," she said.