“Although African-Americans make up only 6 percent of the city’s population, they constitute 29 percent of [the Eviction Defense Collaborative]’s clients. No other racial or ethnic group is so grossly overrepresented in ejectment proceedings.”
“Although African-Americans make up only 6 percent of the city’s population, they constitute 29 percent of [the Eviction Defense Collaborative]’s clients. No other racial or ethnic group is so grossly overrepresented in ejectment proceedings.”
Comments (1)
Albert Kim | [Permalink]
While the “African-Americans represent 6% of the population yet 29% of evictions” result of the EDC study suggests a systematic bias against all African-Americans, I think that they need to control for poverty. I’m not well-versed in housing issues, but my understanding is that evictions affect people with higher level of poverty since they can’t pay rent, run out of time and options, thus receive an eviction notice. And since poverty disproportionately affects African-Americans, this in turn explains much of the glaring disproportionality in overall eviction rates. As a counterpoint, I would bet that higher-income African-Americans don’t suffer from housing discrimination to this alarming a degree (although I’m sure they do in more subtle ways).
I think a more apples-to-apples comparison is to restrict to populations living in poverty and make a statements like “African-Americans represent x% of the population ‘living in poverty’ yet 29% of evictions”. I’m guessing that African-Americans represent more than 6% of San Francisco’s population living in poverty.
It would be really interesting to compare, after restricting to populations living in poverty, eviction rates between African-Americans and non-African-Americans and see if there are any discriminatory practices. My guess is that yes, there is discrimination for the reasons you state above, however it won’t be as stark as the 6% vs 29% figure initially suggests. This being said, I don’t think there is no issue here: the issue isn’t so much discriminatory practices in housing, but rather the much bigger and systematic issue of poverty in many African-American communities.