Auditor’s piece minimizes impact of racism in housing
An opinion piece by Hamilton County Auditor Dusty Rhodes, published Aug. 2, critiqued a 2021 report authored by the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity that was prepared on behalf of the Franklin County Auditor.
We welcome substantive critique to help clarify findings and resolve errors.
However, we do need to respond to the factual inaccuracies and misinterpretations raised in Rhodes’ piece on the report, "Franklin County Auditor Report: Investigating the Appraisal Process.”
Due to the limited space, we are unable to respond to all his concerns. An expanded version of this response is posted on the Kirwan website.
We will outline how Rhodes appears to minimize the impact of racially motivated historic housing and development policies, and the present-day impacts from these policies; as well as to misunderstand our research conclusions on valuation disparity.
Historic policies such as redlining have had lasting impacts on property values in diverse neighborhoods throughout our region, negatively impacting many urban communities.
Moreover, the consequences of these policies are most felt today in wealthy suburban and urban enclaves, which have maintained their property values and benefited from discriminatory policies such as redlining and the use of racially restrictive covenants in home deeds.
Rhodes noted, “Historical inequities such as ‘redlining,’ housing policies, and home ownership have nothing to do with the current market value of a property.”
This statement is factually incorrect.
In Franklin County, home ownership rates are highest in wealthy suburban areas.
The effects of green-lining and racially restrictive covenants used through the late 1940s, have continued to exclude racial and low-income minoritized groups through exclusionary zoning policies, lack of non-discrimination protections and overt discrimination from homeownership.
Ignoring or disregarding this well-known history by assuming the appraisal process is “race blind,” further exacerbates existing disparities and undermines the credibility of the appraisal profession.
We found the disparities using the International Association of Assessing Officers standard sales ratio approach, one of many methods Rhodes states as a valid approach, that Black and lower-income neighborhoods were overvalued prior to 2017 and that neighborhoods that were more than 90% white had consistently been undervalued, which is unexplained by income differences.
Rhodes states, “The charge that some areas were systematically over-valued resulting in higher property taxes and others under-valued resulting in lower property taxes remains unproven after 43 pages of statistics and opinion cloaked in academic language." This statement is contrary to our stated findings. Systemic overvaluation was statistically demonstrated based on valid sale prices compared to their respective appraisal valuations and linking those values to their respective neighborhood race and income.
Our findings are consistent with other national studies.
We hope our response has clarified Rhodes’ concerns and shed a light on the standard practice of housing valuation and appraisals that has maintained racial disparities in the appraisal process.
Michael Outrich is a social researcher II / GIS specialist at The Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University. His primary research focus is on the racial wealth gap, the commodification of housing and how housing markets influence wealth inequality and segregation from the past to the present.