"She purchased the house for $100,000 in 2017 and expected it to be valued similarly to her sister’s home in the same area, which was given an estimate of $198,000 in 2019.
But the first valuation came back at $125,000, while a second, conducted by a different mortgage broker and appraiser, said it was worth $110,000.
A third appraisal, conducted after Ms Duffy did not declare her race in her application and went to great lengths to conceal her identity, came back at $259,000.
“In the first two appraisals, comparable sales were pulled from Black neighborhoods more than a mile from Duffy’s home, rather than those nearby that were closer to the specifics of her house, said Fair Housing Center of Central Indiana Executive Director Amy Nelson.”
After she gets her refi done on the higher value, she should go back to being obviously black and get her property tax assessment halved based on the low appraisal. Make the system work for you.
Excellent and timely post. Thank you for bringing this to our attention!
I also checked out that vote in Pennsylvania because this is the first time in America that voters have been able to express an opinion on the matter. Using their Secretary of State’s website:
PA voters in Philadelphia overwhelmingly supported the Governor’s prerogatives. But outside Philly, and even in their Allegheny County (Pittsburgh), the vote went in favor of giving the legislature more power.
My opinion:
Trump won Pennsylvania in 2016 but lost the state in 2020. As compared with those two elections, very few people voted in this week’s primary. So
I seriously question whether that election reflects the mood of the greater electorate. When people do not vote, strange outcomes become possible.
This is kind of silly to blame the homeowner for the rampant cheating and criminal behavior by, er, white people.
There is a long history of this behavior of trying to restrict some races. It was legal until a few decades ago (of course it was legal because of the group in power that made it legal).
"So how many fraudulent voters did Kobach’s dragnet convict during his eight-year tenure in office? Just nine. Nine convictions in a state with nearly 2 million registered voters. Among those were older citizens who mistakenly voted in two different places where they owned property.
A college student filled out an absentee ballot for her home state before voting months later in Kansas, both times for Trump. Steve Watkins, a former Republican congressman, was charged with three felony voting offenses and got off with diversion.
The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, supports the arguments of Donald Trump and Kobach. Going back as far as 2005, Heritage lists 15 convictions for voter infractions in Kansas, presumably including those from the Kobach era. Over 15 years, one offense per year.
The Heritage website also reports 1,322 “proven instances of voter fraud” in the United States since the early 1980s. How could America have passed 40 years with a measly 1,322 proven instances of voter fraud? Among our 168 million registered voters?
Both for Kansas and the nation, the rate of fraud has been less than one one-thousandth of 1%. Would that we religious Americans sinned at such a microscopic rate."
Here you go again assuming the worst about people you disagree with. I read @xerty’s post as him clearly joking.
That said, I read that story a few days ago and something just doesn’t line up. She got 2 racist appraisers and 1 honest one in Indianapolis? Where is the evidence that they were racist. The comps they chose existed. They weren’t made up. Is the construction quality of her home actually lower? An article in the South Bend Tribune says homes in her neighborhood were built by residents and not builders, so there is probably something to that appraiser’s claim.
Appraisals can be all over the place. I bought my house as a foreclosure in the depths of the housing crisis (2009) and appealed my assessment by using my appraisal as the proof. They lowered it. Then the next year, they raised it back up. I appealed again and the assessor was able to pull comps to support his assessment so it stayed up. The next year (now 2011), my locality finally admitted that the housing crisis was real and lowered everyone’s assessments and mine went down close to the appealed amount from 2 years prior. But the comps to support the assessment were there. Was he being racist to me because it came in higher than I wanted? I guess I should have appealed to his boss and had a friend of another race stand in for me. And then if his boss found he was wrong and lowered it again, could I then claim I had proof that he was racist? Or is a more likely outcome that people just do things differently and appraisals vary wildly depending on lots of factors.
Do you really want to pretend there has been no racism in real estate? Like I said, it used to be actually legal and allowed. This doesn’t seem to concern you in the slightest.
Any black person looking for an apartment or a house knows this and has likely experienced it. Pointing to your own experience is ludicrous unless you are black.
Biden is secretly “seeding” conservative regions with illegal immigrants, just as Obama did before him
Tennessee lawmakers alarmed by reports White House secretly flying migrant children into state
Lawmakers from Tennessee are sounding the alarm after reports that the Biden administration has been flying unaccompanied minors into the state in the middle of the night without their knowledge.
The White House is transporting migrants into an airport in Chattanooga from where they are bused to cities within the Southeast, as first reported by local news outlet WRCB-TV Channel 3.
Obama did this same sort of thing years ago to the good people of Idaho. Rely on Democrat scum to spread their unwanted and uninvited ways far and wide, diminishing America’s greatness to the best of their ability.
Racism, that’s all you’ve got to talk about these days.
Lunatic Liberal media & folks like you are obsessed with this.
Too many great Black folks are saying
the same as I am.
Get off your box!! Get out in the real world!!
Why must you always take what someone says and caricature it in the worst possible light instead of reading it and taking it in honestly? No where in my post did I even insinuate that there has been no racism in real estate.
The facts in that article are that she got two low appraisals as a black woman, then several months later (while prices went up, mind you), got a high appraisal with a white man standing in for her. Does that mean that the first two guys could have been racist? Sure, they could have been. They also could have been non-racist misogynists. Why aren’t we exploring that possibility? Or they could have been neither and there is another explanation. If she is going to claim she ended up with a lower home value because she is black and the appraisers are racist, the least she could do is present some sort of evidence that they are, oh I dunno, RACIST.
“In the first two appraisals, comparable sales were pulled from Black neighborhoods more than a mile from Duffy’s home, rather than those nearby that were closer to the specifics of her house…”
Why do I assume it’s in the worst possible light? Because it is the worst possible light. Why do you simply ignore clear evidence it was a racist activity?
I can see your knee-jerk reaction now…wow. that doesn’t prove anything. Maybe the appraisers just liked houses farther away that were not comparable to her house to do appraisals.
Why is it so important to you to pretend there is no racism anywhere? Heck, the white supremacists admit it.
” I have warned for months that President Biden’s failure at the border would result in a systematic resettling of migrants in our communities, burdening our schools, hospitals, and law enforcement agencies, and bringing an increase in drug trafficking and human smuggling," Hagerty said. “A new reality is happening in our country—every town is now a border town.”
The local politician is wrong to think this is a failure - this is Biden’s national open border policy working as planned. He should start a local policy of rounding up all the illegals delivered as such and bussing them to DC where they are clearly welcome.
‘You are a really dull class’: Biden chides Coast Guard grads as jokes fall flat
President Biden’s jokes fell flat at the US Coast Guard Academy’s graduation ceremony Wednesday leading him to call the grads a “dull class” while boasting of his own college exploits including a fire-extinguisher assault on his dorm’s RA.
Biden attempted to earn laughs at the expense of the US Navy, and like a bad stand-up whose set is dying, when the cadets didn’t respond, he turned on them.
What has fallen even flatter than his “jokes” is Biden’s presidency so far in its entirety. Nobody voted for this old fossil or really wants him in the big chair. Countless tens of millions of the votes Biden received were, instead, actually votes against Trump. So now we have a crisis at the border, a crisis in the mideast, and several other crises developing at home and abroad. This is what happens when America elects a weak, indecisive, President.
“It said there were comps within the half mile, but it said the quality of construction of the other homes were far more superior to the quality of construction of my home.”
later in the article
Paul Mullins, a local historian and IUPUI anthropology professor, said the neighborhood was created as a “self-help” sweat equity project in which male heads of household built their and their neighbors’ homes.
In other words, the appraiser had a legitimate reason to pull comps from another neighborhood rather than the one that the homeowner wanted her to.
This really is more of a chicken or egg scenario. It’s clear that homes in black neighborhoods are valued lower than homes in white neighborhoods. But is that because appraisers are racist or because homes in black neighborhoods sell for less than homes in white neighborhoods? I think the evidence points to the latter. And that handcuffs the appraisers when the time comes to appraise the houses, because they can only appraise based on actual sales.
I think a good way to test this is to go into a neighborhood that is becoming gentrified, but still has a significant black population and several rundown homes. Find a home in that neighborhood that has been bought recently and redone and have a group of appraisers come in and appraise it thinking it’s owned by a white family, and then another group of appraisers thinking it’s owned by a black family. Do the same thing for a rundown home. Are the appraisers more likely to treat the updated home as being in a black neighborhood rather than an up and coming gentrified neighborhood if the owners are black? If so, that’s racist. Are the appraisers more likely to treat the rundown home as being in an up and coming gentrified neighborhood if the owners are white? If so, that’s racist. The anecdotal stories with 2-3 appraisals in a black neighborhood where the appraisers are able to explain the comps they chose doesn’t prove racism on the part of the appraisers to me. If they are familiar with the market and the neighborhoods and they know that a home in a black neighborhood will sell for less than a similar home in a white neighborhood, why shouldn’t they use comps from a black neighborhood? Isn’t it the job of the appraiser to get a value as close to what the home would sell for? Not to get a value of what it should sell for if people threw a dart at a map to chose the neighborhood they live in.
