Meh? So buy in Greenwich

a happy family walking to church in a safe neighborhood. What's bad about that?

Top real estate sites remove crime data because BLM or something. Why they assume that black people aren’t concerned about crime is beyond me, but then, I don’t play the Great White Father.

In a statement on Realtor.com titled An Invitation to the Industry: Address Fair Housing Together, CEO David Doctorow begins with an innocuous statement:

At this time of complexity in real estate, our team has been energized by our purpose to simplify real estate choices, especially for first-time homebuyers.

(I’ll simplify it for you: 700 crimes per 1000 residents, don’t buy.)

Yet we keep bumping up against one very old and persistent problem: the ability to afford and own a home can be unjustly limited by one’s race, ethnicity, or other personal characteristics.

I’ll ask again: how does knowing the odds of your wife being raped and your home invaded limit one’s ability to buy a house?

At virtually every step of the way, too often people of color find hurdles in their path, making it difficult to turn their dreams of homeownership into reality.

These challenges also afflict people by virtue of their gender, sexual orientation and religion. Whatever the root cause, more must be done to level the real estate playing field for all. We at Realtor.com have been working to break down those hurdles.

[So to solve all that]  earlier this month, we removed the crime map layer from all search results on Realtor.com to rethink the safety information we share on Realtor.com and how we can best integrate it as part of a consumer’s home search experience.

Okay, you integrate the definition of the problem: difficulty in buying a house; and the “solution” provided by Realtor.com, not revealing the crime statistics in a particular neighborhood. I can’t.

Not to be outwoken, Redfin’s “Chief Growth Officer,” Christian Taubman chimes in:

Neighborhood Crime Data Doesn’t Belong on Real Estate Sites

We recently decided not to add neighborhood crime data to Redfin.com.

We were considering this because we’re very much focused on answering all the questions people have when they’re considering a home purchase, and we know that one of these questions is whether they’ll feel safe in a given home or neighborhood.

Got it: knowing the crime data for a neighborhood will help a buyer decide whether it’s a safe space to live, right? Well, no, it turns out. Not according to Red Fin.

But the data available don’t allow us to speak accurately to that question, and given the long history of redlining and racist housing covenants in the United States there’s too great a risk of this inaccuracy reinforcing racial bias. We believe that Redfin–and all real estate sites–should not show neighborhood crime data.

One big thing we learned through our research is that there’s real variety in how people define and evaluate safety, and that it doesn’t line up very well with purely crime-based data.

People are interested in safety, not crime. 

Uh huh. Thanks. Got it. I’ll just stay in Greenwich, and keep it simple.