A growing body of literature has documented persistent racial discrimination in rental housing markets, often using audit or correspondence studies where fictitious identities request to view an apartment. However, these methods may overlook subtle forms of discrimination, such as selective advertising, where landlords choose not to advertise certain units, reserving them for prospective renters they have met in person after an initial screening. This practice is difficult to detect, creating significant challenges for fair housing enforcement. Timmins & colleagues introduce an innovative method for detecting selective advertising and analyze how this practice hinders minorities’ access to better amenities. They find that discrimination against Black and Hispanic renters through selective advertising is particularly severe in neighborhoods with better amenities, where other forms of discrimination are more restricted, and in neighborhoods nearing ‘tipping points’ in racial composition.
Dr. Christopher Timmins specializes in urban and environmental economics, but he also has interests in industrial organization, development, public and regional economics. He works on developing new methods for non-market valuation of local public goods and amenities, with a particular focus on hedonic techniques and models of residential sorting. His recent research has focused on measuring the costs associated with exposure to poor air quality, the benefits associated with remediating brownfields and toxic waste under the Superfund program, the valuation of non-marginal changes in disamenities, and the causes and consequences of “environmental injustice”.
