{"id":6411,"date":"2026-08-12T10:40:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-12T10:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/metrotransitreview.com\/?p=6411"},"modified":"2026-08-12T10:40:00","modified_gmt":"2026-08-12T10:40:00","slug":"how-democrats-dei-kept-homebuyers-in-the-dark-about-crime-and-schools","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/metrotransitreview.com\/?p=6411","title":{"rendered":"How Democrats’ DEI kept homebuyers in the dark about crime and schools"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Nothing is more natural when buying a house than looking into how safe the neighborhood is \u2014 and, if you have or plan to have children, whether the local public schools are any good.<\/p>\n

Read more Roger Federer loses billionaire status as fortune wiped out in day of carnage<\/a><\/p>\n

Yet the last Democratic presidential administration tried to prevent real-estate agents from answering those kinds of questions, because it prioritized \u201cdiversity\u201d over safety and education.<\/p>\n

President Donald Trump\u2019s administration revoked the de facto gag rule this year, but the damage that Joe Biden\u2019s apparatchiks inflicted is still being felt.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s worse, state regulations in New York and elsewhere still<\/em> prevent real-estate agents from speaking freely to homebuyers about crime and schools.<\/p>\n

Interfering with homebuying was a first-week priority for Biden\u2019s administration.<\/p>\n

Six days after he was sworn into office, Biden issued his directive establishing enforcement priorities for the Department of Housing and Urban Development aimed at scaring real-estate agents into remaining silent on two of the subjects most important to their clients.<\/p>\n

\u201cDiverse and inclusive communities strengthen our democracy,\u201d the executive memorandum began.<\/p>\n

What mom or dad wants their community to be \u201cinclusive\u201d of failing schools?<\/p>\n

Who wants \u201cdiversity\u201d to mean mixing criminals with innocent people?<\/p>\n

Black families don\u2019t want to live in dangerous or educationally dead-end neighborhoods any more than people of any other color do.<\/p>\n

Yet too many progressives believe racial equality is best achieved by demolishing standards for everyone.<\/p>\n

That was the effect of Biden\u2019s memo, which made clear that racial politics and the doctrine of \u201cdisparate impact\u201d would guide HUD\u2019s enforcement of federal housing laws.<\/p>\n

The major online real-estate companies understood immediately what was being demanded of them.<\/p>\n

Realtor.com and Zillow stopped providing crime data, while Redfin \u2014 going out of its way to embrace the party line \u2014 posted a blog proclaiming, \u201cNeighborhood crime data doesn\u2019t belong on real estate sites.\u201d<\/p>\n

The National Association of Realtors put up a webpage in early 2023 titled \u201cHow to handle client questions about schools and neighborhoods,\u201d which told realtors to point homebuyers to other sources of information rather than providing the facts themselves.<\/p>\n

The page is larded with the jargon of diversity, equity and inclusion \u2014 but it also testifies to the association\u2019s worry that fair-housing laws would be interpreted aggressively, and that realtors who did<\/em> tell their clients too much would run the risk of punishment.<\/p>\n

Read more Bruce Blakeman could unseat Hochul and turn New York red, stunning poll reveals<\/a><\/p>\n

In April, Trump\u2019s HUD announced that realtors and other real-estate agents should not feel intimidated: \u201cThe Fair Housing Act does not require withholding useful information on school quality and crime statistics,\u201d the department proclaimed.<\/p>\n

The \u201cDear Colleague\u201d letter from Assistant Secretary Craig Trainor went into considerable detail to \u201cstrongly urge\u201d the real-estate industry \u201cto revisit ethics training materials and reconsider public statements that stifle real estate agent speech.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the New York Association of Realtors, for one, says it can\u2019t do that \u2014 because its members \u201cmay be subject to liability under (New York state) law\u201d if they speak frankly to homebuyers about schools and crime.<\/p>\n

How many voters know some state governments \u2014 and, under the last Democratic administration, the federal government \u2014 are muzzling real-estate agents in this way?<\/p>\n

How many know how easily the industry rolled over when Biden decided to put homebuyers\u2019 safety and their children\u2019 s education at risk?<\/p>\n

What the Biden administration did was unethical, and the industry did a disservice to its clients by giving in \u2014 though perhaps the prospect of selling more homes in bad neighborhoods appealed to the least scrupulous members of the profession.<\/p>\n

Buying a home is a trust-intensive process: It\u2019s not only expensive, it ranks alongside marriage as one the most consequential decisions anyone can make, holding the potential for decades of happiness or misery.<\/p>\n

Buying a home is buying a future.<\/p>\n

It isn\u2019t right to withhold any<\/em> information a family needs about a prospective neighborhood, and state laws as well as federal ones must put homebuyers \u2014 of all races \u2014 first, above any political commitment to abstractions like diversity and inclusion.<\/p>\n

The point of shielding information about crime and schools is to get more people to buy homes where they otherwise wouldn\u2019t want to live.<\/p>\n

\n<\/div>\n

What could be more wicked, more destructive, than that?<\/p>\n

The intrepid journalist Helen Andrews, who\u2019s never afraid of a controversy, deserves credit for calling attention to this corruption of the real-estate industry in a recent essay for the web magazine Compact.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a big story, one that ought to be on voters\u2019 minds as they consider the state and local elections, as well as federal ones, coming up in November.<\/p>\n

If Americans don\u2019t want their real-estate providers gagged, they must speak up themselves \u2014 at the ballot box.<\/p>\n

Read more Drunk driving ex-NJ mayor, husband forged signatures to get on Democratic primary ballot: prosecutors<\/a><\/p>\n

Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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