Closed Doors, Opportunities Lost: The Continuing Costs of Housing Discrimination.

• Author: Ramos, Dante

Lost: The Continuing Costs of Housing Discrimination John Yinger Russell Sage Foundation, $29.95 By Dante Ramos

At first, you might mistake economist John Yinger for a race-relations Rip van Winkle. Yinger offers Closed Doors, Opportunities Lost, a book on housing discrimination, at a time when many minority politicians owe their gerrymandered safe districts to the intractability of ghettoes, when white fears of integration are expressed in code (fear of "high crime rates" and "declining property values"), and when organizers of the Million Man March have urged blacks to wash their hands of whites and go their own way. In short, Yinger writes as if four decades of protest and progressive legislation have barely altered the terrain upon which minority Americans struggle for equality.

He's right. Yinger presents a litany of depressing data suggesting that blacks and Hispanics who look for new homes are shown fewer units than comparable whites and are steered toward low-income, segregated neighborhoods. Yinger figures that housing discrimination costs black homebuyers $5.7 billion and Hispanic homebuyers $3.4 billion every three years.

Yinger relies most heavily upon the 1989 Housing Discrimination Study, which he directed and which the Department of Housing and Urban Development sponsored. Black-and-white and Hispanic-and-white teams of testers, matched by sex, age, marital status, income, assets, occupation, and family size, conducted 3,800 audits in 25 metropolitan areas nationwide. The teams randomly selected newspaper ads for apartments and houses. Testers were coached to ask agents whether the advertised unit was available and whether others like it were available. They visited every unit agents offered and recorded every positive and negative comment agents made.

Stop the presses: Agents generally treated white testers better. In about 41 percent of their visits to realtors, black testers learned about fewer apartments than their white counterparts; whites learned about fewer houses on only 18 percent of visits. In other words, in a visit to a typical real estate agent, a black prospective renter who asks about available units is 23 percentage points more likely than a comparable white one to get shafted.

The pattern of discrimination against blacks and Hispanics persists at almost every step of a transaction. Compared with demographically similar whites, Hispanics who ask about unadvertised units are 7.7 percentage points more likely...