Does Housing Discrimination Exist Based on the 'Color' of an Individual's Voice?

Does housing discrimination exist based on the quot;colorquot; of an individual's voice? Linguistic profiling occurs when people make judgments over the telephone about the character of the individual with whom they are talking. This study uses a logit model regression to determine if the race of a person searching for housing has any correlation with whether he or she is able to make an appointment over the phone. The data used for this analysis come from the Housing Discrimination Study (HDS) 2000 Phase I that was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which measured the patterns of racial and ethnic discrimination in urban housing markets across the United States through paired testing. HDS 2000 found statistically significant evidence that unacceptable levels of housing discrimination still persist across the nation. Although it is important to note that the paired tests used to measure levels of housing discrimination in HDS 2000 are based on the physical race of the tester and not whether the tester had a linguistic speech pattern commonly associated with a specific race or ethnicity, this research finds that there is little association between race and the ability to make an appointment over the phone. It was found that the predicted probability of making an appointment to inquire about a rental or sales unit is similar across racial and ethnic groups, varying slightly around 97 percent. These results suggest that while there may be minor differences among racial groups in the ability to make an appointment over the phone to inquire about a rental or sales housing unit, none of these differences are statistically significant. Although these initial findings indicate that linguistic profiling is probably not a major factor in measuring housing discrimination, it is crucial that further research be conducted in this area to more accurately determine whether and to what extent linguistic profiling affects levels of housing discrimination