New research finds little evidence of anti-black racial bias by public housing authorities

Despite great strides in Civil Rights and representation, there are still concerns over racial bias in the provision of public services. In new research Katherine Levine Einstein and David Glick examined whether or not access to public housing is affected by racial bias by sending emails with ostensibly black, white, and Hispanic names to more than 1,000 housing authorities. Surprisingly, they found no evidence of anti-black racial bias in the response rate, though there was some evidence of anti-Hispanic discrimination. They comment that this surprising lack of discrimination against blacks could be down to public housing authority workers being more racially liberal as well as greater monitoring for such discrimination under the Fair Housing Act.