Audit Studies of Housing in the United States: Established, Emerging, and Future Research

Abstract

Since the 1960s, social scientists, fair housing agencies, and the federal government have conducted hundreds of in-person and correspondence housing audits. Researchers use these covert experiments to make strong causal claims about difficult-to-detect behavior, such as racial, gender, and other types of discrimination. These studies have consistently uncovered discrimination in multiple stages and contexts of the housing exchange process. The housing audit literature is broad and robust, and a number of in-depth reviews already exist. In this chapter, we build on those reviews by focusing attention on emerging areas of inquiry and suggest new avenues of research pursuits. We begin by briefly reviewing the long history of housing audits including in-person HUD audits and correspondence audits of home sales and housing rentals. Next, we discuss three emerging areas of housing audit research -housing choice vouchers, short-term rentals, and roommate searches -and highlight important findings, new innovations, and areas of weakness. Finally, we conclude with a discussion about future directions of housing audits including using experiments to test for ways to reduce discrimination, using additional data to examine the mechanisms of housing discrimination, and designing modified audits to explore discrimination in other stages of housing exchange.

Racially Distinctive Names Signal Both Race/Ethnicity and Social Class

“…More recently, researchers have expanded the use of audits to examine discrimination among a broader set of actors, such as bureaucrats, college admissions counselors, health care professionals, politicians, principals, professors, and members of the general public (Block et al 2021;Butler and Broockman 2011;Einstein and Glick 2017;Gell-Redman et al 2018;Hughes et al 2020;Milkman, Akinola, and Chugh 2012;Pfaff et al 2021). The popularity and usefulness of this method are reflected in numerous reviews (Baert 2018;Butler and Crabtree 2021;Gaddis and DiRago 2021), meta-analyses (Gaddis et al 2022b;Quillian et al 2017;Zschirnt and Ruedin 2016), and methodological examinations (Gaddis 2018a;Larsen 2020;Vuolo, Uggen, and Lageson 2018) in the last few years alone. One reason for this popularity is that audits provide strong causal evidence of discrimination.…”