Racial Steering

Racial steering is the practice by which real estate agents guide prospective home buyers toward or away from particular neighborhoods based on race, either by recommending certain areas over others or by withholding listings that meet a buyer's stated criteria. It has been unlawful in the United States since the Fair Housing Act of 1968, enforced nationally by the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, and lawsuits against real estate firms for the practice have continued since the 1980s. Alongside earlier tools such as restrictive covenants and discriminatory zoning, racial steering helped produce and sustain residential racial segregation, and a 2022 case alleged that Meta's advertising algorithm had reproduced the same discriminatory effect by unevenly distributing housing ads. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/