Racialized Discourse in Seattle Rental Ad Texts

Abstract

Racial discrimination has been a central driver of residential segregation for many decades, in the Seattle area as well as in the United States as a whole. In addition to redlining and restrictive housing covenants, housing advertisements included explicit racial language until 1968. Since then, housing patterns have remained racialized, despite overt forms of racial language and discrimination becoming less prevalent. In this paper, we use Structural Topic Models (STM) and qualitative analysis to investigate how contemporary rental listings from the Seattle-Tacoma Craigslist page differ in their description based on neighborhood racial composition. Results show that listings from White neighborhoods emphasize trust and connections to neighborhood history and culture, while listings from non-White neighborhoods offer more incentives and focus on transportation and development features, sundering these units from their surroundings. Without explicitly mentioning race, these listings display racialized neighborhood discourse that might impact neighborhood decision-making in ways that contribute to the perpetuation of housing segregation.

The Unequal Availability of Rental Housing Information Across Neighborhoods

“…In the list ings most prox i mate to Ad 2, pro spec tive rent ers will see lit tle if any infor ma tion about the hous ing or neigh bor hood ame ni ties but will see a long list of renter dis qual i fi ca tions. Although St. Louis fol lows the over all trends iden ti fied in our sam ple, future work should test for dif fer ences across MSAs based on their lev els of seg re ga tion and other char ac ter is tics to bet ter under stand whether and how the racialization of hous ing infor ma tion depends on local con di tions and his to ries (Kennedy et al 2021).…”

“…In addi tion, the prev a lence of Craigslist list ings rel a tive to the under ly ing hous ing stock is greater in neigh bor hoods with more White, higherincome, and more edu cated res i dents (Boeing 2020). Critically, how ever, lit tle work has exam ined the main tex tual descrip tion of list ings, with the excep tion of Kennedy et al's (2021) recent study. Although collecting and ana lyz ing these data is more time con sum ing and labor inten sive, it allows for a deeper under stand ing of the infor ma tion com monly included in online rental hous ing adver tise ments.…”

“…Descriptions of local ame ni ties, for exam ple, influ ence neigh bor hood selec tion, and homeseekers are sen si tive to sig nals about crime and safety-although sig nals about crime may operate as prox ies for ethnoracial makeup (Krysan and Crowder 2017; see also Quillian and Pager 2001). In fact, lan guage that is not overtly racial can still pro vide cues about a given neigh bor hood's demo graph ics (Besbris 2016(Besbris , 2020Besbris and Faber 2017;Howell and Emerson 2018;Kennedy et al 2021;KorverGlenn 2018KorverGlenn , 2021 and can sub se quently affect res i den tial mobil ity deci sions and eco nomic deci sions more gen er ally (Besbris et al 2015(Besbris et al , 2019Krysan and Crowder 2017). Landlords may sim i larly be influ enced by shared per cep tions of neigh bor hoods when they com pose their adver tise ments, and the infor ma tion they pro vide about avail able hous ing likely both reflects existing pat terns of res i den tial sorting and per pet u ates them.…”

Searching for housing in the digital age: Neighborhood representation on internet rental housing platforms across space, platform, and metropolitan segregation

“…The large share of neighborhoods with zero vacant units for rent is not ideal and likely reflects sampling and definitional issues rather than neighborhoods where there was no vacancy over the course of time covered. Finally, simply counting the number of advertisements within a neighborhood does not provide insight into what these advertisements say and how they describe neighborhoods, which may have its own independent effect on segregating housing search outcomes (Kennedy et al, 2020).…”

The COVID-19 Pandemic and the Rental Market: Evidence From Craigslist

“…These data are “tantalizingly rich, detailed, and rare in their ability to describe the spot market in disaggregate form” ( Boeing et al, 2020 , p. 6). For example, advertisements for rental housing on Craigslist must contain advertised rent and a textual description of the rental unit ( Besbris et al, in press ; Kennedy et al, 2020 ). The vast majority also contain an exact address or easily geocoded location on a map embedded in the ad, pictures of the unit, and specific information about the pet policy, access to laundry services, the square footage, and the number of bedrooms and bathrooms ( Boeing et al, 2021 ).…”