How Do Real Estate Actors Advertise in Mixed-Income Neighborhoods?The Importance of Home Security

Abstract

Throughout its history, the real estate industry has emphasized privacy and exclusion in housing advertisements, helping entrench patterns of residential segregation in the process. Recently, however, some forms of neighborhood-level social diversity are becoming more common, as indicated by the growing number of neighborhoods that are mixed-income. Does the proliferation of income-diverse neighborhoods suggest that advertisers are curtailing their exclusionary rhetoric when marketing homes in mixed-income communities? To answer this question, this study uses a combination of automated text analyses and regression-based methods to analyze over one million Craigslist rental listings posted in the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas in July and August of 2019. Findings show that real estate advertisers continue to rely on rhetorical strategies that likely reinforce, if not encourage, privacy and exclusion in mixed-income neighborhoods. Specifically, rental advertisements in mixed-income neighborhoods were disproportionately likely to mention that the advertised unit came with a home security device, a rhetorical tool likely aimed at calming home seekers' apprehension toward living in an income-diverse neighborhood. This finding suggests that scholars have underexamined the strategies that real estate actors use to persuade home seekers to live in diverse neighborhoods. Furthermore, the security rhetoric prevalent in income-diverse neighborhoods may encourage home seekers' fears of mixed-income settings and impede cross-class social integration.

Keywords: Residential segregation, Housing advertisements, Home Security, Integration, Mixed-Income Neighborhoods; Residential Segregation, Real Estate Advertising, Housing Market

JEL Classification: M37, R23, R3, R31, I3, Z1, Z13