Harold Hutchison, DCNF

Vice President Kamala Harris told the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Monday that black families “encourage” white friends to hang up photos of themselves to boost their home values during appraisals.

“We are hearing the cases of, for example, a black family trying to sell their home, and they get the appraisal and they just know it is not the true value of their home,” Harris said in the speech. “And so you’ve heard the stories about how they’ll then encourage friends of the family — a white family — to come in. And then the white family will put the pictures up of their family. And then that appraisal gets done, and it’s for a much higher value. Same house. Same neighborhood.”

“It is because of a clear history of segregation, restrictive covenants and redlining that long denied black homeowners the opportunity to take full advantage of the wealth-building power of homeownership,” Harris claimed. “That inequity continues today in the home appraisal system.”

Black families claimed that companies were under-appraising their homes in violation of the Fair Housing Act, The New York Times reported in August 2020. Abena Horton, whose website describes her as an “anti-discrimination change agent,” claimed that the value of her home changed by $165,000 after an experiment that included removing family photos from the mantle and having her husband, who is white, stay home alone, according to the Times.

The National Association of Realtors did not immediately respond to an inquiry from the Daily Caller News Foundation about whether such incidents had taken place.

Harris also decried the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that overruled Roe v. Wade.

“For the first time in generations, the United States Supreme Court — the highest court of our land; the former court of Thurgood Marshall — took away a constitutional right, that had been recognized, from the people of America, from the women of America,” Harris said.

The White House and the Department of Housing and Urban Development did not immediately respond to requests for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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