CityLab Daily: Why Won’t Ben Carson Confront Discrimination?

All ears: Before self-proclaiming as a YIMBY on Twitter this week, HUD Secretary Ben Carson announced to a gathering of public housing authority directors that he will launch a “landlord engagement listening tour” later this month. The goal is to figure out why landlords don’t accept housing vouchers from low-income tenants, which makes it more difficult to desegregate neighborhoods. But Carson should already have a pretty good idea of the answer: a great deal of research—a lot of it from his own department—finds the answer loud and clear: It’s discrimination.

Just this week, a new study from a group of economists found that African Americans pay more in rent for identical housing in identical neighborhoods, and that gap increases the whiter a neighborhood becomes. HUD has also released three major studies this year on the various ways that black and Latino tenants face discrimination in the rental market. Today on CityLab, Brentin Mock asks: Why Won’t Ben Carson Confront Discrimination?