Please join us for "Digital Gossip and Neighborhood Value," an Urban Conversations event with speaker Elizabeth Delmelle in conversation with Chris Herbert.
This talk synthesizes findings from three studies that use natural language processing on a national, longitudinal corpus of real estate listings. We demonstrate that neighborhoods experiencing significant increases in the share of white residents are marketed through language emphasizing consumption amenities, historic character, and luxury upgrades, while increasingly diverse neighborhoods are marketed through family-oriented public amenities and dated suburban features. These language patterns reflect broader socioeconomic and demographic transformations occurring in those neighborhoods. We then demonstrate how marketing patterns correspond with mortgage applicant sorting, with Black applicants being disproportionately granted mortgages in neighborhoods marketed as areas of concentrated disinvestment with limited profit-making potential. They face systematically higher mortgage denial rates in neighborhoods marketed as investment opportunities. By analyzing the words used to sell homes, we gain insight into how neighborhood value is communicated, who searches for different types of housing, and who can access credit across differentially marketed spaces.
Elizabeth Delmelle is an Associate Professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design, where she also directs the Master of Urban Spatial Analytics Program.
Sponsored by Harvard HMUI and special thanks to GSD and JCHS.
The event will take place in the Plimton Room at the Harvard Barker Center, 12 Quincy St, Cambridge. Lunch will be provided.
Please RSVP by Tuesday, February 24 for this event.
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