Being Black In Marin Costs Couple $500K: Lawsuit

MARIN COUNTY, CA — Being Black in Marin nearly cost a couple a half a million dollars.

That’s according to Paul Austin and his wife Tenisha Tate-Austin, a Marin City couple whose allegations of racial discrimination have made national headlines in recent days. The Austins last week filed a federal lawsuit that names a San Rafael-based appraiser as the defendant.

The couple suspected they’d been discriminated against earlier this year when Janette Miller appraised their four-bedroom Marin City home — that in 2019 was valued at $1.3 million — for less than $1 million, NBC News reports.

Paul Austin in an ABC 7 interview earlier this year described the lowball offer a “slap in the face.”

“This time I’m going to guarantee that I’m going to get the appraisal that my house is supposed to get,” Tenisha Tate-Austin told NBC News.

Asked by reporter Jacob Ward how they would do so, the couple said in unison “being white.”

The couple said they had a white friend stand in for them for another appraisal three weeks later in which all racially identifying photos were removed.

This time, an appraiser assessed the property’s value at $1.48 million.

Miller & Perotti Real Estate Appraisals is named in the lawsuit the couple filed Thursday in federal court with the San Rafael-based Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California.

Miller & Perotti Real Estate Appraisals did not immediately respond to a message from Patch requesting comment.

“Race was a motivating factor in (Janette) Miller’s unreasonably low valuation of the Austins’ house, in violation of the Fair Housing Act and related federal and state laws,” the lawsuit alleges.

“Accordingly, the Austins seek monetary, declaratory and injunctive relief.”

The Austins’ alleged experience reflects a pervasive pattern that has had a devastating economic impact on racial minorities, according to a Northwestern University meta-study of racial discrimination in the housing and mortgage lending markets over a 40-year period (1976 to 2016) cited in the NBC News report.

“Because home equity is the major source of wealth accumulation for most households in the U.S., this form of discrimination inhibits the upward social mobility of minorities and exacerbates large racial disparities in wealth,” the study’s authors wrote.

Marin is reckoning with a checkered racial justice history that goes back decades.

Redlining, the practice of preventing Black people from securing loans in predominantly white communities, was done in broad daylight until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the county has publicly acknowledged.

And despite its reputation as one of the nation's most politically progressive communities (Joe Biden got 82.3 percent of Marin's vote in last year's presidential election), Marin remains one of the state’s most racially unequal communities, according to a recent study.

The Advanced Project California study released last month ranked Marin as the state’s second most unequal county. Marin topped the APC’s 2018 ranking.

Housing discrimination is not unique to Marin.

In a similar case earlier this year, the assessed value of a Black Indianapolis woman’s home more than doubled when she removed all photos in her home that might reveal her racial identity had a white friend stand in for an appraisal, The Indianapolis Star reports.

Carlette Duffy’s home was initially valued at $125,000 and $110,000 in separate appraisals before she “whitewashed” her home. The third appraisal came in at $259,000, The Star reports.

"I had to go through all of that just to say that I was right and that this is what's happening," she told the news outlet.

"This is real."