Fair housing

Fair housing

This system ranks properties and markets for investment underwriting. It does not rank people, and its factor choices are governed with fair-housing exposure explicitly in mind. A model-governance memo accompanies each scoring release (first full version ships with the P3 scoring rebuild; mandatory before any multi-tenant display).

Signal families used

• Market: prices, rents, sale-to-list, days-on-market, yields, appreciation.
• Financial: HMDA mortgage volumes, loan sizes, applicant incomes, FHA share; property taxes and reassessment behavior.
• Physical: housing age, permits, flood complaints, FEMA zones, building violations.
• Municipal-administrative: point-of-sale inspection friction, municipal fiscal distress, 311 governance burden.

No protected-class attribute is an input anywhere in the system. Geography can correlate with protected class, which is exactly why the factor list is published and governed rather than assumed harmless.

The display line

Internal underwriting analytics and public display are different risk classes, and the system treats them that way:

• Crime detail — absolute levels, per-neighborhood type breakdowns — is excluded from steering-adjacent public display. What the models use internally is a single rising-violent-trend flag in the risk score; what public lenses show is trailing trend direction only, framed as underwriting risk, not neighborhood characterization.
• Publicly displayed signals are property- and market-economics framings — taxes, flood-311 density, permits, liquidity — each with its definition and vintage published in data sources.

Commitments

1. No output of this system may be used for tenant screening or credit decisions (FCRA). This is written into the terms and into the API’s own disclosure line on every valuation.
2. Scores rank tracts and deals for investment analysis. They are not judgments about a neighborhood’s residents, and no person-scoring feature will be built.
3. Each release that changes factors documents which features touch protected-class-correlated signals, the business-necessity rationale for keeping them, and their display boundaries.