Blog Archives - Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California

‘Scrub Blackness from Our Home’: Oakland Couple Forced to Whitewash Their Home to Prove Its Worth — Appraiser Who Undervalued It by $254K Now Faces Consequences

5/14/2025

A couple in Oakland, California, has won a legal victory over an appraiser and lender who undervalued their home by $254,000 during a refinance, which the state determined was due to racial bias. As the result of a settlement overseen by the California Civil Rights Department (CRD), Ronald and Dominique Curtis received $75,000 from appraiser Mehdi Mehdipour-Mossafer, who also agreed to pay $15,000 to the CRD and to watch “Our America: Lowballed,” a documentary on the impact of appraisal discrimination on Black and Latino families produced by ABC7 News in San Francisco. The Curtises purchased a duplex in Oakland in 2019, hoping to build equity and some day leave the home to their young daughter, according to a statement by Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California (FHANC), a nonprofit organization.

After making significant renovations, in April of 2020 the home was appraised at $1.15 million. In December 2020, seeking to take advantage of historically low interest rates, they applied to Quicken Loans (now Rocket Mortgage) to refinance their home. As part of the process, Mehdipour-Mossafer, a licensed real estate appraiser, inspected the house and prepared an appraisal report. The Curtises said they were shocked to receive a valuation of $900,000 from the appraiser — $254,000 lower than it had been appraised for earlier that year. Ronald Curtis, who is Black, is a real estate agent in the Bay Area and Dominique Curtis, who is Puerto Rican and identifies as Latina, worked with him at a local brokerage and was training to be an appraiser at the time. (She is now a licensed appraiser). As real estate professionals they had access to multiple listing service (MLS) data and used it to compile and submit a 60-page appeal requesting a reconsideration of value, reported ABC7.

The couple took issue with the properties used in the appraisal report as comparable homes, including several that were blighted with boarded-up windows, a caved-in garage and bricks sitting atop roof shingles to hold them in place. They suspected racial bias might be at play. But Mehdipour-Mossafer refused to change the appraisal, and ultimately the Curtises were unable to secure the refinanced loan. According to their complaint, the lender only followed up to offer a second appraisal after the Curtises went public with their concerns on local TV news.

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‘Millions out on the street virtually overnight’: How Trump’s budget proposal could affect California

5/6/2025

On Friday President Trump released a budget blueprint for the next fiscal year that would take a chainsaw to social, environmental and education programs. Some of the sharpest cuts are directed at housing programs that are meant to serve the poor, housing insecure and unhoused.

In California, millions are served by these funds and state and local governments depend on them to operate affordable housing, rental assistance, homeless service, planning and legal programs.

In a letter to the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee, the president’s budget director, Russel Vought, laid out $163 billion in annual spending cuts coupled with “unprecedented increases” in military and border security spending. The cuts, Vought wrote, are directed at areas of spending that the administration found to be “contrary to the needs of ordinary working Americans and tilted toward funding niche non-governmental organizations and institutions of higher education committed to radical gender and climate ideologies antithetical to the American way of life.”

That includes $33.5 billion in proposed cuts to the Housing and Urban Development department, a 44% reduction from current levels.Presidential budget requests rarely reflect what Congress ultimately passes into law but are instead often viewed as something between an opening negotiating bid and a political vision board. “You’d be looking at millions of people out on the street virtually overnight.” Matt Schwartz, president, California Housing Partnership...

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