Fair housing

Fair housing

This system ranks properties and market evidence for investment underwriting. It does not rank people. Geography can correlate with protected class, so public factors are governed as potential proxies rather than presumed harmless. Counsel review remains an open launch gate; this page describes the current engineering stop-loss, not a legal conclusion.

Signal families used

• Market: prices, rents, sale-to-list, days-on-market, yields, appreciation.
• Financial: mortgage volumes and loan sizes, 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.

Protected-class composition is not a public score input. Mortgage-applicant income, tract household income, crime trend, and crime-mix fields are retained only as restricted offline diagnostics. They are stripped from public tract payloads and do not affect public opportunity scores, property risk scores, recommendation outputs, or app lenses. The current capital-flow composite is also withheld until an income-free series is rebuilt and independently reviewed.

The display line

The current public display line is fail-closed:

• Crime level, trend, and type-mix fields do not appear in public lenses, property risk, or recommendations.
• Applicant/household-income fields do not appear in public lenses, opportunity scores, property risk, or recommendations.
• 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, why any retained offline field is necessary, and its enforced serving boundary.
4. A current fairness artifact and counsel review are required before this stop-loss is relaxed. The present fairness artifact still flags a disparate error-level result, so no fairness sign-off is claimed.