The sale price on homes with their address on a street named after a Confederate military figure or sobriquet sell for an average of 3% less and stay on the market longer than comparable properties on streets with normal names, Bloomberg CityLab reports on an Emory University analysis.
“Some of the discussions about Confederate streets so far have focused on the principled reasons, the benefits of changing the name versus the cost of changing all the signs,” says the study’s lead author, Emory Finance Professor T. Clifton Green. “There could also be economic benefits to changing these things.” The effect is distributed unevenly across the 35 states found to have residential streets with one of four names: “Robert E Lee”, “Stonewall Jackson”, (full names only, as “Lee Street” or “Jackson Avenue” are too generic on their own), “Confederate”, or “Dixie”, as naturally it’s less of an issue in the actual former rebel states than it is elsewhere. The mean Confederate street name discount works out to $7,000 on a $240,000 house nationally. There was plenty of data to work with, as even Massachusetts and California have streets with such names, and besides the homes being slightly older than average, the research team were able to find plenty of comparable control properties sold in the same quarter of the year, same census tract, similar age and stats on property size, bedrooms, bathrooms, etc to make the contrast clear as day.
We’ve said it once and we’ll keep saying it again and again and again: MAGA doesn’t pay.