When Lonnie Feemster—a real estate broker and former president/current member of the Reno-Sparks NAACP—read the book The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein, he immediately recognized the truth of the book based on his own experience.
Feemster, who was born and raised in Reno, had heard stories of racism in real estate and mortgage deals from his parents and friends. He had fielded complaints of discrimination brought to the NAACP, and he has witnessed plenty of incidents himself. In 2019, he worked with the State Senate to pass a bill to void items in the covenants, conditions and restrictions (CC&Rs) connected to local properties that prohibited selling properties to buyers who weren’t white.
Segregated neighborhoods in Reno and Sparks
When he got started in real estate after working for Sierra Pacific Power for 27 years, Feemster worked for a Black real estate broker. Feemster’s first client was also Black. When they were looking at a house near Cannan Street and Silverada Boulevard, close to the Reno/Sparks border, a neighbor, who was white, came out and told them that he moved there from Ninth Street and Silverada, because he “was trying to get away from the Black people.”
Feemster laughed, remembering, “And he moved a couple of blocks away! I guess he thought he crossed the Mason-Dixon Line!”
Feemster said that the effect of disallowing Black people to buy property, at all or in certain neighborhoods, is to deny the opportunity to build wealth and pass it on through generations.
“In America, when it comes to building wealth, it’s required that you own real estate,” he said.
Feemster talked about growing up in Reno and Sparks in the 1960s. “We were restricted from living in most areas of Sparks and Reno through restrictions in property CC&Rs that had racial exclusions written into the deeds.”
He himself owns a property with such restrictions in the deed. “It says you can’t sell this property to anybody that’s not 100 percent white,” he said.
“When I was 15 or 16, when we were going to house parties, we had to go out to Conductor Heights. (It’s) an area where they allowed African Americans to live.” That area is now an industrial neighborhood around Hymer Avenue and Rock Boulevard.
Once, a woman who was preparing to sell a house called Feemster in disbelief, having just learned that her deed dictated that a Black person was not allowed to be in her neighborhood after dark.
“Now, that was news to me, because I used to catch the city bus right by her house to get back over to northeast Reno,” he said. “I don’t know if they counted catching the bus next door as violating the rules. But that was the rules right there.”
According to Feemster, Kent Ervin, a professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, was similarly appalled when he read the CC&Rs for the home he was buying in Newlands Manor and contacted some local legislators, along with Feemster. As a result, in the 2019 Legislative Session—just six years ago—Sens. Julia Ratti and Dallas Harris sponsored a bill jointly with then-Assemblywoman Lisa Krasner to void such items in CC&Rs.
Senate Bill 117, which passed both the Assembly and Senate unanimously, voids any CC&Rs restrictions based on “race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, sexual orientation, or gender identity or expression.”
Loan applications sorted by race
These days, Feemster’s most pressing concern is discrimination in lending.
He said that banks put loan applications from Black and Latino applicants in different piles, and mentioned “Fat File Syndrome,” a phrase that describes the practice of lenders giving more information about loans to white applicants than Black applicants.
He said he was once helping a couple buy their first house, and the loan they were expecting kept getting delayed. After various delays, the lender said the couple’s file had been lost.
“I called the loan officer, and he said, ‘We finally found their file. It was in the Hispanic pile,’” Feemster said.
He was not surprised to learn that the lender was separating applications by race—only that he said it out loud.
“Banks have written algorithms that will turn you down for a loan based on some reason,” Feemster said. “They say, ‘Well, the computer said you wouldn’t be a good loan candidate.’ But what they’ve done is they’ve delegated racial discrimination to their algorithms and then blame it on the computer. They’ve shown that algorithms have a racial bias.”
Feemster believes that the answer to discriminatory practices in real estate and lending is education.
“We haven’t solved the racial bias problem in America, because we haven’t educated our children,” he said. “They don’t even know this is racial bias. A lot of kids come from good families, but they don’t realize all this stuff is going on. If you don’t work in the business of real estate and civil rights, how are you going to even know this stuff?”
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