Better residential than ethnic discrimination!

Summary Access to housing is difficult for minorities in France. An audit study we run in the Paris area showed that minority applicants do not face a strong disadvantage in the first step of the application. however, the fact that applicants come from a deprived area leads to more frequent unfavorable outcome (we call this residential discrimination as opposed to ethnic discrimination). The puzzle and paradox come from the fact that face-to-face interviews with real-estate agents in the city of Paris and the Parisian region DO NOT confirm this result. If anything, all discrimi-nation arise from ethnicity and agents dis-miss residential discrimination. Our paper, forthcoming in Urban Studies, documents this contrast between quantitative and qualitative methods and proposes interpretations.