More than 1,400 streets across the U.S. bear the names of Confederate figures such as Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, the legacy of historical revisionists over the 20th century. These memorials come with a price, a new study suggests Governments that insist on naming streets after Confederate figures are costing some homeowners a small fortune.
Confederate addresses sell for 3% less on average than homes of similar size and age on nearby streets that aren’t named for secessionists. That works out to a mean Confederate home-sale discount of about $7,000 on a $240,000 home. Houses on Confederate streets also take longer to sell than otherwise comparable homes, according to a review of home sales data across 35 states.
“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 T. Clifton Green, a finance professor at Emory University and the study’s lead author. “There could also be economic benefits to changing these things.”
But the effect is geographically variable: The Confederate discount is far more muted in the states that make up the former Confederacy, and in a handful of states with the most Lost Cause memorials, homes on Confederate streets may even enjoy a fraction of a percentage point boost in sales. Outside the South, the Confederate discount is pronounced.
Green says that this revelation doesn’t trump other reasons for changing Confederate street names. “Not every decision should be made just on the basis of economics, but there is also economics.”
The as-yet-unpublished paper, which Green wrote with Russell Jame, Jaemin Lee, and Jaeyeon Lee, contributes to a growing body of work on the impact of racial attitudes on the housing industry. Bloomberg CityLab’s Brentin Mock has written about the race gap in-home appraisals, spurred by an industry that persistently undervalues properties owned by Black and Latino homeowners. Economists have carved out a niche for street maps: Jhacova Williams has shown that Confederate street names are associated with racial gaps in labor factors. Other researchers have studied the economic geography of streets named after Martin Luther King Jr. The paper by Green et al. might be unique in that it shows an adverse consequence associated with white identity politics.
The study looked at transaction data for streets named after Lee, Davis and Jackson (using their full names) as well as two more generic options (“Confederate” and “Dixie”). Using figures from ATTOM, a private property data provider, the researchers examined nearly 6,000 sales on more than 1,400 Confederate-named streets between 2001 and 2020. Unsurprisingly, the majority of these streets are located in former Confederate states, but they also appear in California and Massachusetts, as well as Midwestern and Western states that didn’t exist during the Civil War. The researchers compared homes with similar characteristics — same number of bedrooms and bathrooms, same building and lot size, same age — within the same census tract, focusing on sales that happened in the same calendar quarter. Houses on Confederate streets tend to be older, but otherwise, there was an ample control set for comparison’s sake.
“Our main approach is to control for other houses in the region and any trends over time, specifically for older properties. We try to be very conservative for finding benchmark properties,” Green says. “The data speaks for itself. It jumps out.”
Within the 11 states that make up the former Confederacy, the discount is smaller (less than 2%) and not statistically significant. In the states with the most Confederate memorials — Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas and Virginia — the researchers recorded a small (insignificant) positive effect on sale prices on these streets. For the 24 states outside those of the former Confederacy, however, the effect was strongly significant: Home sales on Confederate streets were more than 4% lower on average.
The effect was even stronger in areas with higher shares of Black residents, highly educated residents and Democratic-voting residents. Sales on these streets were 9% more likely to fall within the group (quintile) with the slowest sales. These sales are 10% more likely to wind up in the quintile with the largest discount relative to the listed price. And Confederate house sales dipped even further — going for 8% less on average — in the calendar quarter after events that shone a spotlight on white supremacy, such as the church massacre in South Carolina in 2015, the Unite the Right rally in Virginia in 2017 and the widespread Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality in 2020.
Over the last several years, these outrages precipitated a nationwide recall on Confederate monuments, with or without the permission of local leaders. This effort includes a push to rename hundreds of streets that honor white supremacists (plus a parallel movement to rename streets to proactively honor Black history). According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, roadways honoring the Lost Cause outnumber statues, schools, parks, or other commemorations.
Atlanta has put in work, albeit slowly, to change streets named for members of the Confederacy and the Ku Klux Klan. Alexandria, Virginia, aims to rename streets for secessionists John Janney and Earl Van Dorn after Elijah Cummings and Breonna Taylor, among dozens of others. Changing deeds is painstaking work; the study might give landlords, business owners and city officials an incentive to take up the charge.
At a hyperlocal level, the findings align with patterns in residential segregation. Looking specifically at homeowners in Florida, the study shows that homes on Confederate streets are less likely to be owned by Black households (30% less), registered Democrats (20% less) and people with a college degree (17%). “The demographic evidence is consistent with residential sorting, and the findings support the view that the Confederate street transaction price effect is related to homeowner preferences,” the paper reads.
Green concedes that the delta between specific sales could potentially be explained by unobservable differences between homes that are difficult to track. He says he would also like to see whether name changes for schools named after Confederates has any impact on neighborhood home sales, although it’s harder to come up with the control group for that analysis.
To fully assess how much a Confederate street name drives down housing prices, Green says that he’s missing important data: comparisons for home sales before and after a new sign goes up. “There haven’t been enough street name changes to test.”
