# Disparate Impact

> Disparate Impact reveals and governs how access to place and credit can be distributed or denied

| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Stable ID | `node:kiduna:real-estate-mortgage:fair-housing:disparate-impact` |
| Family | Fair Housing & Exclusion |
| Domain | Governance |
| Era | Institutional Age → Collective Age |
| Kind | governance-mechanism |
| Archetype | The Boundary |
| Claim layers | empirical, cultural_historical, synthesis, interpretive, symbolic_divinatory |

## What it is

Disparate Impact is a governance mechanism in the Fair Housing & Exclusion family, defined here by the function it performs in the property system rather than by label alone.

## What it actually does

Disparate Impact reveals and governs how access to place and credit can be distributed or denied.

## Why it exists

It exists because place is unique and immovable while law, capital, information, and human lives must still coordinate around it across time.

## System mechanics

- **Who uses it:** owner, occupant, buyer, seller, lender, investor, steward, regulator
- **Incentives:** legitimacy, clarity, enforceability, administrative efficiency
- **Inputs:** place, people, records, rules, resources, time
- **Outputs:** rights, constraints, uses, relationships, consequences
- **Dependencies:** Land, Authority, Information, Capital, Time

## Archetypal reading

- **Essence:** Disparate Impact reveals and governs how access to place and credit can be distributed or denied
- **Gift:** Clarity about disparate impact makes a hidden allocation of place, time, authority, value, or risk available for deliberate choice.
- **Wound / Shadow:** When disparate impact is treated as neutral or inevitable, its costs can be shifted to people who hold less information, authority, liquidity, or mobility.
- **Failure mode:** The failure mode appears when disparate impact is stale, opaque, mispriced, misrecorded, overextended, or applied outside the conditions that made it useful.

## Lenses

- **Personal:** Notice where disparate impact appears as a structure in your own commitments: what is held, promised, priced, protected, excluded, or deferred?
- **Business:** Disparate Impact reveals a handoff among information, authority, incentives, operating work, and capital. Make the owner of each handoff explicit.
- **Financial:** Disparate Impact changes the timing, priority, comparability, liquidity, or distribution of cash flow and risk.
- **Property:** Disparate Impact changes how a physical place can be used, valued, financed, transferred, occupied, maintained, or reclaimed.
- **Community:** Disparate Impact can create benefits inside one parcel while exporting costs or opportunity to neighbors, institutions, or future residents.

## Divination

The Boundary enters the reading through Disparate Impact. The issue is not only what is visible; it is which map of ownership, time, risk, authority, or belonging currently governs the situation.

**Question:** Who has legitimate authority under Disparate Impact, and where does that authority stop?

**Guidance:** Name the source, scope, duration, appeal path, and release of authority.

## Game function

Changes what actions are permitted and who may authorize them. Initiative 4.

## Relationships

- **Community Land Trust documents Disparate Impact.** Community Land Trust documents Disparate Impact through a change in rights, information, cash flow, priority, timing, or physical use.
- **Disparate Treatment enables Disparate Impact.** Disparate Treatment enables Disparate Impact through a change in rights, information, cash flow, priority, timing, or physical use.
- **Disparate Impact prices Appraisal Bias.** Disparate Impact prices Appraisal Bias through a change in rights, information, cash flow, priority, timing, or physical use.
- **Disparate Impact transfers into Regulation X.** Disparate Impact transfers into Regulation X through a change in rights, information, cash flow, priority, timing, or physical use.

## Oppositions

- Formal Equality versus Substantive Access
- Scarcity Value versus Affordability

## Historical lineage and regulatory context

Read Disparate Impact through the lineage of Fair Housing & Exclusion: earlier customary or local arrangements became recorded, standardized, financed, regulated, digitized, or contested over time.

Rules vary by jurisdiction and transaction. Use the cited primary sources as starting points and verify current local law, program guides, contracts, and professional standards before operational use.

## Visual direction

Text-free rounded-square enamel artifact for Disparate Impact: a cadastral grid overlaid with colored permissions, gates, and invisible boundaries made visible; vitreous midnight enamel, blackened steel, warm brass, copper accents, mortgage-paper cream, deep green, slate, and sky blue.

## Engine output / Sentinel handoff

The generative interpretation above is preserved as Engine Output. Sentinel factors: jurisdiction-specific rules, factual uncertainty, historical discrimination, cultural context, fair-lending implications. These factors request contextual review; they do not delete or silently rewrite the candidate.

## Research / provenance

- [Housing Discrimination Under the Fair Housing Act](https://www.hud.gov/helping-americans/fair-housing-act-overview) — U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development; housing discrimination and protected classes.
- [The Fair Housing Act](https://www.justice.gov/crt/fair-housing-act-1) — U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division; fair housing and lending discrimination.
- [Redlining and Your Rights](https://www.justice.gov/crt/media/1325956/dl?inline=) — U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division; redlining and equal access to credit.
