The Geography of Algorithmic Judgment: LLM Intermediaries, Place Identity, and Racial Steering in Housing Search

In three linesBehavioral audit of 7 LLMs (open-weight and closed-source) across 4 US cities reveals racial steering emerges from interaction between user identity, stated preferences, and the model's learned spatial representations. Steering is not uniform: preference-conditioned testing often amplifies bias. Results do not generalize across local markets.

Summary generated by Claude — human-verified