You apply for an apartment, and they ask for your credit score. You shudder. Perhaps for a good reason, it’s possible that credit scores are more sinister than we realized. Liberty and Scott are getting to the bottom of credit scores to find just how antagonistic credit scores are to people from underserved communities seeking quality housing. They look for answers from Prof. Munther Dahleh, Director of MIT IDSS, and Yuri Beckelman, staff director at the US House of Representatives to find out who credit scores hurt the most and what alternative solutions can work for everyone–lenders, landlords, and borrowers included.  

Data Nation is a production of the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society and Voxtopica.