July 06, 2020

Boston: Study shows Black renters, voucher holders face egregious housing discrimination

Blacks tend to be poorer and more violent so there will always be a presumption against them.  It is similar in Australia with Aborigines and Maori.  As an Australian landlord in the 80's and '90s, I was aware of the adverse probablities with them but still accepted them where my judgment of them personally suggested that they would be OK.  I judged the individual, not the race.

I eventuallly tired of Maori because of their disruptiveness when drunk but contiued to accept Aborigines until I gave up landlording. So I am one of the "good" landlords who did accept minorities.  But I did so on the basis of a personal interview.  If I had to leave the judgment to an agent, however, I would have put in place a mechanism for rejecting minorities. The risk would have been too great to delegate the decision to an agent.

And that is the reality. You can try to make prospective black tenants more desirable by way of anti-discrimination laws but owners will find ways around such laws.  An undesirable tenant will remain an undesirable tenant and will rarely be accepted.

The pity of course is that some minority tenants will be perfectly OK.  Two of my best tenants were black.  But most blacks will be rejected because of their ethnicity.  So an intelligent solution to that problem is needed.

Making eviction easier would be one such measure.  If you can easily get a bad tenant out, owners and agents would be more likely to take a risk.  Higher rents and deposits for minorities would also work but would send the Left into a frothing rage.  The left go for coercion despite the much greater effectiveness of incentives


Researchers fault real estate professionals who illegally ghost, steer away qualified renters

An undercover investigation released Wednesday found that Black people posing as prospective tenants in Greater Boston were shown fewer apartments than whites and offered fewer incentives to rent, and that real estate agents cut off contact when the renters gave Black-sounding names like Lakisha, Tyrone, or Kareem.

The white “testers” in the study posing as would-be renters, on the other hand, easily secured tours of properties, were wooed with discounts, and got preferred treatment — such as the opportunity to view additional units — when looking at apartments.

In subtle and overt ways, Black renters experienced discrimination by real estate brokers and landlords in 71 percent of the cases tested in the study by Suffolk University Law School, titled “Qualified Renters Need Not Apply: Race and Voucher Discrimination in the Metro Boston Housing Market.”

SOURCE






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