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Entry bubble Ever Heard of Housing Discrimination?

By: Jake | April 20, 2009 | Category: Home and Family

Houses

The Department of Housing and Urban Development designates April as Fair Housing Month to spread the word about your rights when buying, renting or financing a home. This week is Fair Housing Education Week, where HUD representatives visit schools to teach children and their parents about housing discrimination.

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibits discrimination based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status (including children under the age of 18 living with parents or legal custodians, pregnant women, and people securing custody of children under the age of 18), and handicap (disability) when renting, selling or financing a home. It also makes HUD the primary enforcement agency, so if you think you have a housing discrimination case, file your complaint with them. Keep in mind the law does not protect people who can't pay their rent or mortgages.

I wonder how much of a problem housing discrimination is. According to recent remarks from HUD's Secretary, there were more than 10,000 complaints of housing discrimination last year, though an older study estimates that there are 2 million instances of housing discrimination each year. I've never been discriminated against and none of my friends believed that they had been a victim of housing discrimination. Of course I wouldn't consider my friends to be a scientific sample, and most of them believed that housing discrimination would be hard to identify because it might not be overt.

So what do you think? Have you or anyone you've known been the victim of housing discrimination?

| View Comments [4] | envelope E-mail This Entry | Tags: fair_housing_education_week   fair_housing_month   housing_discrimination   jake  

Comments (4):

blue comment bubble Posted by steve on April 20, 2009 at 04:30 PM EDT

The estimated 2,000,000 housing discrimination events annually is based on a study by HUD and the Urban Institute that involved sending "mystery shopper" testers out to housing providers. The second significantly lower number simply cites the number of complaints received.

This dramatic difference is explained by the few number of individuals who recognize that they are victims of housing discrimination. For example, a prospective tenant will not know that the unit is actually not rented as is being claimed or that a higher rent is being quoted. Even those that do realize that they have been victimized generally do not wish to spend a year or more of their lives trying to get recourse through HUD or filing a lawsuit.

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blue comment bubble Posted by dani on April 21, 2009 at 09:13 AM EDT

I have not personally been a victim of housing discrimination (at least not to my knowledge) but I know it happens all the time, both from the work I do and friends that tell me about discrimination they experience. I also see it in discriminatory housing ads on Craigslist.org. I believe most housing discrimination is never reported.

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blue comment bubble Posted by rdoran on April 21, 2009 at 04:15 PM EDT

Yes Virginia, housing discrimination exists!
My agency, Baltimore Neighborhoods, Inc. (BNI), investigates housing discrimination complaints. We investigate several hundred every year and receive many more that we just don't have the resources to research. And those are just from the people who know of us and are able to get in touch.
Another concern I have is that many people don't know and/or understand their rights in the first place. So discrimination happens but the person is oblivious to it.
A last concern - people dointentionally discriminate but they know the laws and how to get around them. The fair housing/fair lending community must get better at investigating and researching.
Most important - the need for more resources (i.e. funding).

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blue comment bubble Posted by Mira on April 22, 2009 at 12:43 AM EDT

Yes, I have faced housing discrimination. A landlord (whom I rented from for 6 years previously with excellent rental history) would not show me a property when he learned I had a baby. My husband has had landlords hang up on him when they heard his foreign accent. My dad was told there were no units available, he could not be put on a waiting list and the deposit would be twice the amount of rent. Then he had his white US-born friend call who was told that there were units available and the deposit was one month's rent. My white mother was told that she "would not be comfortable" in an integrated neighborhood by a real estate agent, and the agent told her that she would not let "a single woman like you live in a neighborhood like that." Housing discrimination happens frequently. Because people often are not aware of their rights, or don't know how others are being treated, it often goes unreported.

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