Landlord Constructions of Fair Housing Compliance in the Information Age

• In Event: 374 - Section on Sociology of Law. Law and Culture

Abstract

As we approach the 50th anniversary of the 1968 Fair Housing Act’s passage, the persistence of discrimination in the rental housing market is one indicia of the Act’s shortcomings that is bound up with and compounded by other significant contemporary barriers to housing for Black and Hispanic renters. Rental housing access is further constricted by both the acute shortage of affordable rental housing and landlords’ adoption of more exhaustive background screening practices. The expanded use of commercial background checks by private landlords is said to frustrate housing access for large numbers of renters of color with criminal convictions, past evictions and damaged or non-existent credit histories and enhance opportunities for subtle forms of discrimination involving the inconsistent application of background check criteria.
This paper presents findings from a case study of tenant screening practices in Seattle’s private rental housing industry. In contrast with the voluminous socio-legal literature on employer compliance with anti-discrimination law, very few studies have taken a ground-level approach to investigating how anti-discrimination regulations shape or fail to impact landlords’ behavior. The current study draws on in-depth interviews with landlords and renters with criminal convictions, past evictions and damaged credit histories to construct a rich descriptive picture of law’s imprint on tenant screening practices and assess the capacity of existing and recently proposed fair housing regulations to meaningfully combat discriminatory tenant screening practices and improve housing access for who those encounter multiple interlocking barriers to housing.

Author

• Anna Reosti, University of Washington