A Discriminating Landlord

Suppose black rapper Tyler, the Creator went apartment hunting in Portland, Ore., and encountered a landlord who detected thug tendencies in Tyler’s attitude. Suppose the landlord didn’t want to rent to him. Should that be a crime?

But what if Tyler, the Creator rejected the landlord as too uptight and the neighborhood as too quiet and incompatible with his family’s lifestyle: “I done seen my mom beat bitches up.” Would that not prove that the landlord’s suspicions were right?

Tyler, the Creator really did say that about a landlord and his mom while apartment hunting – but not in Portland. He was in L.A.

Had he been in Portland, and had Tyler decided he wanted to shake up the neighborhood, that landlord might’ve felt forced to rent to him – especially now.

The Fair Housing Council of Oregon has alleged that an audit showed 50 Portland landlords discriminated against 32 potential tenants, who were either black or Hispanic. Typically, the landlord quoted a higher move-in fee to black or Hispanic “testers” hired by the council to pose as apartment seekers compared to the fee quoted to non-Hispanic white “testers.”

The results have been widely publicized, and Portland Commissioner Nick Fish has announced a plan to fight housing discrimination and “get at the root of persistent problems in our community, which are barriers to housing choice.”

Perhaps Fish is living in the housing of his choice. Many people aren’t, no matter what their skin color. (Fish is the same city commissioner who said last week that $32,000 was a “trivial” amount.) Most of us live where we can afford to live.

The names of the landlords alleged to have discriminated against blacks and Hispanics have not been released. It’s unknown how many fit the description of local mom-and-pop landlords and how many are owners (absentee or otherwise) with large numbers of rentals.

Given Portland’s reputation for being predominantly liberal, it’s doubtful that all of these landlords accused of discrimination are right-wing Republicans. Some of them probably support the ideals they are now accused of violating. What happened?

Finding good tenants isn’t always easy. Sometimes the best a landlord can do is rely on instincts and past experience. If a potential renter reminds a landlord of a previous tenant who caused problems, is it really the government’s business to step in and tell the landlord, “Stop thinking. We’ll decide for you.”

If the Fair Housing Council of Oregon is going to instantly label a landlord guilty of racial discrimination, and if government agencies and the media are going to jump on board, perhaps the auditors should also be audited. Some questions:

  • How deep did this audit go? Were black landlords and Hispanic landlords also tested? Shocking as it may seem, some black landlords don’t like renting to Hispanics, and some Hispanic landlords don’t like renting to blacks.
  • Did any of the landlords previously evict a black or Hispanic tenant? A landlord who’s gone through a difficult eviction with a black or Hispanic may see an advantage to white tenants: They can be easier to evict because they are less likely to claim discrimination.
  • Did the black and Hispanic testers present themselves differently from the white testers? Did the testers all use similar language and voice inflection? Did they display the same demeanor?
  • If the testers appeared in person, did they all dress in a comparable fashion? Did they drive comparable cars or use comparable transportation? (Some landlords check out the cleanliness of a prospective tenant’s car to get an idea of how they might take care of property.)

I’ve never been a landlord, but I’ve been a renter. I’ve had landlords and landladies who went out of their way to try and rent to me. I appear to be innocuous, quiet and responsible. That appearance has nothing to do with my fair complexion. You don’t have to look too hard to find someone with my skin shade who appears unkempt, loud and unreliable (check the sidewalks in downtown Portland).

Forcing landlords to abandon their own judgments when selecting tenants might make some politicians and activists feel good about themselves, but it can lead to unintended consequences that can hurt entire neighborhoods.

In 1989, an Oakland woman who was fed up with crack houses and the inability of landlords or police to do anything about them, founded an organization called Safe Streets Now. It’s a way to get landlords to evict undesirable tenants by having multiple neighbors document all nuisance activities at a problem property, then each neighbor sues the landlord in Small Claims Court alleging a public nuisance. Each claim can be up to $5,000. Since it is Small Claims, the landlord cannot be represented by an attorney. The multiple claims can add up to attention-getting sums.

I saw neighbors forced to go this route in Southern California. In some cases the landlords were absentee owners who didn’t care what their tenants did as long as they paid their rent (at least no one could accuse these landlords of discriminating).

In other cases, the landlords lived locally but were overwhelmed and intimidated by tenants who turned out to be gang members or drug dealers. Would it be surprising if those landlords later steered away from black or Hispanic tenants?

The good intentions of fair housing laws enacted decades ago do not take current realities into consideration. Are we tackling a problem as if nothing has changed since the mid-20th Century?

In 2011 we have Tyler, the Creator who boasts about misogyny and violence and also brags: “I always judge a book by the cover, never the page.”

— Pamela Fitzsimmons

5 Comments

  • Your piece brought to my mind two essays written by Shelby Steele (one appeared in the Best American Essays series some years back), neither of which I can find right now.

    Both of the essays helped me to infer that many “progressive” Americans need to believe it is permanently Sunday sunrise in Selma, Alabama,1962.

    In part this is because the earnest activists of that period often became the sinecured institutional reactionaries of today, reactionaries that inscribed their bloated catechism on young minds ala Ayers/Dohrn, Marion Berry etc).

    As a college English teacher I increasingly became leery of my students.

    I witnessed a fellow instructor (a navy vet)hauled before the Dean because he’d noted that the Gomer Pyle T.V. series had some fairly accurate depictions of service life. An army vet complained.

    While working the University of Minnesota system I witnessed many aggressive political officers (those paid high salaries to ferret out discrimination in any form) work any chafing at instructional authority, student ignorance/immaturity, or small misunderstanding into state and federal statistical bias data and at the same time those political officers were very keen on getting the mind right of any university employee they’d decided was an offender.

    This housing business that you note – I believe much of the problem stems from rotten institutions and institutional thinking anchored in an antiquated self-righteousness. That, and the fact kids went straight from those schools into government. And finally, these bureaucrats know nothing of creating wealth or making a living in the world of free enterprise.

  • There was a commentary posted on Oregonlive by a landlord named Lisa Warmington, who talked about the need for property owners to be selective. Not surprisingly, it generated some comments (most of them by one person) who fit your description of people who always have their antennae up, seeking bias. It makes you wonder what goes on inside their own minds that they see bias everywhere.

    The FAQs section on the Fair Housing Council of Oregon’s Web site has some fascinating details on what landlords can and cannot do. A few of them: Landlords may be required to rent to the mentally ill. Landlords are advised not to advertise a place or neighborhood as “quiet.” And if a landlord has rented to black tenants, but they were all light-skinned blacks … well, that could be a problem.

    Some of the requirements border on the absurd and challenge the credibility of fair housing laws.

    It isn’t just bureaucrats who know nothing of creating wealth. Our culture has some romantic notions about wealth and work. We love stories about artists who sacrifice everything for their art. We are less sympathetic to, and less admiring of, people who sacrifice everything to start a small business. I am guilty of this myself sometimes.

    Pamela

  • appaloosa wrote:

    I know a couple of people who got out of the landlord business because of this kind of stuff. One of them is letting the apartment over his garage stay vacant. A lady I know went to a seminar with her husband. I don’t know if it was by this organization you mention here but they were told you have to be very, very careful. A landlord can be forced to rent to someone they dont’ trust if the tenant threatens to raise trouble.

  • I vow to look for the positive aspects of the matters brought up on this site; to try and highlight or at least point to trends or instances the suggest common sense and fairness might be re-asserting their presence among us.

  • An often missed element by the media and absent in general discussions is that housing discrimination is not necessarily illegal. It is illegal if that discriminatory conduct is because of race, etc.

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