The Fight
For Fair Housing
ast month, I went on vacation to Seattle. My
boyfriend and I decided to book an Airbnb,
generally a cheaper option than a hotel.
In preparing for the weeklong excursion, I
told my boyfriend he would have to be the one
to set up the Airbnb profile and book the trip.
He’s white and I’m black. I didn’t want to risk our being
denied a place to stay due to my profile picture.
It may seem like an unrealistic fear, but it’s not
unwarranted. Last July, The Guardian published a story
about an Airbnb host who canceled a woman’s reservation
via text message just minutes before she arrived, stating: “I
wouldn’t rent it to u if u were the last person on earth,” and
“One word says it all. Asian.”
That’s just one among a plethora of stories about
discrimination with Airbnb. Later in that same month,
Airbnb partnered with the NAACP to reach out to
communities of color and help increase the diversity
of the website’s rental hosts, according to the NAACP.
Airbnb also committed to hiring a more diverse workforce
internally.
But housing discrimination isn’t limited to vacation
rental sites.
Housing discrimination also happens with permanent
housing situations — renting an apartment or attempting to
buy a house. In places like Eugene and Portland, where the
housing market is super tight, this makes it even harder to
secure housing for already marginalized groups.
With Oregon’s specific history of deterring people of
color from land and home ownership, the fact that racial
discrimination in housing still exists should not be terribly
surprising. But other forms of housing discrimination
take place here, too, and they tend to get overshadowed
— discrimination regarding disability, source of income,
sexual orientation and other identifications.
But such forms of discrimination are rarely as blatant as
a message of “I won’t rent to you because you’re Asian,”
so they’re more difficult to prove.
In 2016 alone, the U.S. Department of Housing
and Urban Development (HUD) received 60 housing
discrimination complaints for the state of Oregon. The
individual cases are not available to view in detail, and the
most recent 2017 report is not available yet, according to
Public Information Officer Leland Jones.
Oregon’s Bureau of Labor and Industries (BOLI)
handles complaints together with HUD. BOLI has more
specific data for regions within Oregon.
L
The people
striving to fix
Oregon’s housing
discrimination
problem
BY MEERAH POWELL
Over the past five years in Lane County, 58 housing
discrimination complaints have been filed with BOLI. More
than half of those cases were closed due to “no substantial
evidence.” Most of those cases cited either source-of-
income discrimination or disability discrimination.
But those numbers are not actually an indicator of
what’s going on, fair housing advocates say.
Allan Lazo, executive director of Fair Housing Council
of Oregon (FHCO), says housing discrimination goes
largely underreported. The fact that these cases are hard to
prove also discourages tenants from taking action.
“It can be very difficult to get that kind of evidence
in a housing discrimination case, because housing
discrimination today just looks very different than when
the fair housing act passed 50 years ago,” Lazo says. “And
that’s because, at that time, discrimination and segregation
around those issues were blatant. They were just flat out.
‘No blacks here’ or ‘Whites only.’ And you certainly don’t
see that anymore, so it can be difficult in a complaint of
that nature to prove discrimination.”
The Fair Housing Act — also known as Title VIII of
the Civil Rights Act of 1968 — “prohibits discrimination
by direct providers of housing, such as landlords and
real estate companies as well as other entities … whose
discriminatory practices make housing unavailable to
persons because of: race or color, religion, sex, national
origin, familial status or disability,” according to the U.S.
Department of Justice.
Oregon also adds marital status, source of income,
sexual orientation and gender identity to that list. Eugene
additionally protects against housing discrimination based
on ethnicity and age.
FHCO, based in Portland, is dedicated to “ending
housing discrimination and ensuring equal access to
housing opportunities throughout the state,” Lazo says.
They do that through their housing discrimination
hotline, which Lazo estimates receives approximately
2,000 calls a year, along with providing other services.
About 10 percent of those statewide hotline calls are
what FHCO calls bona fide fair housing allegations, Lazo
says.
“We get a lot of calls from people who don’t know
whether or not they’ve been discriminated against. We
kind of talk with them and try to figure out whether or not
it’s a case of discrimination,” he adds. “About 10 percent
of those calls, about 200 of them, are bona fide allegations
and we will further investigate those.”
Lazo says some of those complaints are more easily
resolved than others.
“Some of the cases we have around physical disability,
those are a little more clear because the rights for disabilities
are pretty well defined, so it’s pretty easy for us to work
with the housing provider and say, ‘You’re in violation of
the fair housing act,’ either federal or local or state laws,
and it’s pretty clear,” he says.
Other forms of discrimination — for example, disability
involving mental health — aren’t as clearly outlined. “The
other types of complaints are much more difficult to move
through that legal process, for sure,” Lazo says.
According to data from FHCO, from “July 1, 2016
to June 30, 2017, the Fair Housing Council of Oregon
screened 1,859 intake claims for possible housing
discrimination from throughout the state of Oregon; 102 of
those intakes came from residents of or properties within
the city of Eugene.”
“[Twenty-six] of the [Eugene] intake calls, or 25.49
percent, resulted in further investigations of a fair housing
allegation,” according to FHCO.
Fifteen of those “bona fide” 26 intake calls were related
to disability complaints, three were related to race and/or
color, three to sex and so on.
Lazo says FHCO does its own investigations, but also
refers people to BOLI or HUD if they want to lodge a
formal complaint.
Along with its hotline, Lazo says FHCO also does
testing throughout the state. “That’s like secret shopper
testing,” he says. The organization sends in pairs of people,
one in a protected class and one not, to observe whether
they’re being treated differently in the rental process.
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