A black person looking for rental housing in Richmond can expect to be discriminated against 80 percent of the time, a study revealed.
This is a much higher rate than similar studies have found in other Bay Area cities during the past two decades.
“Nobody knew what we would find, but these results were pretty startling and extreme,” said Caroline Peattie, of Fair Housing of Marin, the nonprofit that did the survey.
National experts called the rate astonishingly high.
The audit had pairs of black and white apartment hunters with similar incomes and rental needs call 20 property owners and managers advertising on Craigslist.
The callers voices indicated their race.
The audit in June found that 16 of the housing providers responded less favorably to blacks than their otherwise identical white counterparts. Among the findings:
The sample size was small, but such undercover testing is actually better at rooting out bias than complaint-driven enforcement, according to John Trasvina of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
“The number of complaints really doesn’t tell you all that much,” Trasvina said. “What does tell you a lot is testing.”
City Council members discussing the report Tuesday vowed to eradicate the housing bias.
“Eighty percent is just awful, and we did a heck of a lot worse than anywhere else,” said Councilman Jeff Ritterman. “We should do whatever we have to do as a city to not tolerate it.”
In studies over the past several years, Fair Housing found that 48 percent of housing providers in the small towns around Richmond discriminated against black renters, and 32 percent of housing providers in Marin showed a bias.
In 2005, a different nonprofit found that housing providers discriminated against black men 26 percent of the time in Hayward, Livermore, Pleasanton and Union City.
Council members suggested supporting litigation against biased homeowners and publicizing their names, and sponsoring civil rights workshops for tenants.
The study’s findings were no surprise to Ruth Scott, who struggled this fall to find an affordable rental in Richmond’s Hilltop area.
She believes that the apartment managers she called quoted her high rents because they didn’t want her as a tenant.
“They just put the rent up so high, they definitely don’t want us to rent houses,” she said.
Property owners associations decried the findings and offered to help the city educate its housing providers.
“It’s basically ignorance,” said East Bay Rental Housing Association board member Link Corkery. “Maybe a person who buys some real estate takes the attitude, ‘Well, it’s my property, and I can rent it to whoever I want.’ That’s not the law.”
Scholars believe that housing providers generally discriminate against minorities either because they think they can use race to predict something about the tenant, such as their income or employment status, or because they are trying to please their existing white tenants.
“(Scholarly studies) indicate that there is an economic basis for discrimination, which helps to explain why it is so difficult to eliminate,” said John Yinger, professor of Public Administration and Economics at Syracuse University.
Some experts say this kind of discrimination persists because HUD — which got the power to enforce housing discrimination law in 1988 — has insufficient resources to do so.
This camp believes that the agency should do more large-scale audits to measure true level of discrimination.
“The evidence suggests that over time discrimination has become more subtle and therefore harder to detect and deter,” said Xavier Briggs, an MIT professor of sociology and urban planning who led the housing department’s last major bias audit. “Most people who are victims of housing discrimination don’t even know it.”
Minority applicants don’t know about apartments they don’t see or deals they’re not offered.
That’s where side-by-side comparisons come in. One of the white testers who participated in Fair Housing’s study explained that although he was given preferential treatment, he had no way of knowing that on his own.
Briggs said the 80 percent discrimination rate in Richmond is “astonishingly high” if the study is valid.
Even when renters do recognize bias, they may be reluctant to bring a complaint.
Scott is the rare tenant who formally accused her landlord of racism, but she does not recommend the tactic.
With the help of Bay Area Legal Aid, which also worked on the study, she charged her landlord in court with discrimination and persuaded him to abandon an attempt to raise her rent above what she could afford.
However, her living situation became so hostile during the suit that she moved out.
“It was a horrible situation dealing with him,” she said. “I felt very bad about it because it had been a nice, safe place. It’s not easy just trying to find a place to live.”
Contact Hannah Dreier at 510-262-2787.
