Boston City Councilors Lydia Edwards and Matt O’Malley are calling for the city to establish its own fair housing testing program in the wake of a Suffolk University Law School report that found significant discrimination against prospective Black renters.
Suffolk researchers found when randomly testing Greater Boston rental listings between August 2018 and August 2019 that some apartment brokers discriminated against Black testers and testers of all races seeking to rent using Section 8 vouchers. Black testers were offered half as many apartment showings as white testers, worse customer service and were sometimes “ghosted” by apartment brokers who suddenly ceased contact after realizing the tester’s race.
Massachusetts already has laws on the books barring discrimination on the basis of race or source of income. However, enforcement of these laws is limited, researchers said, and sanctions against brokers who break Fair Housing laws take a long time to implement.
“The recent Suffolk University study shows that we can’t wait for these discrimination cases to come to us,” Edwards said in a statement. “Instead of waiting for complaints to come in we have to be proactive and ever vigilant in fighting against discrimination. We need real-time data and analysis about who is discriminating and who is being discriminated against. This dovetails with the zoning amendment I filed. We are attacking patterns of discrimination in housing from the beginning (planning) to the end (selling or renting).”
Edwards and O’Malley will ask the Boston City Council this afternoon to schedule a hearing about how the city could establish a testing program.
According to Suffolk Law School Professor Bill Berman, who heads the Housing Discrimination Testing Program that produced last week’s report, testing programs can be costly and personnel-intensive to set up. However, he told Banker & Tradesman last week, testing programs are key to boosting compliance with existing state and federal Fair Housing laws. Testing programs such as Suffolk’s are set up to measure the prevalence of discrimination in the marketplace by mimicking a typical renter’s apartment search process and not to catch individual wrong-doers, he said.
Leaders of the state’s two largest Realtor organizations have called for researchers to expose wrongdoers and for a joint effort by industry, activists and government to find solutions to the problem. A spokesperson for Attorney General Maura Healey, who is also the state’s top consumer protection official, said she is looking for ways to address the issue, from more enforcement to new policy solutions.
“The results of this study are deeply troubling and further reinforce the immediate need to address the longstanding injustices Black people face in every aspect of their lives – including in their access to housing,” Healey said in a statement. “It’s important that people know their protections under the law and that my office is here for them. We will not tolerate bias or discrimination of any kind, and we are committed to ensuring fair and equal access to housing for everyone in our state.”
