(no subject)

[randomness]

Shocked, shocked I am that there could be violations of the Fair Housing Act by Airbnb hosts.

Renting while black. It's a thing.

(Obviously, be careful of the comments.)

Comments

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

Holy cow.

[chris-warrior.livejournal.com]

ARG. *sigh*

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

I do get itchy about small-business "platforms" like this. If, just suppose, there's a general prejudice against black taxi drivers. If you run a taxi company, you aren't allowed to discriminate against black job applicants even if not hiring them would make your customers a bit happier on the average. More importantly, if just hypothetically you do discriminate against them, you risk being in a position where someone could prove it, and you could get seriously nailed for it. (OTOH, your competitors have to live under the same rules, so you aren't put at a competitive disadvantage.) But if the average black Uber driver gets 1/2 star lower rating by the customers than he would if white, there's economic pressure pushing black drivers out of Uber that Uber isn't legally responsible for (as far as I can figure out).

I definitely have heard an alum of my oh-so-liberal undergraduate school say (in effect) that they liked the demographics of Uber drivers better than the demographics of taxi drivers.

In regard to AirBnB, given that many of the landlords are really small, they might be under the threshold for the anti-discrimination laws to apply. (IIRC, the Massachusetts laws are effective only on landlords with more than 3 units or so.)