Romate.com doens’t own any of the properties anyhow…….

I should like to offer some general comments on the Craigslist and Roommates cases, pertaining to this thread, and also to the previous thread:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080314/163809545.shtml

The Craigslist and Roommates.com cases involve markets which are ultimately driven, not by bona fide landlords, but by prospective roommates. Someone who designs and builds apartment buildings will, insofar as feasible, give each apartment most of the privacy obtaining in a house. He will put in independent entryways if he can. He will focus on building fairly large apartments, each approaching the size of a small house. The most desirable apartment tenant is someone with a substantial income who is single, but would want a big house if he were living in a family, with a spouse and children. It is logical to build the kind of apartment that kind of person would like. With a reasonable level of goodwill on all sides, the personal characteristics of the tenants in different apartments do not impinge on each other. The most common form of tenant screening is to require a substantial deposit and/or prepayment, and to incorporate a prohibition on subletting. By now, of course, a lot of the more upscale apartments have been converted into condominiums, requiring the occupants to put down substantial capital. Discrimination cases arise in the lower and scruffier ends of the housing market, catering to people whose defining characteristic is their inability to put down capital, typically students and poor people. A high proportion of this discrimination involves cases which actually involve illegal subletting, meaning that the rejected applicant has no legal recourse. Hence the search for proxy defendants, such as Craigslist or Roommates.com.

At this point, the main weight of discrimination in housing is not against Blacks per se. We are not talking about prospective roommates here– we are talking about landlords, businessmen. Businessmen are accustomed to dealing with all manner and conditions of men– it goes with the territory. There are, of course, damm fools who have never heard of Collin Powell, Condaleeza Rice, or Barrack Obama, but there aren’t very many of them. The main weight of discrimination seems to involve children, and perhaps, more specifically, the woman with children, minimal income (minimum wage or welfare), but no husband, who wants to live in a space which would normally be occupied by a single person. This is not a case of the really big firms. They play by the rules, but they also set their prices high enough to exclude welfare families. It is the moderately small landlord, with say, a hundred units, who is likely to be breaking the rules, and sometimes getting caught. Recurrent issues seem to involve children playing in hallways, stairwells, entranceways, and other common spaces, generally because the apartment complex has no practical and appropriate place for them to play. Less frequently, there is an unwillingness to do the paperwork required for Section 8 housing.

It is a technical shortcoming of the fair housing law that it did not envision the possibility that prospective roommates would make open public advertisement, under conditions approximating those of an arranged marriage bureau. In the time when the law was written, back in 1968, even the largest cities had substantial working-class housing quarters, and less space had been rebuilt as apartment complexes. Even New York was still a city of small factories. If you couldn’t afford an apartment of your own, and you didn’t have someone you already knew and wanted to room with, you found a family to board with, quite possibly with meals included. The age of legal majority at the time was twenty-one, but the median age of first marriage was almost twenty-three for men, and about twenty for women. Colleges were very definitely “in loco parentis,” meaning that girls had to live some place where they could be under the moral supervision of a housemother until they were safely married to someone whom their parents approved of. Consider the case of Linda LeClair, the Columbia University coed who, in 1968, got in trouble for living with her boyfriend. Boys were a bit more free, but bear in mind that the microwave oven had not yet been invented, and they were likely to be less than enthusiastic about the prospect of eating their own cooking. If you look at contemporary fantasy literature of bachelordom (Playboy Magazine, James Bond, etc.), you note that it is premised around having a servant. In the real world, a twenty-three-year-old law student, say, would consider himself ahead of the game if he could find a Jewish-mother-type landlady to fuss over him. The idea of being a single young adult, in the modern sense of the word, was substantially invented after 1970. The fair housing law carved out a substantial exemption for small landlords. It did not cover the idea of organized apartment sharing, but it was obviously not the intent to cover situations where multiple tenants were in fact living as a family, sharing meals, etc. I think we can reasonably say that the authors of the fair housing law would have assumed that people wanting roommates would have hooked up with friends of friends, posted advertisements on workplace/school bulletin boards, etc.. That is, they would have advertised semi-privately to locate people with whom they already had some kind of distant relationship. A reasonable interpretation of the law, engaging the underlying intent of the framers, would be to say that a joint tenancy constitutes a legal entity, which, if sufficiently small, should be entitled to the benefit of the small landlord provisions. A reasonable dividing line might be somewhere between five and ten people.

Section 230 liability is basically irrelevant to the Roommates case. Once one recognizes that Roommates.com has something of the character of a marriage bureau, the types of criteria it uses are not extraordinary. Established newspapers have long carried personal advertisements of the same type. People often specify things like ethnic backgrounds. Marriage is not a public accommodation.

Roommates.com has posed a series of questions (viz. sex, family status, and sexual orientation) which do reach to the heart of household life. “Living Together” is often a euphemism for a common-law marriage (displacing the older, and pejorative, terms “Shackmastering” and “Light Housekeeping”). Even if this is not the case, living together still involves a wide range of personal adjustments. For example, are you proposing to live fraternity-fashion, or are you proposing to live in a manner appropriate for bringing up children? If you live in a household with a child, you are perforce, a de facto aunt or uncle, at the least. Children simply do not have a clear understanding of social limits, being nothing if not completely spontaneous. Entering into such a relationship is tantamount to marriage, far beyond the scope of the fair housing laws. Living in a household with an “unfilliated” child is often considered presumptive evidence of paternity for purposes of making out child support orders. The question “are you willing to live with children” often works out, in practice, to “are you willing to seriously consider marrying the children’s mother and legally adopting the children.” It is not a light undertaking, and should not be trivialized.

What has happened with Craigslist and Roommates.com is that in certain big cities, population pressure has reached extreme levels, to the point that complete strangers are willing to move in together. In New York, at least, this probably involves the operation of rent control, which has the side effect of removing the vast majority of apartments from the open rental market. In the Northeast, generally, there are vast areas of “brownfields” and abandoned/bombed-out buildings, which it has not proved practicable to reclaim. They occupy space, nonetheless. Looking at the Craigslist apartment share listings for New York and Chicago, the New Yorkers seem to be rather older than the Chicagoans; more likely to be employed and less likely to be students; and rather less adaptable. A lot of them seem to work very long hours– many of the advertisements carry the expectation that people sleep at home, and otherwise spend very little time there. They are often in their thirties, and tend to have the kind of substantial jobs which might reasonably entitle them to places of their own, and which ought, indeed, to be sufficient to start families with– but New York is New York. Craigslist and Roommates.com are measures of people’s desperation in finding places to live. The practical alternative might be to spend two-and-a-half hours a day on a commuter train, and perhaps as much as four hours a day in total commuting time.

Big cities tend to “exclude the middle class,” and therefore to present class conflict in its most intractable form. There are about two million men in prison in the United States. Most of them are from urban areas, from the slums geographically adjacent to the places where yuppies are using Craigslist, and where housing discrimination cases are typically arising. Prisoners quite often represent a quarter or more of the total number of men in the area between the ages of 20-45 (what is sometimes described as young men of military age). The prisoners are collectively the fathers of the children of the welfare mothers. The biological father of the welfare mother’s child will very probably turn out to be a violent man considerably her senior, with substantially the attitudes of a pimp. He will probably have managed to keep his claws in the welfare mother, regarding her as a “meal ticket,” and he will inevitably turn up, sooner or later. If you take the classic welfare mother into your home, you are sooner or later going to have to bounce the pimp off the walls a few times, by way of defining the situation to him. I once met a single Anglican priest who was engaged in single-handedly bringing up the three children of a drug-addicted prostitute. He was generally regarded by those who knew him to be a saint, that is, a man possessed of heroic virtue. Even he contented himself with taking the woman’s children, and not attempting to domesticate the mother.

Here we have to incorporate the factor of the “aggressive social worker.” Imagine a social worker whose job is essentially to move people from the homeless shelters to into permanent dwellings. By her standards, an eighteen-year-old girl with a six-year-old child is not unpromising– there are long-term alcoholics and druggies in the shelters, with completely disintegrated personalities. The social worker knows how to use Craigslist, how to set up an e-mail account on her client’s behalf, etc. Similarly, she will send e-mails in the client’s name, and “supervise her correspondence.” In general, she will force the issue where the client would not have done so. The Fair Housing Councils, which brought these cases, are probably the litigative arm of the social workers. However, sooner or later, the social workers’ bluff is going to be called. Many people would not consider the client a desirable wife or daughter-in-law.

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http://www.hud.gov/offices/fheo/FHLaws/

http://www.etext.org/Politics/AlternativeOrange/2/v2n6_bhre.html

http://beatl.barnard.columbia.edu/cuhistory/archives/Rosenberg/woman_question.htm

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A collection of Fair Housing Council press releases, giving something of the flavor of their litigation.

http://www.fairhousingoc.org/news.html
http://www.fairhousing.com/index.cfm?method=page.display&pagename=releases_schrc06-23-03
http://www.fhcsp.com/pdf/Newmiller%20article.pdf

http://www.fhcsp.com/pdf/Hill%20House%20Press%20Release.pdf
Wheel Chair

http://www.fhcnnj.org/news.htm
http://ndfhc.org/fair_housing/P071%20(FS%20disc%20questions).pdf
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