Racial and Ethnic Biases in Rental Housing: An Audit Study of Online Apartment Listings

Abstract

As rental markets move online, techniques to assess racial/ethnic rental housing discrimination should keep pace. We demonstrate an audit method for assessing discrimination in Toronto's online rental market. As a multicultural city with less segregation and more diverse visible minorities than most US cities, Toronto lends itself to multiname audit studies. We sent 5,620 fictitious email inquiries to landlords offering apartments on Craigslist, a popular Internet classifieds service. Each landlord received one inquiry each from five racialized groups—Caucasian, Black, E/SE Asian, Muslim/Arabic, and Jewish. In our experiments, “opportunity denying” discrimination (exclusion through nonresponse) was 10 times as common as “opportunity diminishing” discrimination (e.g., additional rental conditions). We estimate Muslim/Arabic–racialized men face the greatest resistance, with discrimination occurring in 12 percent of experiments. The level of discrimination is modest but significant for Asian men (7 percent), Blacks (5 percent), and Muslim/Arabic women (5 percent). Discrimination was evenly spread throughout the city.