A few landlords have had to be sacrificed to accomplish what the enlightened ones know is right. After all, the ends justify the means. The enlightened know full well that equal housing opportunity is the most important end, but it is sometimes hard to pin down violations. The best way to guarantee equal housing is to scare the sense out of landlords so they will “police” themselves.
That is the approach that the “Fair Housing” persecutors take with enforcing the Fair Housing Act. Mind you, equal housing opportunity is what we all want to accomplish. Whether someone will be a good tenant or not is in no way related to skin color, race, national origin, marital status, familial status, age, or handicap. Whether someone will be a good tenant depends on his or her attitude, self-image and sense of responsibility.
You find out about those qualities through careful screening.
What I object to is the unfairness of “Fair Housing.” I went to one of my favorite books, the OED (Oxford English Dictionary), and looked up the word “fair.” Here is the definition that is appropriate to the situation at hand:
“10. Free from bias, fraud or injustice; equitable, legitimate. Not taking undue advantage; disposed to concede every reasonable claim.”
Those are all qualities that we can aspire to in every part of our lives. But can the Fair Housing persecutors proudly proclaim that they aspire to those same qualities? Absolutely not. A few landlords have had to be sacrificed for the greater good.
The history of Fair Housing enforcement is rife with unfair treatment of landlords. Ignorance or misunderstanding of the law is no excuse, but over and over again HUD and the Fair Housing Testers have obfuscated and changed on a whim the laws and rules governing equal housing opportunity. For example for many years HUD refused to even publish any kind of standards regarding occupancy, because they wanted to decide for themselves what was reasonable or let the courts decide. Isn’t that great for landlords who cannot know what to do and certainly cannot afford to fight the Federal Government all the way to the Supreme Court.
Fair Housing persecutors believe that every landlord is a bigot. Some landlords just disguise it better than others. At a Fair Housing Litigation Conference I attended I heard in so many words that they knew all landlords would try to illegally discriminate, so it was these enlightened ones’ job to catch them at it.
Then there is Florrie Brassier, who came from Virginia to save the benighted community of Spokane, Wash. from all those bigoted landlords. She posted a sign at the entrance to her office that says “IF YOU’RE NOT OUTRAGED, YOU’RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION.”
Those of us in the rental property industry were outraged at her high-handed approach in whipping that community into her version of shape. She picked out the landlords and businesses who could least afford to fight and drove them into bankruptcy, in spite of the fact that none of them did anything really to violate the Fair Housing Act nor had any intention of discriminating illegally. Florrie was there to make an example of them so the rest of the landlords would forget all about trying to select good tenants, and would cower in fear that they would illegally discriminate unwittingly. Too often the Fair Housing persecutors equate “careful screening” with disguised illegal discrimination.
Being fair cuts both ways. The vast majority of landlords want to be fair in their treatment of applicants and their tenant customers. If only the “Fair Housing” enforcers would also take pride in their fairness.