5 ms·

Isn't it a basic right of an owner to rent his property to anyone he likes without explaining the decision (even if the decision is based on racial prejudice)?

tzmudzin 12y ago
Not quite, as long as we as a society want to protect the minorities. Either you force equal treatment, or things can escalate quite quickly: - basic right of owner to rent property to anyone he likes without explaining the decision (and not to rent to anyone else...) - basic right of hotel owner to accept anyone he choses (and deny access to anyone else) - basic right of restarant manager to accept anyone he chooses (and deny service to anyone else) - basic right of transportation owner to accept anyone he chooses (and deny service to anyone else) - basic right of hospital operator to accept anyone he chooses (and deny service to anyone else) Now pick your minority: it might have been Jews or the Slavic for the Nazis, it might have been the blacks in South Africa -- or the US, or homosexuals in Russia. Or the red-headed, the fat, the old, ... Once you step onto this path, it's hard to put hard stop someplace
- lafar6502 12y ago
  Somehow I expected first response to mention Nazis... Anyway, renting a flat is just a contract between two people, not a public service. You need to trust the other person and feel comfortable with giving them access to your property. I dont care about minorities or majorities - its my property and I'm the one who's entitled to do anything with it. Laws won't make me accept _any_ offer if I can choose the best one from a large pool. Just introduce some stupid regulations and I bet you won't find any appartment because nobody will be renting.
  - goodJobWalrus 12y ago
    Sure, but if you base your comfortableness with giving the access to your property to someone, not on their rental history, or credit info or interview, but on the fact that they are say, black, you are discriminating, and you are probably a racist.
    - lafar6502 12y ago
      Maybe i base my decision on flipping a coin? That's certainly not your (or anyone else's) business - the point is I can do that because until I sign a rental contract I'm free to do whatever I want. There's no contract - there's no legal binding between the owner and a 'candidate'. Any obligations, duties and rights start after the deal is made.
      - saosebastiao 12y ago
        Wrong. Your obligations and duties start the second you make an offer. You may not have obligations to a tenant that doesn't exist, but that doesn't mean you don't have to comply with the applicable laws. Based off of your opinions in this thread, I highly suggest that you never rent out your property. Your opinions on what the law says will likely end up with you in jail.
        lafar6502 12y ago
        So please enlighten me what are the applicable laws and how they can put me in jail for cancelling an offer or choosing one candidate and not the other.
        saosebastiao 12y ago
        IANYL.
- hippich 12y ago
  I wonder why economic laws does not work here? I.e. if certain categories of people comes with certain risk in the eyes of landlords, this should be reflected in price, and who don't want to have to deal with adjusting price for risks should loose to once who are more flexible?
  - twobits 12y ago
    Then it's the same thing as just saying "no". Which isn't discrimination, but it's just logical. If the market price for renting is 1000, and I ask you for 10000, that's basically a "no". And to give some glimpses towards answering your question, the basic answer is the laws, and information asymmetry. I am only aware of the local situation, but the law is strongly, to the point of unfairness, in the side of the tenant. And in sum, the owner has less than 1 hour to judge psychologically if the person in front of him is trustworthy. Something that is easily faked.
  - sgift 12y ago
    High demand, low supply. A landlord in Munich can ask - more or less - whatever he wants and still find people who are desperate to get a flat. Any flat. For any price.
    - lafar6502 12y ago
      Of course. Even if all these people were named Hans, age 25, no family and high paid tech jobs, still half of them wouldn't have a place to live. No laws can change the numbers.
  - JabavuAdams 12y ago
    Because people aren't rational actors. Economics can't tell us what kind of society we want, nor even help us to estimate risks realistically when cultural biases are at play.
- icebraining 12y ago
  Once you step onto this path, it's hard to put hard stop someplace Not really. You could define some as basic services and deny discrimination on those. Much like e.g. some basic utilities are already prohibited from cutting off supply to debtors while most businesses can. I'm not saying I agree with not legislating equal treatment, but the slippery slope is not inevitable.
stef25 12y ago
I hope so. It's done on AirBnb, you're perfectly within your rights to refuse a request if something feels fishy.
- lafar6502 12y ago
  even more, you can refuse any request and nobody can force you to rent if you decide not to. AirBNB is not anonymous, people are expected to give some information about themselves so the landlords can judge them and make a decision. I think nobody would rent a flat to a completely anonymous person. Is this insane or what? My house is not a hostel...
rmc 12y ago
No. There are countless laws for landlords. e.g. if you rent it to someone, you can't kick them out whenever you want, you can't enter the property whenever you want. Likewise, if you own a shop, you cannot refuse entry to your property based on race/ethnicity. You do not have an absolute right to do whatever you want with your property.
- lafar6502 12y ago
  But luckily no law yet can force you to rent your property to someone if you don't want to.
  - saosebastiao 12y ago
    Actually, yes you can be forced. If you have an open offer to rent, and you refuse a qualified tenant on illegal discriminatory grounds, a judge can force you to hold true to that offer.
    - lafar6502 12y ago
      First of all, they'd have to prove I did something illegal. What makes you think so? Hopefully we still have the right to say just "sorry, I changed my mind, the offer is no longer valid" or "I chose another offer, sorry".
      - saosebastiao 12y ago
        Well, enforcement always was the problem with anti-discrimination laws. But when it is provable in court, you can't just drop the offer. That would be considered a fraudulent offer. In fact, that is one of the few ways that discriminatory landlords are caught: they rescind an open offer after a someone disagreeable applies, and then reopen it later for someone more agreeable. Property rights aren't absolute. They certainly don't trump civil rights, and anti-discrimination laws are amongst the core of our civil rights laws.
      - rmc 12y ago
        The same way they prove any other type of crime. Sometimes people are blatant (e.g. the english hoteliers who refused to rent a room to a same sex couple), or when you put other facts together it becomes obvious (e.g. at 1:00pm the landlord tells someone with a foreign accent that it's unavailable, but at 3:00pm they tell someone with a different accent that it's available), or sometimes an offer is withdrawn when a certain fact becomes known (e.g. everything is going great until the prospective tenant says he has to call his husband) You do not have "the right" to choose to not rent your property to someone. If you think it's one of your rights, and you're in the property market, you should talk to a lawyer.
JoeAltmaier 12y ago
Yes it seems it is, as long as they landlord receives no federal assistance (in the USA): http://www.lawfirms.com/resources/landlord-and-tenant/tenant-discrimination/tenant-discrimination-laws.htm http://www.lawfirms.com/resources/landlord-and-tenant/tenant...

tzmudzin 12y ago

Not quite, as long as we as a society want to protect the minorities. Either you force equal treatment, or things can escalate quite quickly: - basic right of owner to rent property to anyone he likes without explaining the decision (and not to rent to anyone else...) - basic right of hotel owner to accept anyone he choses (and deny access to anyone else) - basic right of restarant manager to accept anyone he chooses (and deny service to anyone else) - basic right of transportation owner to accept anyone he chooses (and deny service to anyone else) - basic right of hospital operator to accept anyone he chooses (and deny service to anyone else) Now pick your minority: it might have been Jews or the Slavic for the Nazis, it might have been the blacks in South Africa -- or the US, or homosexuals in Russia. Or the red-headed, the fat, the old, ... Once you step onto this path, it's hard to put hard stop someplace

lafar6502 12y ago
Somehow I expected first response to mention Nazis... Anyway, renting a flat is just a contract between two people, not a public service. You need to trust the other person and feel comfortable with giving them access to your property. I dont care about minorities or majorities - its my property and I'm the one who's entitled to do anything with it. Laws won't make me accept _any_ offer if I can choose the best one from a large pool. Just introduce some stupid regulations and I bet you won't find any appartment because nobody will be renting.
- goodJobWalrus 12y ago
  Sure, but if you base your comfortableness with giving the access to your property to someone, not on their rental history, or credit info or interview, but on the fact that they are say, black, you are discriminating, and you are probably a racist.
  - lafar6502 12y ago
    Maybe i base my decision on flipping a coin? That's certainly not your (or anyone else's) business - the point is I can do that because until I sign a rental contract I'm free to do whatever I want. There's no contract - there's no legal binding between the owner and a 'candidate'. Any obligations, duties and rights start after the deal is made.
    - saosebastiao 12y ago
      Wrong. Your obligations and duties start the second you make an offer. You may not have obligations to a tenant that doesn't exist, but that doesn't mean you don't have to comply with the applicable laws. Based off of your opinions in this thread, I highly suggest that you never rent out your property. Your opinions on what the law says will likely end up with you in jail.
      - lafar6502 12y ago
        So please enlighten me what are the applicable laws and how they can put me in jail for cancelling an offer or choosing one candidate and not the other.
        saosebastiao 12y ago
        IANYL.
hippich 12y ago
I wonder why economic laws does not work here? I.e. if certain categories of people comes with certain risk in the eyes of landlords, this should be reflected in price, and who don't want to have to deal with adjusting price for risks should loose to once who are more flexible?
- twobits 12y ago
  Then it's the same thing as just saying "no". Which isn't discrimination, but it's just logical. If the market price for renting is 1000, and I ask you for 10000, that's basically a "no". And to give some glimpses towards answering your question, the basic answer is the laws, and information asymmetry. I am only aware of the local situation, but the law is strongly, to the point of unfairness, in the side of the tenant. And in sum, the owner has less than 1 hour to judge psychologically if the person in front of him is trustworthy. Something that is easily faked.
- sgift 12y ago
  High demand, low supply. A landlord in Munich can ask - more or less - whatever he wants and still find people who are desperate to get a flat. Any flat. For any price.
  - lafar6502 12y ago
    Of course. Even if all these people were named Hans, age 25, no family and high paid tech jobs, still half of them wouldn't have a place to live. No laws can change the numbers.
- JabavuAdams 12y ago
  Because people aren't rational actors. Economics can't tell us what kind of society we want, nor even help us to estimate risks realistically when cultural biases are at play.
icebraining 12y ago
Once you step onto this path, it's hard to put hard stop someplace Not really. You could define some as basic services and deny discrimination on those. Much like e.g. some basic utilities are already prohibited from cutting off supply to debtors while most businesses can. I'm not saying I agree with not legislating equal treatment, but the slippery slope is not inevitable.

stef25 12y ago

I hope so. It's done on AirBnb, you're perfectly within your rights to refuse a request if something feels fishy.

lafar6502 12y ago
even more, you can refuse any request and nobody can force you to rent if you decide not to. AirBNB is not anonymous, people are expected to give some information about themselves so the landlords can judge them and make a decision. I think nobody would rent a flat to a completely anonymous person. Is this insane or what? My house is not a hostel...

rmc 12y ago

No. There are countless laws for landlords. e.g. if you rent it to someone, you can't kick them out whenever you want, you can't enter the property whenever you want. Likewise, if you own a shop, you cannot refuse entry to your property based on race/ethnicity. You do not have an absolute right to do whatever you want with your property.

lafar6502 12y ago
But luckily no law yet can force you to rent your property to someone if you don't want to.
- saosebastiao 12y ago
  Actually, yes you can be forced. If you have an open offer to rent, and you refuse a qualified tenant on illegal discriminatory grounds, a judge can force you to hold true to that offer.
  - lafar6502 12y ago
    First of all, they'd have to prove I did something illegal. What makes you think so? Hopefully we still have the right to say just "sorry, I changed my mind, the offer is no longer valid" or "I chose another offer, sorry".
    - saosebastiao 12y ago
      Well, enforcement always was the problem with anti-discrimination laws. But when it is provable in court, you can't just drop the offer. That would be considered a fraudulent offer. In fact, that is one of the few ways that discriminatory landlords are caught: they rescind an open offer after a someone disagreeable applies, and then reopen it later for someone more agreeable. Property rights aren't absolute. They certainly don't trump civil rights, and anti-discrimination laws are amongst the core of our civil rights laws.
    - rmc 12y ago
      The same way they prove any other type of crime. Sometimes people are blatant (e.g. the english hoteliers who refused to rent a room to a same sex couple), or when you put other facts together it becomes obvious (e.g. at 1:00pm the landlord tells someone with a foreign accent that it's unavailable, but at 3:00pm they tell someone with a different accent that it's available), or sometimes an offer is withdrawn when a certain fact becomes known (e.g. everything is going great until the prospective tenant says he has to call his husband) You do not have "the right" to choose to not rent your property to someone. If you think it's one of your rights, and you're in the property market, you should talk to a lawyer.

JoeAltmaier 12y ago

Yes it seems it is, as long as they landlord receives no federal assistance (in the USA): http://www.lawfirms.com/resources/landlord-and-tenant/tenant-discrimination/tenant-discrimination-laws.htm http://www.lawfirms.com/resources/landlord-and-tenant/tenant...