Gary Rhoades , American Bar Association (ABA); Ghosts in the Machine: How Past and Present Biases Haunt Algorithmic Tenant Screening Systems
"The Civil Rights Act of 1968, also known as the Fair Housing Act (FHA), banned housing discrimination nationwide on the basis of race, religion, national origin, and color. One key finding that persuaded Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., President Lyndon Johnson, and others to fight for years for the passage of this landmark law confirmed that many Americans were being denied rental housing because of their race. Black families were especially impacted by the discriminatory rejections. They were forced to move on and spend more time and money to find housing and often had to settle for substandard housing in unsafe neighborhoods and poor school districts to avoid homelessness.
April 2024 marked the 56th year of the FHA’s attempt to end such unfair treatment. Despite the law’s broadly stated protections, its numerous state and local counterparts, and decades of enforcement, landlords’ use of high-tech algorithms for tenant screening threatens to erase the progress made. While employing algorithms to mine data such as criminal records, credit reports, and civil court records to make predictions about prospective tenants might partially remove the fallible human element, old and new biases, especially regarding race and source of income, still plague the screening results."
