Racial and Ethnic Biases in Rental Housing: An Audit Study of Online Apartment Listings
DOI[PLACEHOLDER: Annotation on the first online audit study demonstrating racial and ethnic discrimination in rental housing markets. One of 6 most significant works.]
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An audit study of Toronto Craigslist rental listings showing that "opportunity-denying" discrimination, where landlords simply do not respond to racialized names, was ten times more common than overt hostility. The platform's architecture, by enabling anonymous screening of applicants through email, creates new infrastructures for discrimination that operate through non-response rather than explicit exclusion.
Develops an innovative audit methodology using 5,620 fictitious email inquiries sent to Craigslist landlords, each landlord receiving inquiries from five racialized name categories. The method enables large-scale discrimination testing at low cost by leveraging the affordances of online platforms for systematic field experiments.