Part of my duties as a Fair Housing Specialist is to conduct fair housing tests. What is a test? It's basically something like "secret shopping". Except instead of snooping to see how the customer is treated, we're looking to see if housing providers are in accord with the Fair Housing Act (FHA).
The FHA states that it is illegal to discriminate against a person's access to housing based on their race, color, national origin, religion, sex, and family status. These are known as protected classes under the FHA. For more information about fair housing, see HUD's website on fair housing laws and the wikipedia entry on fair housing.
When I organize a test, I take two of our volunteers (whom we call testers) and give them similar profiles and send them to the same apartment complex or real estate agency . Testers are chosen in a way so that there is only one significant difference between them. The type of test we conduct determines the difference between the testers. We conduct tests based on the protected classes outlined in the FHA. Thus, if I'm organizing a sex test, the only difference between the testers is their sex. These two testers will be of the same race, and their age will be within 10 years of each other. Then I construct a profile for them so that they are making almost the same amount of money, have the same amount of children, and will both have a spouse.
These testers then visit the same housing provider role-playing as a home-seeker or potential tenant. After their test the volunteers write up a report. I read the report and look for differences in treatment of the testers, differences in prices offered to each tester, and differences in availability or location of housing offered to each tester.
In my next post I'll detail what happens after a test is conducted and how I see testing as conducting many mini-ethnographies.
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