Dimensions of Discrimination: Discrimination in Housing

Abstract

People from religious or ethnic minorities or other historically disadvantaged groups frequently face discrimination when they seek rental housing. This chapter surveys the literature on such housing discrimination, focusing on the experimental literature, including in-person housing audits (as first pioneered by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development) and the more recent development of remote impersonal housing audits in the United States and Europe. It then describes an audit experiment carried out on India’s largest real estate websites, which document striking variations between landlords’ treatment of upper-caste Hindus, Other Backward Classes, Scheduled Castes, and Muslims. Strong evidence is found of discrimination against Muslim applicants, both in terms of probability of being contacted and the number of contacts, relative to upper-caste Hindu (UC) applicants, in the rental housing market in Delhi and its largest suburbs. While the probability that a landlord responds to an upper-caste applicant is 0.35, this is only 0.22 for a Muslim applicant. There is also suggestive evidence that when landlords respond to both UC and Muslim applicants, they call back the UC applicant sooner. Muslim applicants are especially disadvantaged when applying to rent one-bedroom houses; there is an additional 20 percentage point reduction in the probability of a callback. In contrast, there is no clear evidence that landlords are less likely to respond to Scheduled Castes and other backward classes. However, our estimates may understate the true differentials in callback ratios as a result of the failure to perfectly link all callbacks to a listing as well as Scheduled Caste/Other Backward Class names acting as only imperfect signals of caste background.