Race and Source of Income Discrimination in the Metro
Boston Housing Rental Market
William Berman and Catherine La Raia, Suffolk University
Racial segregation in America remains a chronic and visible
problem. Congress created the Housing Choice Voucher Program to increase
mobility for low-income people, many of whom are people of color. The idea that
low-income minority renters would be able to use vouchers to reverse patterns
of segregation and access less segregated neighborhoods of opportunity has not
come to fruition.
Race is a protected class under the Fair Housing Act.
Source of income (“SOI”) (i.e., having a housing subsidy) is not a federally
protected class but it is a protected class in state and local jurisdictions
covering about a third of the nation’s renters. Massachusetts added SOI as a
protected class under its anti-discrimination statute in 2006. However, housing
advocates have raised concern about the significant level of discrimination in
Massachusetts based on SOI and about whether SOI discrimination is a proxy for
race discrimination.
This article will publish an empirical study of the rates
and types of discrimination in the Greater Boston rental housing market based
upon source of income and race. The Suffolk University Law School Housing
Discrimination Testing Program will conduct 50 paired housing discrimination
tests to develop the data for the study. An outside data analytics firm will
analyze the test results for statistically significant data, comparing the
treatment housing providers give to the different testers. The resulting data
will inform policy recommendations regarding state enforcement measures and
whether SOI should be included within the protected classes enumerated in the
Fair Housing Act.
Black, Poor, and Gone: Civil Rights Law’s Inner-City Crisis
Anthony Alfieri, University of Miami
In recent years, academics
committed to a new law and sociology of poverty and inequality have sounded a
call to revisit the inner city as a site of cultural and socio-legal research.
Both advocates in anti-poverty and civil rights organizations, and scholars in
law school clinical and university social policy programs, have echoed this
call embracing the inner city as a context for experiential learning,
qualitative research, and legal-political advocacy regarding concentrated
poverty, neighborhood disadvantage, residential segregation, and mass
incarceration. Indeed, for academics, advocates, and activists alike, the inner
city stands out as a focal point of innovative theory-practice integration in
the fields of civil and criminal justice.
Today, in the post–civil rights
era, new socio-legal research on the inner city casts a specially instructive
light on the displacement-producing and segregation-enforcing policies and
practices that have caused the involuntary removal of low-income tenants and
homeowners from gentrifying urban spaces and their forced out-migration to
impoverished suburban spaces. Despite more than fifty years of law reform
campaigns in the field of fair housing, neither legal advocates nor civic
activists in gentrifying neighborhoods across the nation have been able to halt
the pace of e