Fair Housing, Discrimination

I got into a Twitter conversation this morning with Brian Larson and Marc Davison. It started with a comment about the term "Family Oriented" and kind of got crazy. Ardell DellaLoggia and I sent a few tweets back and forth as well. I sent the following email to Brian (edited slightly) as a means for more dialog since Twitter can be so limiting.



Crazy topic!!!

When I worked at MRIS 10 years ago we changed "Handyman Special" (meaning a house that needs work) to "Fixer-Up" because "handyman" could be seen as discriminating against women and handicapped. I grew up in DC so being politically correct is native to me! Moving to South Florida was a *huge* eye opener.

At RMLS met many times with a Fair Housing attorney for Palm Beach county. She used to attend the RMLS tradeshows, have a booth and also do a session on Fair Housing. What Pam said was basically the fed, state and local gov'ts do not publish a "forbidden" list but they do have the list of protected classes. Some terms are obviously derogatory and are easy to restrict but others are more "code" and it's hard to create a list of words people can't use. RMLS used to publish a list of forbidden words but it got a bit too complicated to check using programming.

The list RMLS had included forbidding the use of any nationality. That didn't work because it's okay to say "Mexican tile" but it is not okay to say "no Mexicans". We were throwing too many false positives. Also, once you define words someone can not use they find others to replace them. I think the practice now is pretty much the context of the statement/remarks. And the stories I hear are more from actual people telling a story than remarks put into the MLS. Discrimination and steering are still out there, they just find sneakier ways of doing it.

Specific to the "family oriented" thing - we had to send a warning to someone once because of that comment. The agent got all worked up because she was referring to a park within the community but I had to explain those comments were seen by the old-schoolers to mean husband, wife and children.

It's great to see the disconnect here, though! If so many of us have to learn the hidden meaning behind some of this stuff it means it isn't something we're used to. Hopefully it'll all be gone at some point and we can say "family oriented" and mean any kind of family, even the unrelated kind. Or we can say "heavenly" and have it interpreted as peaceful, not Christian.