Is The Use of “Love Letters” a Form of Housing Discrimination?

An unprecedented demand for houses due to the COVID pandemic has spurred competition among prospective home buyers who often resort to writing “so called” love letters to sellers to increase their chances of purchasing a house over competitors. This article examines the potential discriminatory impact of this device.

‘How We Were Never Posthuman’: Technologies of the Embodied Voice in Pamela Z's Voci

This article analyses composer Pamela Z's work in light of critiques of posthumanism from Black studies and sound/music studies. Z's large-scale multimedia work Voci (2003), which the artist describes as a ‘polyphonic mono-opera’, consists of a series of eighteen scenes that combine vocal performance with digital video and audio processing. Z manipulates these sources using the BodySynth, an alternate controller interface that converts bodily gestures into expressive control signals. Z's work has been considered through cyborgian, Afrofuturist, and posthumanist discourses. But rather than affirm her practice as fully consonant with technological visions of the posthuman, I argue that she challenges the very liberal humanism upon which the posthuman is built. For a key tenet of liberal humanism, as Alexander G. Weheliye observes, was the racial and gendered apportionment of humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and non-humans. We have never been completely human, he suggests, let alone posthuman. Z uses technologies of the embodied voice to confront both the posthuman imaginary and the continued effects of its ideological preconditions in racio-colonial liberal humanism. In a Voci scene entitled ‘Voice Studies’, for instance, Z engages the problem of ‘linguistic profiling’ as it applies to housing discrimination, citing the work of Stanford linguistics researcher John Baugh. Against a backdrop of percussive vocalizations, Z explains, ‘Studies reveal that people can often infer the race of an individual based on the sound of their voice’, subsequently playing back recordings of housing applicants containing vocal signifiers of racial difference. The article then contrasts this kind of ‘aural dimension of race’ found in Jennifer Lynn Stoever's notion of the ‘sonic color line’ with Pierre Schaeffer's attempt to separate sound from the social – as well as from bodies and identities – in his practice of acousmatic reduction. With this in mind, I show how Z construes the voice as an acous(ma)tic technology of embodiment while reframing opera's humanist legacy through Voci's allegorical narration of the ‘prehuman’, ‘human’, and ‘posthuman’. Moving with and against a posthuman imaginary, Z suggests that although we have never quite been human or posthuman, we may nevertheless narrate new versions of each.

Audit Studies of Housing in the United States: Established, Emerging, and Future Research

Since the 1960s, social scientists, fair housing agencies, and the federal government have conducted hundreds of in-person and correspondence housing audits. Researchers use these covert experiments to make strong causal claims about difficult-to-detect behavior, such as racial, gender, and other types of discrimination. These studies have consistently uncovered discrimination in multiple stages and contexts of the housing exchange process. The housing audit literature is broad and robust, and a number of in-depth reviews already exist. In this chapter, we build on those reviews by focusing attention on emerging areas of inquiry and suggest new avenues of research pursuits. We begin by briefly reviewing the long history of housing audits including in-person HUD audits and correspondence audits of home sales and housing rentals. Next, we discuss three emerging areas of housing audit research – housing choice vouchers, short-term rentals, and roommate searches – and highlight important findings, new innovations, and areas of weakness. Finally, we conclude with a discussion about future directions of housing audits including using experiments to test for ways to reduce discrimination, using additional data to examine the mechanisms of housing discrimination, and designing modified audits to explore discrimination in other stages of housing exchange.

More Than Shelter: Housing for Urban Maternal and Infant Health

Housing quality, stability, and affordability have a direct relationship to socioemotional and physical health. Both city planning and public health have long recognized the role of housing in health, but the complexity of this relationship in regard to infant and maternal health is less understood. Focusing on literature specifically relevant to U.S. metropolitan areas, I conduct a multidisciplinary literature review to understand the influence of housing factors and interventions that impact infant and maternal health. The paper seeks to achieve three primary goals. First, to identify the primary “pathways” by which housing influences infant and maternal health. Second, the review focuses on the role and influence of historical housing discrimination on maternal health outcomes. Third, the review identifies emergent practice-based housing interventions in planning and public health practice to support infant and maternal health. The literature suggests that the impact of housing on infant health is complex, multifaceted, and intergenerational. Historical housing discrimination also directly impacts contemporary infant and maternal health outcomes. Policy interventions to support infant health through housing are just emerging but demonstrate promising outcomes. Structural barriers to housing affordability in the United States will require new resources to foster greater collaboration between the housing and the health sectors.

The Uncertain Future of the Fair Housing Act: HUD’s Recent Changes to Disparate Impact Standard

In 2013, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) published its Disparate Impact Final Rule in which it sought to formalize its longstanding interpretation of disparate impact liability under the Fair Housing Act (FHA) by setting forth a three-part burden-shifting framework. HUD subsequently revisited its disparate impact standard following the 2015 Supreme Court ruling in Inclusive Communities and published a Proposed Rule on August 19, 2019. On September 24, 2020, HUD published a new Final Rule substantially altering the disparate impact standard laid out by the 2013 Rule. This Comment will analyze the similarities and differences between the disparate impact standard in the 2013 Rule and the standard set forth in the current, 2020 Rule. Additionally, given that the 2020 Rule was drafted in response to Inclusive Communities, this Comment will examine whether, and to what extent, the 2020 Rule is consistent with the Court’s ruling. Finally, this Comment will address the criticism leveled at the 2020 Rule by fair housing advocates and explore potential consequences of the new standard. Ultimately, this Comment will argue that, although the 2020 Rule finds some textual support in Inclusive Communities for several elements of its new framework, given the broad remedial purpose of the FHA, the core mission of HUD to eradicate housing discrimination, the potential, negative consequences of the new standard, and President Biden’s recent memorandum on housing discrimination, HUD should abandon the 2020 Rule and readopt the 2013 Rule.